Perfect Ten
Matthew 25:1-13

November 9, 2008


Most people feel real sorrow for those five oil-less maidens who at the end of Jesus’ parable were locked out of the wedding feast. It is a tad rough to be told by the very bridegroom they were celebrating for, “I don’t know who you are.” That’s not nice, it’s mean-spirited and judgmental and more than a few of us would like to cut that part out of the parable. This really is not the Gospel part.

Something like this has happened to me several times. A young minister and his wife decided to go to the funeral of the uncle of one of his most devoted parishioners. It was in the back woods in some variety of Baptist church. The church was packed, then all of a sudden the casket was wheeled in and the preacher got right down to business, preaching fire and flailing his arms. “It’s too late for Joe! He might have wanted to do this or that in his life, but it’s too late for him now! He’s dead. It’s all over. He’s in the box! He might have wanted to straighten out his life, but he can’t now. It’s finished!”

The young minister was taken back and thought, “This certainly is great comfort to the grieving family.” The preacher wasn’t finished. “But it ain’t too late for you! People drop dead every day, so why wait?! Make your life count, wake up and come to Jesus now!”

“Can you believe that,” the young minister exclaimed driving home in the car, “a preacher doing that to a bereft family? It was manipulative, cheap, and inappropriate.” His wife agreed, yep, tacky, calloused, manipulative, “And of course,” his wife added, “the worst part of it all is that what he said was true.”

Ten maidens are waiting for the bridegroom to arrive. These weren’t our kinds of weddings; a different game was played and it was played often over days, not hours. The bridegroom would delay coming to the party and try to catch everybody off guard, surprising them at all hours of the day. Oh, what fun to wait! These ten maidens had their lamps oiled and ready, but some thought the bridegroom would play fair and others knew he would be a trickster. The party would not begin until he showed up at the midnight hour.

Yet, did you hear anything about a bride? I didn’t. How can you have a wedding without a bride? It’s clear that a bride is not mentioned, so does that mean anything? Add to that the unsettling request- for a Gospel after all - of the foolish maidens for more oil from their sisters in waiting. The have-nots were turned down by the haves, “Perhaps there will not be enough for us and for you.” Aren’t you supposed to share? You might have thought the five wise maidens would have used their wisdom and figured that if we pool our oil and stand together in a circle we won’t need that many lamps burning and would need only half as many. We would accomplish what we all need and everyone would be in the party. But no, get your own from the store. The foolish ones head off to the store that could not have been open and when they return the door has been shut and it never says whether they had fetch new oil anyway. Just as for Joe in the box, it’s too late, and the worst part is that it’s all true. Remember, this is what the kingdom of heaven is like. Weddings are fun.

There are some ways out of here. It doesn’t make much sense to see some young women carrying around extra bottles of oil - worse than the Englishman carrying an umbrella on a sunny day. There is an interesting allegorical interpretation which starts by declaring that the maidens weren’t carrying oil, but their faith. Five had a lot of faith, and therefore a lot of patience; and five others found their faith quickly exhausted and exasperated. So when they ask the wise maidens for more oil, it is nothing that they can give away to them. You can’t give your faith to someone else, not on the spur of the moment. The foolish maidens run off into the night trying to find faith, but there is no store that can sell it to them. They return faith-less and too late.

A bride-less wedding? When the wise maidens were admitted to the feast, they became the bride collectively - they became the Church, the Bride of Christ, for Christ describes himself several times as the Bridegroom. Faith accomplishes what we cannot imagine.

I am not sure that is the whole or final story. Just a little too easy and superficial, for faith is not that easy to carry around and never easy to explain. That is because faith is the basic characteristic of our God-ness, our relationship and participation in the love and spirit of God. Since God is beyond our capacity to define and pin down to a few traits, God tends to be infinite and our faith is therefore also virtually infinite, taking on innumerable shapes.

Here it is obvious that faith is endowed with endurance of patience, in which at the same moment, we are alert and ready to act, for you know neither the day nor the hour that Jesus the bridegroom will arrive; and that we are prepared to wait without discouragement into even the dark night of the soul. It is not some magic gift of emotion, this faith, but the fruit of knowing what God has already shown you.

Faith works when against convention you act in the belief that something is right and good, even if it is unprofitable. Most of our faithlessness occurs not only when we do that which we ought not to do, but when we do not do that which we ought to do. Not as many of us commit actual flesh and blood evil as you might think, but omit doing anything at the moment, and so nothing good happens. What a waste of time!

A small village in the French Alps, Le Chambon, distinguished itself during World War II by hiding its Jewish citizens from the Nazis, using a variety of ingenious and simple strategies. The general opinion was that the simple Biblical preaching of Pastor Trocmé helped guide and sustain his flock into action. When the Nazis came they did not omit carrying out their faith. One little old lady faked a heart attack when the Nazis came looking. She had a family hidden under her chicken house. She explained why she did this by commenting that “Pastor always told us, ‘One day Jesus will come into your life and ask you to do something just for him.’ On the Sunday that the Nazis came he repeated those words. Everybody in the congregation nodded their heads. We all knew what we had to do and we were prepared for it.” When the bridegroom came, they had enough oil and they became the brides.

Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour, but you do have the faith to wait to do what is good.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan