“Gotta Serve Somebody”

Wednesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

By Colleen O’Sullivan

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?  But thanks be to God that, although you were once slaves of sin, you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were entrusted.  Freed from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness.  (Romans 6:16-18)

And the Lord replied, “Who, then, is the faithful and prudent steward whom the master will put in charge of his servants to distribute the food allowance at the proper time?  Blessed is that servant whom his master on arrival finds doing so.  Truly, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property.  But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk, then that servant’s master will come on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour and will punish the servant severely and assign him a place with the unfaithful.  (Luke 12:42-46)

Piety

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed,

You’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

(from “Gotta Serve Somebody,” Bob Dylan)

Study

In baptism, God gets hold of us and pulls us from the dirt and filth of sin, whether original and/or our own, and in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, washes us clean.  As a symbol of our rising from the water to new life in Christ, we don white garments.  In essence, in our reading today from Paul’s letter to the Romans, the apostle admonishes us to keep our baptismal clothes white and unscathed.  Don’t go stomping in mud puddles or rolling in the dirt of sin again, he says.

Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” puts to music what the apostle more eloquently writes to the Christians in Rome.  Every one of us is going to serve something or someone.  When we’re baptized, we’re freed from slavery to sin.  We are free to choose goodness and love, free to serve the Lord.

The truth is, though, that on some days or during whole portions of our lives, we are slaves to people and things other than the Lord.  We conduct ourselves as though we’ve never felt the refreshing, cleansing waters of baptism.  Hard to imagine what those baptismal garments must look like today.  In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells a parable about a servant entrusted with the care of the household in his master’s absence.  This guy quickly demonstrates that he’s more enslaved to his self-interests than to his master’s wishes.  Jesus says he’s totally caught off-guard when the master returns.

It is true that he’s caught red-handed serving himself, but what saddens me equally is that he’s wasting his life.  He’s missing out on the joy, the redemption, the inner peace and the freedom that come only from serving Jesus Christ.

Action

“You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”  Think back over the last 24 hours.  How have you spent your time?  What has occupied your thoughts?  What or whom have you served?