This is a strange parable.
The setting is unfamiliar; it reflects a culture that celebrates weddings differently than we do today and describes customs that sound odd to us. The community is under duress and being persecuted for their religious beliefs; they’ve already waited for the return of Christ longer than the first generation of Christians expected and now Matthew is urging his listeners to keep the faith, confess Christ and wait expectantly for Christ’s return. Two thousand years later, that plea has lost its immediacy, and it all just sounds strange to our hearing.
But at the heart of the parable, Matthew is addressing two questions: “When will Christ return?” and “What shall we do while we wait?”
In these last few weeks of the Church Year, “the lectionary texts [are] about the coming of the Son of Man” as the season of Advent nears. Advent or “the season of coming” prepares us for Christ coming both as the conquering Son of Man at the end of time and as the helpless infant in a manger.[i]
But meanwhile we wait.
In Matthew’s parable, the bridesmaids are waiting together for the bridegroom’s arrival. Matthew divides them into two groups and describes them as wise and foolish but doesn’t say more about what makes one wise and the other foolish. What we do know is both groups fall asleep while they wait.
Matthew tells us later that the wise ones carried extra oil with them while the foolish ones only had what their lamps could hold.
Martin Luther understood the oil as faith but how can we run out of faith? And if the burden of having enough faith falls on us, how do we square that with Jesus’ own words in Matthew 17 when he said to his disciples,
“For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”(Matt. 17:20)
Others think of the oil as “good works” but then, how can we buy more good works? And how do we reconcile that with our Lutheran understanding that salvation is only possible through God’s loving mercy and not something that we ourselves can do? I don’t think we can.
I don’t think the oil matters. What is important is that we are invited to wait, and how we wait matters.
One of my preaching professors, Karoline Lewis, has told the story of her father-in-law, who was 96 when he died. Sam was a World War 2 veteran, and he didn’t talk much about the war, but one day, not too long before he died, he asked for his grandchildren to come over and he bequeathed his items from the war to them. And as he told the stories behind the items, he talked about his experiences in the war, and
He talked about the waiting. [You see, Sam] had been selected, singled out, not to be sent to the front, but to stay behind [because he] was good in math. He showed [his family] his notebook in which he had calculated multiple ballistic measurements. And as he worked on his equations, he waited for his fellow soldiers, his friends, to return.
Some did. Some did not.
He could not understand how he was spared. Yet in the waiting and the wondering he knew God was there, and there was nothing else he could do but trust that truth.[ii]
The waiting we are invited into in this parable is waiting with uncertainty. Waiting when we have no control over what happens next. Waiting even when we don’t understand why it is taking so long. Waiting even when we feel unprepared.
The foolish bridesmaids were not foolish because their lamps ran out of oil. They were foolish because they left to search for more oil.
They forgot why they were there. They were there to wait for the bridegroom, even if that meant waiting in the dark.
A few years ago, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a book called Learning to Wait in the Dark where she describes the darkness as anything that scares us and then lifts up the idea that Christ finds us there, saying:
Between the great dramas of life, there is almost always a time of empty waiting — with nothing to do …— a time when it is necessary to come up with your own words and see how they sound with no other sounds to cover them up. If you are willing to rest in this …., where you cannot see your hand in front of your face and none of your self-protective labors can do you one bit of good, then you may come as close to the Christ as you will ever get —
We must not be afraid, or frantically search out ways to bring light in; instead we must remember that the Light of the World shines brightest in the dark, and Christ comes to us in our waiting.
Let us pray with the psalmist, saying,
“Lord, make haste to help me…
come to me quickly, O God.
You are my helper and deliverer;
O Lord, do not tarry.” (Ps. 70:1, 5)
Amen.
[i] Brian Stoffregen. “Exegetical Notes.”
[ii] Karoline Lewis. “How to Wait.” Dear Working Preacher. Luther Seminary.
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