As in the days of Noah

A word for the week

Think of the most ordinary morning you can remember. Coffee going cold by the sink. Someone late for the bus. The radio on low, a bill on the counter, the same small argument about the same small thing. Nothing about that morning announces itself as important. It is just a Tuesday, one of the thousands, hard to tell from the ones on either side of it. Hold that picture, because it is exactly the one Jesus reaches for when he wants to describe the day everything changes.

He says it will be as it was in the days of Noah. And what were the days of Noah like? Not lurid, not dramatic. He describes them with the plainest words he can find: they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah went into the ark. That is all. The failure he names is not some spectacular wickedness. It is ordinariness. It is life going on exactly as it always had, everyone absorbed in the normal business of being alive, and no one looking up. They did not know, he says, until the flood came and took them all away.

This should unsettle us more than any thundercloud would, because we can all see ourselves in it. We keep half-expecting the important day to arrive dressed as an important day, with the sky torn open and a trumpet. Jesus says no. It comes on a Tuesday. It comes while you are doing the dishes. Two men will be in the field, he says, and one is taken and one is left. Two women grinding at the mill, side by side, at the identical ordinary task, and one is taken and one is left. The difference between them is not in what they were doing. They were doing the same thing. The difference is invisible from the outside. It is whether, in the middle of the ordinary, they were awake.

That is the warning, and it is a strange one, because it does not tell you to stop doing the ordinary things. Noah's neighbors were not condemned for eating and drinking; you have to eat. The failure was not the eating. It was sleeping through their own lives, never once looking up from the plate to wonder whether the God who made them might be near. You can grind the grain and be awake. You can grind the grain and be asleep. The task is the same. The soul doing it is not.

So Jesus lands where he always lands: watch, therefore, for you do not know the hour. Then he adds the small sharp picture of the thief. Nobody schedules a break-in. If the owner knew the night, he would sit up. He does not know the night, so his only defense is to live ready every night. The whole force of it is that the day hides inside the ordinary days. It does not come labeled. It comes like every other morning, right up until it is not.

Which means readiness is not kept somewhere special. It is kept here, at the sink, at the mill, in the field, on the Tuesday. Stay awake in the middle of your ordinary life, because that is the only place the extraordinary has ever actually shown up.