Lord's Work Ahead: Expect Delays
Matthew 25:1-13
Like most of you, I remember the days of road trips when you needed to chart a course on an actual road map made of paper that you spread across the dashboard like a dining room table cloth. One person drove and another navigated. And good luck folding the map once it had been unfolded. It required all the patience and concentration of making an origami butterfly.
Then in the late 1990s there came Mapquest, which provided turn-by-turn directions that you could print from a personal computer. It couldn’t get any better than that! Until it did.
Nowadays, both road maps and Mapquest (which still exists) seem antiquated compared with Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, or whatever may be your GPS system of choice. With all of the above you get not only turn-by-turn directions on a digital screen that shows your precise location, they can even show you the traffic conditions along your route so that you can anticipate and avoid delays caused by accidents or roadwork, because there’s no frustration quite like the frustration of being stuck in a miles-long line of cars that moves like melting ice.
As a society, we don’t like to be kept waiting. We want fast food, high-speed Internet, next-day delivery. Minute rice takes 30 seconds too long. Going sixty-five miles per hour on the Palisades Parkway is like standing still! For many, if not all of us, wait is a four-letter word. But waiting is central to the parable that we heard a moment ago. All of the bridesmaids—the foolish and the wise alike—must wait for the delayed arrival of the bridegroom who operates according to his own timetable.
Of all the parables that Jesus tells, the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids is one of the most straightforward on the surface. Yet once you scratch that surface, you quickly discover a depth that defies superficial interpretations. We’re told up front that among the ten bridesmaids, five were foolish and five were wise. Well, that’s easy enough! We certainly don’t want to be foolish. Therefore the point must be that as followers of Jesus we ought to behave like the wise bridesmaids. What’s so complicated about that? The parable even ends with the takeaway lesson: “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” The lesson is obviously to be like the wise bridesmaids who keep awake and therefore….
Oh! Hold on a minute! The problem with that interpretation is that in the parable the so-called wise bridesmaids don’t keep awake. Just like the foolish bridesmaids, they also get tired and fall asleep while waiting for the groom to show up. That does complicate things. There must be more going on here than meets the eye. Welcome to the parables of Jesus!
As always, it would help our understanding to have an idea of the context in which Jesus tells the parable. Chapter 25 is approaching the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem, along with his disciples. Upon entering the city he was greeted with much excitement and even shouts of praise. Many who lined the streets to welcome him believed that Israel’s Messiah had at last come.
Jesus then headed straight for the temple and chased out those who were buying and selling religious wares. This highly provocative move united the city’s religious authorities against him. One by one the various factions interrogated him with questions designed to challenge his authority and make him look foolish. They all left disappointed and frustrated and dared not ask him any further questions.
From that point on Jesus’ teachings to the crowds and his disciples take on an apocalyptic tone. He pronounces a series of scathing woes on the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy. He foretells the destruction of the temple—the very temple from which he had just driven the buyers, sellers, and moneychangers. He then speaks of the signs that will announce the coming of the Son of Man—God’s agent who will usher in the end of the age.
As we turn the page to chapter 25, the crowds have gone away and it’s just Jesus and his disciples. The series of three parables that he tells them in this chapter, beginning with the parable before us of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids, are among his final teachings. Beginning in chapter 26, the plot to kill Jesus will be set in motion while he gathers with the twelve for a last supper. Jesus knows that the events of the next two days—his betrayal by Judas, his arrest in the garden, his trial before the high priest, and his questioning by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate—will culminate with his crucifixion. With death soon to separate him from his disciples, Jesus uses this parable to speak to the them of his return, when death will be vanquished for good and the kingdom of heaven will become an earthly reality.
With death soon to separate him from his disciples, Jesus uses this parable to speak to the them of his return…
The arrival of the kingdom of heaven won’t be on anyone’s calendar. No one will receive a text message reminding them to prepare for its arrival. Rather, the kingdom of heaven will be like a wedding in which all the bridesmaids are waiting for the groom to arrive. None of them are certain exactly when he will appear, but they all seem to think it will be sometime in the evening, and therefore they all pack an oil lamp. The wise, we’re told, bring with them a flask of oil to replenish their lamps, while the foolish do not.
For reasons that are not explained, the groom’s arrival is delayed. And I don’t mean by a few minutes or even a half hour. We’re talking hours. Everyone’s checking their watches, the food’s getting cold, the guests are impatiently cracking open the wine jars. The groom is so late that all the bridesmaids—wise and foolish alike—become drowsy, their eyelids growing heavier with the passing of each hour. “We’ll catch him when he comes in the morning,” they think, before drifting off to sleep.
But the wedding won’t wait for morning. At midnight the air is pierced by a shout, “Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.” Wiping the sleep from their eyes while trying to orient themselves in the dark, each bridesmaid reaches for her lamp. Those who have brought a flask full of spare oil light their lamps, while those who did not bring any extra oil ask to borrow some from those who did.
“Sorry,” the wise say to the foolish. “There isn’t enough for us all. You’d better run to the market and buy some for yourselves.” Not exactly gracious of them, you must admit.
While those in need of oil are making a run to the 24-hour Walmart, the bridegroom comes. Those who are ready to greet him go with him into the wedding banquet, and the door is shut behind them with a resounding thud.
Sometime later the other bridesmaids arrive and ask to be let in. They have their oil. Their lamps are lit. They’re now ready for the banquet. But the bridegroom refuses to let them in. He says to them, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.”
Jesus concludes the parable by urging the disciples, “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
Oftentimes people are of the view that the Old Testament is primarily about judgment while the New Testament is primarily about grace. There are many, many passages that belie that too-easy characterization, this being just one of them. There is plenty of judgment in the New Testament, a fact that’s drawn to our attention at the end of each liturgical year when even the Gospel readings are filled with warnings of the judgment to come.
What distinguishes the wise from the foolish is their readiness for the bridegroom.
There is judgment here in this parable. A door is closed to those who wish to enter. But as we heard last week in the passage from Micah, the judgment of God always occurs within the context of the mercy of God. What was true for Micah is true for Matthew as well. Case in point: all of the bridesmaids receive an invitation to the wedding banquet. This isn’t a parable about insiders and outsiders. From the standpoint of their status as wedding guests, they’re all insiders. What distinguishes the wise from the foolish is their readiness for the bridegroom. The wise are prepared for delay. When their faith in the bridegroom’s coming is tested, when he doesn’t arrive at the expected hour, they have the resources to wait. The foolish, by contrast, are not prepared to wait. They expected the bridegroom to arrive on their schedule, which is why they didn’t feel the need to bring any extra oil.
A question naturally arises: What does the oil represent for us? What is it that we bring with us that prepares us for the arrival of the kingdom of heaven? Is it faith? Is it good works? Is it spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, and reading the Bible? We need to answer that question if we’re to take this 2,000-year-old parable and bring it into our 21st century context.
Let me begin answering the question by looking first not to our own context but to Matthew’s. The Gospel of Matthew was likely written sometime in the 80s, meaning about fifty years after Jesus was crucified. Fifty years is a pretty long time, especially if you’re waiting for something in particular (just ask any fan of the New York Knicks). For many early Christians, the thing they were waiting for was for Jesus to return. They fully expected that he would do so in their lifetimes. They weren’t expecting generations to follow after them. They believed that the end of the age was imminent.
But by the 80s of the first century, everyone who was old enough to have known Jesus in the flesh was already collecting Social Security. Given that they were not getting any younger, they began to consider that maybe Jesus wasn’t going to return and establish the kingdom of heaven in their lifetimes. Maybe the kingdom would be delayed. They then began to contemplate what that delay would mean for how they were to go on living as a community of his followers. They asked themselves, If Christ isn’t coming according to our timetable, then how does that affect how we live?
This is the question that the parable addresses. And in that sense, while nearly 2,000 years separate Matthew’s context from our own, we are still living in that same in-between period. We are still waiting for Christ to return. Maybe he will return tomorrow. Maybe in 10 years. Maybe not in any of our lifetimes. Who knows? We know neither the day nor the hour. That is not our concern. Our concern is to be prepared when he does return. And that means having our oil at the ready to light our lamps when he comes.
And so, yes, back to the oil. What is it, exactly, metaphorically speaking? In the parable the oil is something that the wise have at the ready. Something that, amid the night’s darkness, illumines their path. Something that enables them to trust in the timing of the groom, whether he appears at dawn, at midday, or in the midnight hour.
Faith, as the Gospel of Matthew understands it, is not merely a matter of professing belief in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Faith means orienting one’s entire life according to that belief.
For the believer, such trust is born of faith, a faith that enables us to remain expectant and hopeful as we wait for the coming of a kingdom that is, in some ways, already in our midst. In fact, it is the light of faith that enables us to see signs of the kingdom breaking into the world even now.
Faith, as the Gospel of Matthew understands it, is not merely a matter of professing belief in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Faith means orienting one’s entire life according to that belief. That is what we pray every time we say in the Lord’s Prayer “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” When we pray those words we are praying for the kingdom of heaven to be done on earth—in us and through us—right here and now. We are praying that signs of that coming kingdom would become apparent in our life together—in our worship and work, in our study and prayer, in our deeds of mercy, in our forgiveness of one another, in our spreading of God’s justice and peace.
This is what it means to keep awake. It’s not about maintaining 24/7 vigilance. It’s about living like the heavenly banquet has already begun…because it has! True, the host may not yet have made his appearance, but he has nonetheless invited us to begin the celebration.
I would really like to end the sermon on that uplifting note, but there is one issue that remains. What of those who do not celebrate? What of those to whom the door is shut? I say again what I said earlier. The judgment of God always occurs within the larger context of the mercy of God. No one is rejected on the merits because no one is worthy of being invited to the banquet in the first place. All we can do is be prepared to join in the celebration when the Lord appears.