Chetwynd Shared Ministry
Sunday November 12, 2017
Reading: Matthew 25:1-13
And here we have yet
another challenging and disturbing parable from Jesus. If you’ve been keeping track of our weekly
readings, the last two weeks we had a bit of a break from the extra-difficult
gospel lessons as we celebrated Reformation Sunday two weeks ago, and All
Saints Sunday last week. But here we
are, back in middle of Jesus’ last week before he was crucified.
Chapter 25 of
Matthew’s gospel comes right at the very end of Jesus’ life. He entered Jerusalem back in chapter 21 in a
parade accompanied by waving palm branches.
He went straight to the temple in Jerusalem where he overturned the
tables of the money changers and drove out those who were there to conduct
business rather than worship God; and then he healed people who came to
him. The next day, he came back to the
temple and started arguing with the religious leaders who were there,
challenging them that maybe their practices weren’t quite in line with what God
wanted for the world. The parables that
Jesus told, and the arguments that Jesus made were quite pointed and harsh; but
at the end of two chapters of arguments, Jesus concludes that the greatest
commandments of all are to love God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your mind, and to love you neighbour as yourself. That’s what was missing from the world that
Jesus was living in; and dare I suggest that it is often missing from the world
in which we live?
Jesus then turned from
the religious leaders to the crowds that were gathered around him, and he
continues to preach the same themes – the people who may seem, on the surface,
to be most aligned with God are sometimes the people who are furthest from
God’s plan for the world.
And after addressing
the crowds, Jesus turns to his disciples in chapter 24. He tells them that the temple in which they
are standing is going to be destroyed so that not one stone is left on top of
another.
His disciples were
amazed. After all, the temple was the
largest structure that they had ever seen or could ever imagine. The temple was the central point in their
religious practices. Surely the
destruction of the temple would signal the end of the world. So they ask Jesus two questions: when is this destruction going to happen; and
how will we know when the end of the world is coming?
Jesus answers their
first question – when is the temple going to be destroyed – with a description
of death and disaster and terror, where “the sun will be darkened, and the moon
will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of
heaven will be shaken.” History tells us
that the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed 30-some-odd years after Jesus says
these words, in the middle of a 3-year revolt of the people of Judea against
the Roman oppressors. The temple has
never been rebuilt, and if you go to Jerusalem today, you will only be able to
see a fragment of a single wall that is left – the western wall, also known as
the wailing wall.
Jesus then turns to
the disciples’ second question – how will we know when the world is going to
end – and he answers it by telling them that no one knows when the end is going
to come – not the angels, and not the Son, but only the Father. He then expands this answer by telling a
series of four parables – today’s reading is the second of these parables –
come back next Sunday and the week after, and you will get the third and fourth
parables.
It’s interesting
timing, that we are getting these readings at the end of the church year,
October and November, which here in the northern parts of the world corresponds
with the time when the world is getting darker with longer nights and shorter
days and colder weather. The heavy
readings seem to correspond with a heaviness of this time of year; and will be
broken once we reach the season of Advent and we start looking for the coming
of the light.
Anyways, back to
today’s parable. I have a whole pile of
questions that I want to ask Jesus about this parable.
Why was the bridegroom
so late? He didn’t show up at his own
wedding until midnight! I don’t know
about you, but I’ve been to one wedding where the bride arrived before the
guests, many weddings where everything happened on schedule, and a couple of
weddings where the bride or groom was a little bit late. I don’t think that I’ve ever been to a
wedding where the groom didn’t show up until midnight! What’s going on here?
Also, how could the
bridesmaids forget to bring oil for their lamps? The lamps that they would have been carrying
were probably more like torches than indoor lamps. They would have only burned for 15 minutes or
so before needing to be re-soaked with lamp oil. Half of the bridesmaids brought this extra
oil that they needed, but the other half remembered their torches but forgot
the fuel. What’s up with that?
And then, when they
went looking for oil, they were sent out to the shops to buy some more. Were there actually shops open at midnight
for them to go to? I doubt that there
was a 24-hour 7-Eleven down the street that they could pop in to.
They went out, and
Jesus doesn’t tell us whether or not they found oil, but they come back to the
wedding anyways. But when they asked to
be let back in to the wedding, the bridegroom tells them that he doesn’t know
them. But weren’t they just at the
wedding? And because they were going to
be meeting the groom, chances are these bridesmaids were part of the groom’s
household. Why doesn’t he know
them? They weren’t gone that long!
And finally, my
question that gives me the most trouble – why didn’t the five so-called “wise”
bridesmaids share their oil with the so-called “foolish” bridesmaids? To me, this is not a very loving action, and
nowhere in the story are these “wise” bridesmaids criticized for their lack of
generosity. Remember that not a couple
of hours before this, Jesus said that the second greatest commandment was to
love your neighbour as yourself; and two parables later, Jesus tells his
disciples that we will be judged by our actions, including the famous line,
“just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,
you did it to me.” And yet it isn’t the
ungenerous bridesmaids who are locked out of the feast – it is the forgetful
bridesmaids who miss out.
Did Jesus really mean
to say that the kingdom of heaven will be like a bunch of girls squabbling over
some oil?
Bible scholars tend to
take one of two approaches to this story – either they ignore all of these
difficulties, or they re-write the ending of it. The ones who ignore these questions treat it
as a straight-forward story telling us to be prepared for the kingdom of
heaven, because we don’t know when it is going to happen. But all of my questions leave me unsatisfied
by this straight-forward explanation.
The scholars who re-write the ending of the parable often suggest that
either the wise bridesmaids shared their oil so that all of the torches were
lit, or that the foolish bridesmaids were allowed into the wedding despite not
being prepared. These re-writes are fun
to read – my favourite one is a poem by Thomas Merton where the five
scatter-brained bridesmaids show up at the wedding on motorcycles with empty
gas tanks, but since they knew how to dance they were invited to stay, and
“consequently there were ten virgins at the Wedding of the Lamb.”[1] They are fun to read, but this isn’t the
story that Matthew puts on the lips of Jesus.
In the story in scripture, the five foolish virgins are locked out of
the wedding feast.
So what are we to do
with this story? How can we find good
news in a story of selfishness and rejection?
The one question that,
for me, opens this parable up is when I ask why the five foolish bridesmaids
didn’t have oil with them for their torches.
Surely they knew that if they wanted to be able to light their torches
later in the evening, then they would need oil as fuel to keep them lit. So why didn’t they bring that oil?
I think that maybe the
reason why they didn’t bring oil with them, is that they didn’t really expect
the bridegroom to show up. They didn’t
think that they were going to need to light their torches. They didn’t expect that there was going to be
a party at the end of the evening.
And all of this boils
down to hope. Hope is a funny word
because we use it in so many different ways.
The usual way that we use hope is to mean something along the lines of
wishful thinking. I hope to see you
soon. I hope that you are feeling
better. I hope that we get lots of snow
this winter.
But Christian hope is
more than just wishful thinking. Christian
hope is more along the lines of confident expectation that something good will
come in the future. I have hope that
spring will follow winter. I have hope
that lives can be transformed for the better.
I have hope that God’s kingdom of peace and love and justice will
come. A wise friend once told me that
because of the resurrection of Jesus, we have an endless source of hope.
So looking at the
story of the bridesmaids through the lens of hope, five of the bridesmaids
brought oil with them. They had hope – a
confident expectation – that the bridegroom was going to come and that they
would need to light their torches. The
other five brought torches but no oil – they didn’t expect that they would have
to light them.
When Matthew was
writing down the stories of Jesus’ teaching and healing and life and death,
almost 40 years had passed since Jesus had died and had been resurrected and
had ascended to heaven. The community
had been following the ways of Jesus and passing along his teachings, and they
had been continually expecting his return.
But now they had been waiting for almost 40 years – a lifetime – and
still no kingdom of God. They were
living in the middle of a war between the people of Palestine and the Roman
Empire. I can imagine that some of them
had started to lose hope that this kingdom was ever going to come. The excitement and anticipation that had
followed the resurrection must have started to fade over the years. Maybe that is why they kept sharing this
parable of Jesus – to encourage one another to constantly be prepared. Even though we don’t know when it is coming,
and even though it might be delayed, we can be confident that the kingdom of
God is coming. We can keep our hope.
And here we are,
almost 2000 years later, and we are still waiting for the bridegroom to come
and the party to begin. We live in a
world that is still full of grief and trauma – where world leaders who hold the
nuclear codes are engaging in an ever-escalating dialogue of insults; where
climate change is threatening people who are already the most marginalized on
our planet; where, in the middle of the tragedy of mass shootings, all of the
“thoughts and prayers” that people are offering do nothing to prevent the next
tragedy from happening. How can we live
as though we still expect the party, 2000 years later?
We can live, knowing
that God is with us no matter what. We
can live, knowing that the Holy Spirit is guiding our lives and calling us to
new things. We can live, following
everything that Jesus taught – loving God with our whole hearts and loving our
neighbours as ourselves.
The kingdom of God is
like a wedding banquet – a feast, a party, a celebration of love, a time of
joy. This is the kingdom that is
coming. This is the kingdom that we keep
our hope alive for. This is the kingdom
that we can catch a glimpse of in the resurrection of Jesus. This is the feast that we anticipate each
time we gather around the communion table.
So in the end, I don’t
think that the kingdom of God is like a group of girls squabbling over some
oil. Instead, I think that the kingdom
of God is like a big party, and everyone who hopes for the party – everyone who
expects the party – is going to be welcomed in to it!
Let us pray:
Holy God,
we wait for your
kingdom,
we long for your
kingdom,
we hope for your
kingdom.
Bring your reign of peace,
of
love,
of
justice,
soon.
And while we wait,
help us to sustain our
hope.
We pray this in the name of Jesus
Christ,
Amen.
[1] Thomas Merton, “The Five Virgins,” in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton
(New York: New Directions, 1977), 826-827.
(A Foretaste of the Wedding Feast)
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