The Parable of the Bridesmaids

Matthew 25: 1-13 (November 12, 2023)

For thousands of years, humans have built spiral-shaped labyrinths. You may think that a labyrinth is just like a maze, but where a maze often has dead-end paths, labyrinths do not. The pathway of a labyrinth will always take you to the center, where Christ is symbolized. Medieval Christians used labyrinths to symbolically walk the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that they might have been unable to walk in reality. The most famous labyrinth is probably the one built in the 15th century in Chartres Cathedral in France. Today, Christians the world over walk the labyrinth to physically represent the spiritual journey toward a closer relationship with Christ. It’s meant to connect history and eternity and to reveal the pathway to the kingdom of God.

When we look at the readings from today, we see threads of Israel’s apocalyptic literature, the tradition that is focused on the end of history and the eternal kingdom of God. Amos was one of the prophets, and his book is considered one of the most pessimistic.

Today’s reading tells us that God wasn’t interested in Israel’s sacrifices and liturgical celebrations but was instead interested in justice. Amos warns of the dark day of the Lord when Israel will lose its land and be sent into exile. And of course, there were periods in Israel’s history when they were conquered and exiled. Amos prophesied that would happen because of Israel’s lack of justice and righteousness.

Justice and righteousness are themes that are also strongly present in the Gospel of Matthew. They are marks of the kingdom of God. In some of the earlier parables, we saw how Jesus confronted the religious leaders of his time because he believed they were keeping the people from the kingdom. He saw them as more concerned with their own power than they were with living out God’s beloved community. And last week, we saw in the beatitudes how those who are part of Matthew’s messianic community will live out the kingdom through whole-hearted devotion to God, nonviolence, peacemaking, mercy, and speaking the truth even in the face of persecution. These are the fruits that God desires from us in the harvest.

In this story of the ten bridesmaids, Matthew returns to the metaphor of a wedding to describe the kingdom of God. Here we have ten bridesmaids who go to meet the bridegroom with their lamps trimmed. I’ve read that trimming a lamp means shaping its wick in a way that keeps the flame burning cleanly and brightly. This story refers to a custom where the bridesmaids would light the way for the bridegroom to walk to meet the bride for the wedding ceremony.

We are told that five were wise, because they carried extra oil, and five were foolish because they did not. The bridegroom is delayed and when he finally comes, the foolish bridesmaids are running out of oil. They ask the others for some of theirs but are told no, and so they must leave to buy more. When they return, the wedding banquet has already begun, and they’re shut out.

 

The two things that stand out for me in this story are:

1. The bridegroom is delayed and everyone falls asleep
2. Like the man without the wedding robe in the other wedding, 5 of these 10 bridesmaids end up outside the wedding.

I’d like to look at this story on two levels. First, at the outer level of Matthew’s community and the message that Matthew was trying to convey. And then at an inner level or spiritual meaning that we can apply to our own lives today.

I mentioned last week that in Matthew’s Gospel, he presents his community of Jesus followers as one that believed that the messianic age had begun with Jesus. There are places in the gospels and in the letters from Paul where it’s clear that both Jesus and Paul thought that the new heaven and new earth that God had promised would come within that generation. They believed the great transformation when sorrow would end was imminently upon them.

Matthew’s community and other followers of Jesus would have expected his return to be imminent as well. Yet at least 50 or 60 years had passed since Jesus’ death and resurrection, two generations, and he had not returned. And so, in this story of Matthew’s, the delay of the bridegroom refers to this postponement of the end times that his community expected would have already happened.

We might even suggest that if the bridegroom had not been delayed, if he had come when he was expected, everyone would have had enough oil with them. It’s only because he was delayed that the five bridesmaids needed more. Another consequence of his delay is that everyone had fallen asleep. Eugene Boring, the scholar writing about Matthew that I referenced last week, points out that falling asleep wasn’t the problem, because both the “wise” and the “foolish” bridesmaids fell asleep. The problem was that half of the bridesmaids weren’t ready for what happened. What does being ready mean to Matthew?

According to Boring, “Readiness in Matthew is, of course, living the life of the kingdom, living the quality of life described in the Sermon on the Mount. Many can do this for a short while; but when the kingdom is delayed, the problems arise. Being a peacemaker for a day is not as demanding as being a peacemaker year after year when the hostility breaks out again and again, and the bridegroom is delayed. Being merciful for an evening can be pleasant; being merciful for a lifetime, when the groom is delayed, requires preparedness.”

Matthew urges his community to not give up on the bridegroom, but to keep living faithfully because they wouldn’t know when the Christ would return to renew the earth and establish the time when God would be all in all. To live according to the values presented in the Sermon on the Mount – to be peacemakers, nonviolent, merciful, etc. – is to be ready for the arrival of the bridegroom.

The Greek word parousia that is typically translated as “second coming” of Jesus can also just mean “presence.” A friend of mine named Doug King has an organization called Presence and a podcast by the same name where he teaches about the biblical narrative as a story of universal God identity in every person. Doug is steeped in biblical knowledge and has probably forgotten more about the bible than most of us know about it. He points out that interpreting the word parousia  in the traditional way as the second coming – where Jesus will return at a future date – is basically saying that both Jesus and Paul were wrong or confused when they said it would happen within the generation living in Jesus’ time.

But what if parousia  refers to the kingdom of God described in Luke 17:20-21, where Jesus says, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you”? What if the “second coming” of Jesus is actually our own experience of resurrection? What if it’s a new arising of a Christ-shaped center within the individual soul? That’s the inner meaning of the story that I want to turn to now.

When I spoke a few weeks ago about the wedding banquet of the King’s son, I suggested that the reason the man without the wedding robe was thrown out was because he wasn’t ready for the inner marriage, for union with God, or that he didn’t believe he needed God. I described the inner marriage as a union of the opposites within us, and also of God and humanity. We can also think of it as a marriage of Christ and the individual soul.

I read in Boring’s commentary that the bridesmaids in the story are often interpreted as referring to the Church. Is it possible that this story – like the other wedding story – is also a critique of the religious establishment? Here the bridesmaids are supposed to light the way between the bridegroom and the bride. If we think of the Church today as being tasked with illuminating the pathway for union with Christ, then this story tells us that the entire church got drowsy and fell asleep and that half of it isn’t lighting the way for us to receive the divine marriage and thereby to be able to live out God’s kingdom.

Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrote a book in the 19th century called The Kingdom of God is Within You. In it, he describes three views of life. He writes,

In the first theory of life a man’s life is limited to his one individuality; the aim of life is the satisfaction of the will of this individuality. In the second theory of life a man’s life is limited not to his own individuality, but to certain societies and classes of individuals: to the tribe, the family, the clan, the nation; the aim of life is limited to the satisfaction of the will of those associations of individuals. In the third theory of life a man’s life is limited not to societies and classes of individuals, but extends to the principle and source of life – to God.

When we hold to this third or divine view of life we understand all of life as springing not from the individual or group, but from what Tolstoy calls the “eternal undying source of life – in God.” In this view, to fulfill the will of God might mean to sacrifice one’s individual, family, or social welfare.” What fuels this life, then, is love, and through God’s Love one can see the whole as sacred.

Tolstoy believed that we can only “seek first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness” when we embrace the highest truth exhibited in the life of Jesus, and thereby grow an ever-greater love within ourselves. It is this divine love within us that establishes the kingdom of God outside of us. This is exactly what Matthew tells us – by loving God wholly, by being peacemakers, by being merciful, by being nonviolent – we actually bring about God’s kingdom on earth.

A few weeks ago, when I attended the Synod’s conference on ministry in Lake County, I was able to walk a beautiful labyrinth surrounded by oak trees weeping Spanish moss. I walked that spiral pathway in tears, weeping for the lives lost in Israel and in Gaza. In those moments, it seemed impossible to hold the sorrows of the world, to hold the horror that we witnessed on Oct. 7, and the horror of the deaths that continue to mount.

The bridegroom has been delayed. How can we be peacemakers when the hostilities keep breaking out again and again and again? I have no solutions to offer. All I know is that hearts that have not been broken open by authentic sorrow will not make room for peace. Hearts that cannot weep for the children of the other can only build more barricades to love. As Joanna Macy tells us, “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”

In his wonderful book, The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr reminds us that the apostle Paul describes our relatedness to the whole through his use of the phrase “in Christ” or “en Christo.” “En Christo,” he writes, “seems to be Paul’s code word for the gracious, participatory experience of salvation, the path that he so urgently wanted to share with the world.” Paul, writes Rohr, “seemed to understand that the lone individual was far too small, insecure, and short-lived to bear either the ‘weight of glory’ or the ‘burden of sin.’ Only the whole could carry such a cosmic mystery of constant loss and renewal.”

When we remember that our center – just like the center of the labyrinth – is Christ, then everything the world throws at us can be held within the whole of his life. Let us keep walking the pathway toward that center. Our very life depends on it.