Bridesmaids (Matthew 25)

    In today’s Gospel, the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids (which used to be called the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins), we have another story whose theme is wakefulness, preparedness. It follows the Parable of the Faithful or the Unfaithful Slave, and is followed by the Parable of the Talents, and the Last Judgment. The parables are meant as preparations for the story of the Last Judgment; one way or another, we are being reminded of the choices before us, and their possible consequences.

     “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” says Jesus, and he then unfolds his tale. In this case, the kingdom is a place of possibility, where choices are before the actors in the story. The kingdom in this story is not so much a destination, a final condition, as it is a condition in the process of being created, by the choices of the bridesmaids. The wise bridesmaids create an opportunity for the Lord, the kingdom, to appear, by their readiness, their preparedness. The foolish bridesmaids in effect get in the bridegroom’s way, by their lack of attention, lack of readiness. The bridegroom, the Lord, can’t appear where he can’t be seen. The kingdom, in this story at least, is less about the Lord’s initiative, and more about the initiative, the readiness, of the wise bridesmaids. They are at least precursors of the kingdom; their presence is necessary to make it actual. The bridegroom is waiting for their welcome; he is not going to force his way into their presence.

    “When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.” The natural, obvious meaning of this story is easy to follow. Through long hours of darkness, lamps must be filled, an oil supply must be ready to hand, wicks must be trimmed, and at least one lamp must be kept burning, or embers of a fire, so that lamps can be lit when needed. This is a picture of the world before electric light, not that long ago. Nighttime darkness was total, relieved only by the moon and stars, and by lamps, candles, and fires, where possible. Our experience of darkness is softened by the instant availability of electric light, at the flip of a switch. We don’t usually experience a stark contrast between day and night, light and dark, as likely the ancients did.

    What is it about the lamps in this story? The wise bridesmaids won’t part with any of their oil. The foolish bridesmaids apparently make it to the wedding banquet with refilled lamps eventually, but the lamps seem not to be burning brightly enough to allow the bridegroom to recognize the foolish bridesmaids, and so they are left out. What is going on here?

    I don’t want to sound too fanciful here, but there is a symbolic way of thinking about this story that is perhaps interesting. It is not accidental that there are ten bridesmaids, five wise and five foolish. The five can be understood as the five senses, and the lamps can be understood as the state of readiness of the senses to the reality around them. The burning lamps are the lights of a mind fully awake, aware of spiritual reality and ready for its appearance at any time, even in the darkest times, called ‘midnight’ in the parable. The bridegroom, the Lord, can appear at any time; even the five foolish bridesmaids, a mind and senses unprepared and not fully awake, belatedly recognize reality and attempt to respond to it. I’m reluctant to believe that the bridegroom’s inability to recognize the foolish bridesmaids is total and permanent. A mind can grow, develop, reach the readiness necessary to choose to enter the kingdom. But the apparent rejection by the bridegroom is a reminder of the nature of our choices, that they have consequences, now and in eternity. May we keep awake therefore, for we know neither the day nor the hour, when the bridegroom will arrive. Amen. (11.XI.17 Adv.)

Great Commandment, David's Son (Matthew 22)

    Today’s Gospel continues the sequence of readings from Matthew’s Gospel that we’ve been following this year. Today’s reading comprises The Great Commandment and The Question about David’s Son. These two selections follow the questions about paying taxes and about the resurrection, which we’ve heard in the past few weeks, and precede Jesus’s denunciations of scribes and Pharisees, the same people who have been questioning him. This arrangement is not accidental.

    “One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.” It is said of lawyers in court, that they don’t ask questions to which they don’t already know the answers. That’s certainly true in this story. “Teacher, which commandment in  the law is the greatest?” Now, the lawyer knows the law, and Jesus knows that he knows it, but he answers anyway: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and so on. Jesus and the lawyer know that in the book Deuteronomy (which means Second Law, or Second Giving of the Law) in chapter 6, it says, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one! Therefore, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and so on. But Jesus doesn’t stop with the quote from Deuteronomy; he adds a quote from Leviticus. He says, “And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The source of this is in Leviticus, chapter 19, which lists dozens of rules of conduct, all of them concerned with regulating life in a tough subsistence economy. Jesus selects this one and puts it on the same level as the great commandment; indeed, he adds it to the great commandment. Apparently this passes the lawyer’s test, since he doesn’t ask Jesus any more questions. But it gives us an opportunity to think about questioning itself, and its role in the spiritual life. I said that the arrangement of this reading is not accidental; putting the question about David’s son right after the question about the great commandment is revealing.

    Jesus comes back to the Pharisees with a simple question, to which they know the answer, of course: “‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David.’” Simple question, simple answer. Why ask? Well, it gives Jesus the opportunity to present the Pharisees with a paradox. He quotes Psalm 110, taking for granted that David  is the author of the psalm, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand.” How can the Lord say this to the Lord? How can the Messiah be both son and Lord at the same time, both superior and inferior, mortal and eternal at once? No one in the gathering is able to answer, “nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

    This puzzling question reminds me of what our Zen Buddhist friends call a koan, a story in paradoxical form meant to lead anyone meditating on it to an awareness, an insight into reality beyond the limitations of logical contradictions and superficial meanings. Reality in itself is not contradictory or illogical, but is a unity that can be perceived directly. It is this perception that Jesus is pointing to, when he asks the Pharisees his questions about David and the Messiah. Jesus is leading the Pharisees, the lawyers, beyond their organized, logical, written law, their system of thought, to a perception of the unity of God and neighbor, Lord and son, David and Messiah, the unity that we, and Jesus, call Love. Jesus is not trying to frustrate the Pharisees, but to point them in the direction of the real meaning of the great commandment, the unity of God and neighbor. Jesus’s denunciations, which follow this chapter, are meant to waken the scribes and Pharisees to the reality which their own teaching points to.

    As Christians we meditate on, and we proclaim, the greatest paradoxical teaching of all, that Jesus is divine and human, God and man, the firstborn of all creation and at the same time a mortal like all of us, now  resurrected and living both in eternity and in us, his body in the world, the church. That is what his questions about David and the son and the Lord are about, the resolution of all contradictions in the Incarnation, in which we participate sacramentally, and to which our Lord is leading us, both now and in eternity. Amen. (28-29.X.17. Adv.)