after Pentecost
| Old Testament | Joshua 24:1–3a, 14–25 |
| Psalm | Psalm 78:1–7 |
| Epistle | 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 |
| Gospel | Matthew 25:1–13 |
O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Distractions come my way. Exhaustion takes hold until I cease my search for you. You ask me to watch attentively. Help me develop eyes that enable me to see you in the midst of everyday life. Keep me ready for your coming. You commanded us to stay alert, yet some days clarity escapes me. Show me how to maintain faith when I cannot see anything; help me keep my eyes open when watching becomes difficult, while trusting that you will arrive. Amen.
▶ | Hear These Lessons Preached Christ Church Cathedral, Houston · Proper 27A, November 12, 2017 |
Chrysostom reads the oil as mercy: “By lamps here He means the gift itself of virginity, the purity of holiness; and by oil, humanity, almsgiving, succor to them that are in need.” Which is why none of it can be lent at midnight: “Neither the humanity of those whom they asked, nor the easiness of their request, nor their necessity and want, made them obtain. But what now do we learn from hence? That no man can protect us there, if we are betrayed by our works — not because he will not, but because he cannot.” And where the oil is actually sold: “And who are they that sell? The poor. And where are these? Here, and then should they have sought them, not at that time. … Wherefore here must we get together the oil, that it may be useful to us there, when the time calls us. For that is not the time of collecting it, but this.”
“Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake.” — The Church has a prayer for the middle of the night, and it does not ask to be spared the waiting. It asks God to keep the watch with us.
“When all is said and done — when we have scared ourselves silly with the now-or-never urgency of faith and the once-and-always finality of judgment — we need to take a deep breath and let it out with a laugh. Because what we are watching for is a party.”
“Unpredictability is an important theological category, for the God of the Bible has always chosen to be a God associated with calling people, sending people, encountering people, incarnating as human, and pouring out the Holy Spirit on communities who are on the margins — all of this happening in the fullness of God’s own time.”
Jesus is again teaching a parable about the kingdom of heaven. He offers us ten bridesmaids, lamps, a bridegroom, not enough oil, and trouble. The problem with preaching these parables is that we are preaching against the story tide. People have heard them so many times that they have already made up their minds about what they say. And typically what they know, or think they know, is based upon a surface reading at best, or a childhood memory. Frederick Buechner, theologian and author, remarks that we “suck” these stories dry with old tellings and with what we think we already know. (Frederick Buechner, “The Truth of Stories,” in The Clown in the Belfry, later in Secrets in the Dark.)
The parable itself falls within the last parables of judgment, in Robert Farrar Capon’s view. (See Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, 512.) He offers the idea that human beings think in a way that assumes there is always an opportunity for a second chance. The parables of judgment offer a sense of urgency, in that God in Christ Jesus is a disruptor, a disruption in history. He is a disruption in our history, and there is an immediacy to going with the bridegroom when he comes. There is no time for dilly-dallying. There is the now and present Christ.
God is saving right now, and in our moment. God is, in Capon’s view, saving history. And in a moment that history will have an end, and even in that moment faith will come to an end. Yet God is saving, if you will but have a little faith.
Our parable starts out as his parables began when he first taught, and when his journey to the cross was but in its infancy. Now he nears his work, and so the parables have taken on an urgency, as do his final days with his followers.
In order to catch Jesus’ joke and understand the parable in its kingdom meaning, let’s call the maidens with a little bit of oil “maidens #1.” And let’s call the maidens with a ton of oil “maidens #2.”
Maidens #1 take just enough oil to make it through the night. The first hearers would say, “Ah, these are wise maidens. They are prudent, they take just enough. They are following the rules of not wasting anything. They are so wise.” Jesus then makes a joke. He calls them foolish. The maidens bring just enough to make it to the feast and no more. Once again the parable seems to be about prudence and preparedness, when it is actually about plenty and extravagance.
Then there are maidens #2. By the world’s standards, maidens #2 are foolish. They take way too much oil. Jesus then calls these maidens wise. You see, the party is to go on and on. The bridegroom is making his way from party to party, and we are to go with him when he arrives. In faith we must be ready and willing to be held up as the bridegroom makes his way.
“The kingdom is not run in a respectable way.”
“We all long to hear a good word: a word that brings good news, a word that can sustain us, a word that can give us the vision and courage to make it through another day, a word that tells us God is with us.”
“At the same time that Paul offers this extraordinary vision of consolation, he locates the act of consolation within the community as an ongoing (present imperative) expression of hope.”
Paul is clearly in didactic mode. He is trying to convey to his readers that there is a good word here — that there is hope in God’s promise to be with them always, even to the end of the ages, as Matthew says. And there is hope in God’s promise that he will return. While those who sleep wait, those who live have one another for comfort and to inspire hope in one another.
In a world of strife, injustice, fear, and anxiety about the future, Paul’s good word for his readers in the first century can be a good word for us. It can provide for us a sense that we too are not alone. We have one another, we have the community, and in fact we have God — a God who will not in the end leave things the way they are, but is even now working God’s purposes out. God will return, and we will return into God.
When I think of this passage I am reminded of this piece from the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, from a lecture at Lincoln Cathedral in which he looked at how modern society understands, remembers and wants things, and how the Church can turn this outward into faith, hope and love.
Hope, when it comes to birth, is not just a confidence that there is a future for us; it is also a confidence that there is a continuity, so that the future is related to the same truth and living reality as the past and the present. … You have an identity because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love. You don’t have to work out and finalise who you are and who you have been … because in the eyes of the presence which does not go away, all that you have been and are is still present and real.
Williams then turns to a poem written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison, for his share in the plot to assassinate Hitler. The poem is about the great gulf between what “they” see — a confident, adult, rational, prayerful, faithful, courageous person — and what Bonhoeffer knows is going on inside: the weakness and the loss and the inner whimpering and dread.
“So which is me?” Bonhoeffer asks. Is it the person that they see, or the person that I know when I’m on my own with myself? And his answer is surprising and blunt: “I haven’t got a clue; God has got to settle that. I don’t have to decide if I’m really brave or really cowardly, whether I’m really confident or really frightened, or both. Who I am, is in the hands of God.” … It tells me that I am more than I realize, in the eyes of God, for good or ill. It tells me to hope in “what is unseen,” and to hope in the one who doesn’t need to be told about how human beings work, because he knows the human heart.
“Bondage to a lie, or freedom’s integrity.”
“The verb “serve” is evocative in these verses. “Serve” can mean “worship,” or it can mean “show loyalty toward,” or, as verse 24 notes, it can also mean “obey.””
God, the holy and undivided Trinity, is at work throughout the sacred history of the Old and the New Testaments. This is something that I have learned. The hermeneutical principle of mission, combined with the belief that the same God who is working through the people of Israel and their story is working in the life of the disciples and the fellowship of Jesus, is the only footing for the Christian preacher.
The Gospel evangelists themselves believe this, and in so doing tie the very words of Joshua 24 into our understanding of the vocation of God and the call of Jesus.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speaks of this passage as the great transition between Moses and Joshua. Moses has set his eye on the furthest horizon and concludes the Torah with both prophecy and the last commandments. Sacks writes:
It would not be easy. With his prophetic eye turned to the furthermost horizon of the future, Moses had been warning the people throughout Devarim that the real dangers would be the ones they least suspected. They would not be war or famine or poverty or natural disaster. They would be ease and affluence and freedom and prosperity. That is when a nation is in danger of forgetting its past and its mission. It becomes complacent; it may become corrupt. The rich neglect the poor. Those in power afflict the powerless. The people begin to think that what they have achieved, they achieved for and by themselves. They forget their dependence on God.
Joshua in this moment, in chapter 24, is doing exactly what Moses did. He is calling the people to remember their purpose, their mission, and their commitment. He is reminding them that the God to whom they are yoked in love is a God who freed them — a God who freed them to be a blessing to the whole of creation. They are to be a different kind of people, a people who serve God by being and enacting a different kind of society.
“In effect, Joshua is offering them the freedom to walk away from God and from their covenant with God.”
It is the same with the evangelists of the New Testament. They, like Joshua, narrate God’s mighty acts in the person of Jesus. They enumerate God’s grace. And, like all the history of Israel, the evangelists remind us who have chosen to follow this Christ that we too are called to remember that we are to be a blessing of peace — a blessing of shalom to the world. We are called into a particular community that is to remember the poor, to raise up the powerless, to share what they have achieved, and never to forget the God who loves and offers freedom so that all may be united in one living body. It is not so much that the Gospel reflects or copies the speech of Joshua in this chapter, or the speech of Moses before him. No. It is that the speeches of Moses and Joshua are given by the power of the Holy Spirit, and they are a living word to be incarnated in the people who have a relationship with God.
Walter Brueggemann writes:
What this God requires is a life-commitment that will impinge upon every dimension of public life — social, political and economic. This God, so says Joshua, is uncompromising. With YHWH it is “all or nothing,” no casual allowance for accommodation. What is at issue is a jealous God who is committed to neighborly justice and the organization of the economy for the sake of the weak and vulnerable. But the other gods, the totems of agricultural self-sufficiency, do not require such neighborly passion. The either/or that Joshua presents has immediate practical social consequences. A decision for YHWH entails socio-economic justice.
The foolish bridesmaids went out to buy oil at midnight. Chrysostom says the market is here, not there. What are you postponing that cannot be purchased later?
Joshua offers the people the freedom to walk away. That is what makes the choosing real. What would it cost you to choose, out loud, today?
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