Stewardship Part 4: “Service”

November 12, 2023 – Ordinary Time 

Matthew 25:1-13

Pastor Mike

In Matthew’s Gospel, most of Jesus’ teachings are grouped into five long sermons, often called discourses. The first one, the Sermon on the Mount, is the most famous, and I’d bet that each of you could recall something from it even if you’ve never opened up a Bible to Matthew chapter 5. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are the salt of the earth. When you give, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Our Father, who art in heaven. In that first great teaching, Jesus laid bare the character of our daily discipleship.

Today’s scripture, the parable of the ten bridesmaids, comes from the fifth and final collection of teachings, found in chapters 24 and 25. Jesus gave them in Jerusalem right before his arrest and crucifixion, so they have a very different tone and texture. They are heavy, harsh, full of warnings. He talks about the final judgment and how his people will pass through many hardships as they wait for their vindication on the Day of the Lord. Jesus was teaching them – teaching us – about what it means to live and serve in an in-between time, in what our parable calls the groom’s delay.

These first and last teachings, one focusing on daily practices and the other on lifelong attitudes, resonate with each other. For example, Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who grieve, those who are merciful… In the final teaching, Jesus tells us why they are blessed. He says, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:35-36, 40). Christ’s presence is hidden with us when we suffer, and we find Christ’s presence when we serve the suffering. The key to blessedness.

The Sermon on the Mount talks specifically to the parable of the bridesmaids, too. The language of lamps is a shared feature. In an early teaching, Jesus says, ‘You are the light of the world… No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven’ (5:13-16). That’s clearly a call to put faith and love into practice, to walk the walk. In our parable, perhaps the light of the women’s lamps – and how long it can burn – has some connection to good works.

The Sermon on the Mount is also the only other place in Matthew where Jesus makes a vivid contrast between wisdom and foolishness. At the sermon’s finale, Jesus drives home, once again, the importance of action: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. …[But] everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!” (Matt. 7:24-27).  So ends the Sermon on the Mount – with the collapse of a house built by a fool. It’s jarring and uncomfortable, but so is the end of our parable, with five fools barred from the feast.

Parables are jarring. That’s kind of their purpose, which can be frustrating to American Christians like us who are so used to “applying the Gospel” to our lives in a practical way and want the blueprint, the quick fix. Using a story or an image, parables illuminate one reality in the light of another: “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” (Matt. 25:1). Like a woman turning her house upside down looking for a lost coin. Like a father rushing out to embrace an estranged son while a faithful son stews with envy. Like a seed that hits different kinds of soil and grows or perishes as the conditions permit. Parables seem familiar and relatable at first, but by the time you get to the end of one you realize you’ve been duped, drawn out into strange territory where meanings are unstable and connections have to be forged afresh – by you.

There’s a great Billy Collins poem called “Introduction to Poetry” where he makes suggestions about how to expose new students to poetry: “I say drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out, // or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” But he ends the poem with this lament: “But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.” Parables are like poems in that respect; they have to be lived with and wrestled and ultimately yielded to. Living a parable shares a lot in common with love, the depth of attention that turns listening into true hearing. Which is precisely why Jesus loved them so much. When crowds flocked to him, parables helped expose the quality of each person’s heart. Their opacity drew in those who longed to understand, and it drove away those who, deep down, didn’t want that kind of commitment, who never intended to prepare for a long night of delayed understanding. A synonym for parable is riddle.

Here’s are some things we know about the riddle at hand, the parable of the ten bridesmaids. It was a wedding day, a day of joy. In Jesus’ time and place, weddings were not exclusively for invited guests but for whole communities. Weddings were not scheduled like ours with cocktails and appetizers at 4:00 and a ceremony at 5:00 and a reception to follow at 6:00. Their start time was loose and dependent upon the arrival of the groom. But once a wedding got going, it lasted for days.

Typically, what kickstarted the events of the wedding day was the groom going to collect his bride from her father’s house. Then, together, accompanied by the wedding party, they’d make their way back to the groom’s house to seal their covenant and begin the feast. Since no one knew the exact time the groom would appear – he would just come when he was ready – the bridesmaids were given the task of announcing his arrival. Then they’d go with the couple to the wedding.

The ten bridesmaids gathered, and they brought their lamps, ready to watch and wait. (My wife, Sus, has reminded me that this is still mostly what being a bridesmaid means. You wait around, you keep waiting, then you go for a short walk and wait some more…) Five of the girls, the wise ones, brought a lot of extra oil with them, more than enough to get through the day – which, to the other five, must’ve seemed wildly impractical, unnecessary, overkill. In the words of one writer, the foolish girls “do not take the possibility of a delay seriously.”[1] They assume the groom will come while there’s still plenty of light in the sky and the need for lamps is largely irrelevant. Or maybe they didn’t think much about it at all, and haven’t taken their participation in this festivity very seriously. They’ll go, they’ll get through it, and it’ll be done. Not the wise girls. No, they’re all in, ready for anything, with flasks of oil weighing down their dresses.

The day goes by. Night falls. The groom has not come. All the girls fall asleep. Finally, at midnight, he arrives, and the girls are roused by the sound of a voice announcing that he’s been seen on the horizon. We’re not told whose voice it was that cried out in the night. It’s one of the provocative mysteries of the parable, and I’d like to know – but I digress. Anyway, that part was supposed to be the bridesmaids’ job, but they’ll take it from here.

The girls pull themselves together, the wise ones with poise and excitement, the foolish ones with great anxiety because their lights have gone out and they don’t have any more oil with them. They ask the wise girls for oil and are told No, sharing would spread the supply too thin and there’d be no light for the parade. The foolish girls head off to buy some for themselves, but by the time they return it is too late. The wise girls have gone with the groom, bright lights bobbing in the dark. The feast has started. The door is shut. The groom, in the end, turns the foolish five away.

Or does he? Really, he only says that he doesn’t know them. I wonder what would’ve happened if they told him who they were, if they apologized for being so unprepared and so late. If they’d cared to try, to speak, to commit themselves with effort, could they have received mercy?

Again, they don’t seem to have understood the stakes of what they had signed up for.

Do you?

Do you understand the stakes of being here, waiting upon God? And I don’t just mean here in this particular room, though that’s important, but more broadly I mean your engagement with the people of God and with the Spirit’s movement in our world?

God is in love with the world. With all of it – air and oceans, mountains and fields; with the millions of marvelous species that fill the planet; and with every human person crafted in God’s image. God loves you. And God loves the people in our neighborhood and city who do not yet know that they are loved, who are wounded and in need of healing, lonely and in need of community.

Jesus has shown us how far God will go to press into our lives and claim us. God has taken on our very sufferings and sense of abandonment, and has renewed us from the dark depths of our soul’s midnight. God has done it once for all in Christ, and the Spirit of Christ stands ready in every moment to arrive at the door of someone’s heart, someone wondering if there can be more for them in this life than the shallow or shattered semblances of love they have known.

And we – we in the Church have a crucial and joyful part to play. We get to watch with eager expectation for the arrival of God in the lives of the others, and then announce and celebrate God when God comes. We get to be the ones who point to what is joyful and beautiful and good bubbling up around us and say, “Look! It’s here, it’s happening! Healing and wholeness are at hand!”

We get to announce that there is freedom from sin and from shame.

We get to cry out into the night that justice and peace are God’s will and way.

We get to affirm people stepping into their purpose.

We get to name the hard, dignifying truth that in our poverty, weakness, and suffering, Christ is present in a special way.

We get to keep our lamps lit and offer these good works in service of the Love at the heart of all that is, a Lover who wants nothing less than every heart awakened, every wrong forgiven and made right, every condition necessary to humankind’s physical and spiritual survival protected.

If you are here and you consider yourself a follower of Jesus, those are the stakes. And in the face of them, there really is nothing else.

And if you are here and you’ve never known the love of God in this way, you are among people who have been waiting eagerly with lights burning to announce this good news over you.

But if you are here for the party with a finite amount of oil, you have made a choice, whether consciously or unconsciously, that your engagement with the feast has its limits, that you have a hard stop at 8’o’clock when the easy light of day fades. You are retaining control over how long you will wait for the groom to arrive, how deep into the darkness you will go.

“[D]on’t begin until you count the cost,” Jesus says in another place (Luke 14:28). Attending to God’s love affair with the world is not a commitment that we make alongside other commitments; it shapes and orders all our other commitments. Attending to God’s love affair with the world is not something to which we give a portion of our time; it suffuses all our time. If you don’t count the cost, you won’t honor the magnitude or access the fullness of joy in what is unfolding. If you are not extravagant and impractical and generous with what you bring to the table, somewhere deep inside your heart the joy of God, the hope and assurance and purpose that are your birthright, is wavering. You will know it eventually. Perhaps you know it now.

Oh, don’t we want the wise girls to take pity on the fools and share some oil? Wouldn’t that make for a better, easier, happier end to the parable? But they cannot share their oil, because commitment cannot be had secondhand. There is no such thing as vicarious integrity. No one can make you want what you don’t want or bring what you do not intend to bring.

Yet there is a sharing at the heart of this parable, and it’s not the sharing we expect. Many of Jesus’ parables feature individual characters and lend themselves to individual interpretations: Am I the compassionate father, the prodigal son, or the envious older brother? Am I the good soil or the shallow, thorny ground? But here we have groups who have qualities in common. We’re told nothing about the individual bridesmaids, only that five came prepared for whatever the job would take and five did not and that the five who did were able to share together in the joy of the feast.

And that is because joy can be – must be – shared. There is such a special joy when people who are wholly committed to the work at hand join in that work together. A contagious joy when you know you are bringing everything to the table and the person next to you is bringing everything to the table. Anything is possible, then. What joy it is to be untroubled by darkness and ready to announce the coming of God at a moment’s notice.

Such is the joy of shared desire and common purpose. The joy of the birds who announce the sunrise, of parents who watch over their children, of Paul and Silas singing hymns at midnight from the depths of a prison cell.

We grow anxious in the face of God’s delay only when we have parceled ourselves out and brought less than everything. But when we stand ready to give everything, when we know our lights will burn and we will serve for as long as it takes, then even the waiting, even the delays, even the long nights become part of the wedding, are shot through with delight.

For this our task, thanks be to God.

            Amen.

[1] George T. Montague, S.M., Companion God: A Cross-Cultural Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 276.