Matthew 25:1-13
There’s a bracing kind of argument we use when we want to persuade our children—and probably, ourselves—that those who are well prepared, careful, and correct are the ones who will win the day; and this argument is beautifully rendered in the gospel of Matthew’s story of the ten bridesmaids at the wedding feast, a parable which Jesus tells to help us understand what the kingdom of heaven will be like.
So we listen to and teach this story about personal accountability and preparedness for any situation (keep awake! For you know neither the day nor the hour), and we strain to hear a word of God for the people of God. We are the Chosen: and we try to honor the bridegroom’s generous invitation by also being the Wise. We work diligently for our balanced budgets. We count carefully and conserve our resources. We measure twice and cut once. We give what we have with a responsible, prudent attention to our long term goals, we invest in others of like mind: And if there are those whose carelessness, whose lack of respect, or whose inattention to the requirements of the kingdom cause a threat to the well being of the whole—well, as my grandfather used to say, you shouldn’t throw good money after bad. Sometimes, unfortunately, you can’t escape the consequences of your poor choices.
In this way the gospel of Matthew commends our protestant work ethic, offering a strong justification to support a status-quo practice of our faith in life. If we have enough, it proves our worthiness. If in any circumstance we run out—whether of
patience, of money, of good mental and physical health or appropriate family relationships—it proves that we did not try hard enough, that we do not belong. The kingdom of heaven is about recognizing the worthy, says this story. It does not invite us to consider why five of the virgins had so much more oil than the others; it does not inquire into the circumstances of the five who found themselves without enough.
It does not explore alternative solutions to the crisis of scarcity, it cuts to the chase. There is a wedding to be celebrated, a bridegroom with absolute freedom and absolutist expectations, and we’d better step to it, or else. Truly I tell you, says the man celebrating the happiest day of his life to the women he invited when they beg him to let them into the party late, truly I tell you, I do not know you.
A story in this morning’s New York Times illustrates the point beautifully. In Gila Bend, Arizona, this past June, a nineteen year old farmworker, Antonio Torres, sustained catastrophic injuries in a car accident, and was taken to a hospital
in Phoenix. The man was in a coma, and dependent on a ventilator. He
was also uninsured, an immigrant working among other Mexicans in the
alfalfa fields outside of town. Everyone in this room who has ever had the misfortune to need emergency hospitalization knows: our medical system is overtaxed and undersupported. To use the analogy of the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, the oil is running out, and there’s not enough to go around. So the hospital put Antonio Torres, a legal resident of the United States, onto an ambulance and shipped him over the border, where he lay for four days in an even more overtaxed and unsupported emergency room in Mexicali, while his parents
begged for his return, and a systemic infection raged through his body.
Unlike many other immigrants in similar circumstances, Torres’ parents
were successful in finding a hospital in California that would treat
him and angels to donate an ambulance for his return journey.
Antonio Torres survived, but his father said: In Arizona, apparently,
they see us as beasts of burden that casn be dumped back over the border
when we have outlived our usefullness. But we outwitted them.
We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!1
If stories like these are the natural
conclusion of a world view supported by the bible’s story of the ten
bridesmaids—and make no mistake, they are—how on earth can sincere
followers of Jesus stomach being found among the wise? How can we live
with ourselves, or with any Jesus whose teachings would encourage such
a stingy vision of the kingdom of heaven? For too long, the Church in
our land has been lulled into a false sense of security and self-righteousness
by the abundance of its oil. Like wise virgins who brought more than
enough to the Table of Fellowship, we came to believe that we would
never have to choose, never risk not having enough, never have to face
the possibility that we did not earn our first-class tickets to the
kingdom of God. But now that we see that there is not naturally enough
for some of us and nothin’ for the rest of them, how can we not stop,
and look again?
What if—Jesus told us this parable
not to show us what the kingdom of heaven would be like, but
to stir our passion, our rage at injustice and our compassion in being
partners in that kingdom’s coming? What if, rather than telling
us how it is (which, God knows, we already know well enough!) Jesus
was trying to start a conversation about how, with our help, it might
be different?
Many people in this past week have postulated
that the election of Barak Obama signals a new day dawning in America
and the world. And this conversation is going on among those who voted
in good conscience for Obama, or for John McCain. We all hope
for a better America in a better world. And, whomever we voted for,
we all hope that Obama’s vision of change, and the change that his
very existence in office signifies, means we are on our way to the bridal
celebration. We have only to load up our lamps with the oil we have
set by, and stand at the gates waiting and watching, for the bridegroom
to come. Some people in America consider themselves prepared for,
and ready to celebrate, this feast of hopeful abundance, this wedding
celebration. And surely, all of us know that, despite the readiness
of some, and the hopefulness of many, the wait for a new day will be
a long and tiring one. For there are many among us who have already
waited too long, and whose lamps are guttering and going out, and that
is what I believe this parable that has been so abused and misused is
all about:
We are all of us eager for the arrival
of the bridegroom and the celebration of the kingdom of heaven where
everyone will feast at the Table of plenty: but in the meantime,
we are standing in the dark waiting, and some of us have enough and
others don’t. What, says Jesus, can the kingdom of heaven
really be likened unto?
In a country that voted with astonishing
strength for a candidate who represents a sea change in the way Americans
see the presidency and the governance of our nation; virtually every
initiative on ballots in four states, including California and our own
Florida, refusing to share the oil of equal rights in marriage or parenting
or adoption with our gay and lesbian neighbors failed, overwhelmingly.
In Florida, so strong was our sense of self-righteous protection of
our personal oil supply that we not only intensified the ban on civil
unions for GLBT persons to a constitutional level, we also practiced
our selfish and hoarding ways by refusing to remove from our statutes
a shameful law that, couched in the language of aliens, “us and them,’”
was designed to prevent Japanese Americans from owning property in the
land of their citizenship. And we completed our state’s trifecta
of self-satisfied conservation by refusing to allow community colleges,
which offer the only affordable and reliable way for the poor to receive
a college education, to raise the money from public taxation to support
their crumbling infrastructures and overcrowded classrooms.
Times are hard, I guess we reason, like those wise bridesmaids
did. We all want to come to the party, but some of us deserve
it more than others. Some of us already have the prerogatives,
that is the oil, and know how to use it wisely. The poor, the
gay, the immigrant—well, you should have been better prepared, and
we wish you luck the next time around.
Have you ever made an ironic comment,
only to have your listener respond with a sincerity that horrified you?
I bet Jesus felt that way, if he told this story of the Wise Bridesmaids
to his disciples only to watch them nod and slap each other on the back,
congratulating one another on their good sense and better fortune.
I bet Jesus would be horrified if he heard us taking this story at face
value, and saw what we have done to his vision of a radically inclusive
kindom where everyone belongs.
Where’s the conversation?
Where’s the imagination? Why can’t you figure out some other way
to light the wedding reception than one that leaves half of the family
out in the dark, begging to be recognized? Couldn’t you trust
me, even a little bit? Couldn’t you imagine that the God who
created a world out of nothing might be able to do something with ten
quarter-filled oil lamps, so that everyone could belong? What were you
thinking?
Maybe this will be a new day in America.
I hope so. But if it will be, it won’t be the bridegroom who
makes it so. It won’t be Jesus who saves. It won’t be
the wise who get their way by behaving with correctness and prudence.
The gospel of Jesus is filled with irony, resonant with challenges
to our imagination, resolute in its insistent call that we should be
fools for the kingdom. This is not a time for conservation: it
is a time for spending our abundance so that none of us has to wait
outside in the dark, or miss the party. We have to work harder,
pour out our oil to our neighbor without anxiety that we will not have
enough, learn to trust each other and our God more and more, so that
the darkness will not fall on any of us before the wedding feast of
the kingdom of God begins, and so that finally, the door will be opened
to all. Let us pray: O Lord, oil the hinges of our souls, that our hearts’ door may swing open wide in welcome for the day of your coming, and every day. Amen.