Like
all the other Kingdom parables, it sets us thinking: just how is the Kingdom of
heaven like, in this case, ten bridesmaids?
And the first thing to notice is the “this,” in the first line. “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” he
says, and it seems to refer to the entire story. He doesn’t tell us what it is about the story
the Kingdom of Heaven is like. Not a
hint, or a clue, or even a little suggestion.
We’re given no pointers, except what’s found in the story itself. And to figure it out, we have to think first about
its context. To whom is it told, and
when?
Well,
Jesus tells the original parable to his disciples, and thus to insiders, in
about 30 AD. And he was talking about the
parousia, the second coming of Christ, and though scholars debate how important
a concept this was to Jesus, there is little doubt that it was of very great
importance to early followers of Christ, like those for whom the gospel of
Matthew was written fifty years or so after the crucifixion. In the first century, the entire locus of
Christian hope in the first century revolved around this event, which refers to
the fulfillment, the establishment of God’s just rule on earth. That’s the whole idea behind the kingdom of
heaven, or the kingdom of God as Jesus calls it in Mark and Luke: the kingdom
of heaven is on earth. It’s like the
Lord’s Prayer says: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven.” Jesus is talking to people who
have a world-view that sees heaven—where God lives—as the perfect place, the
abode of the gods, where everybody gets along, where there’s no hunger or war and
et cetera. Further, people in Jesus’ day
believed that earth is an imperfect approximation of heaven, that place where
the gods rule, where in particular God sits on a throne. New Testament Christian hope is that God’s
just rule will come to earth, that’s the “on earth as it is in heaven” part,
and there will be no more starvation or oppression or war.
Now,
a banquet is a common image for that Kingdom because, after all, there is never
any want at a banquet … there is always plenty to go around, plenty to eat and
drink, and for all the people to whom Jesus preached the Good News—the poor, as
it says over in Luke—a banquet is impossibly fine, they’d never be invited to a
banquet in real life, only rich people went to banquets, this is good news to
the poor indeed. And on top of that, a
wedding banquet . . . well. Weddings
went on for seven days . . . seven days
of eating and drinking, and, uh, other things, seven days of no worries and no
trouble, and we know what the number seven represents, don’t we. It’s the perfect number, it represents
fulfillment, completeness, and so the kingdom of heaven is a lack of want and
worry . . . perfected, completed. And as
kind of an aside, this illuminates the changing of the water into wine over in
John, doesn’t it? That’s a wedding banquet,
and Jesus enables it to be brought to its completion, its fulfillment, by
ensuring the abundance of a component critical to all Jewish banquets.
Anyway. Here’s another feature that’s important to
understanding this parable: unlike today, when we are so fixated on time, on
events beginning and ending on time, in those days, things happened when they .
. . happened. Nobody said—“ok, the
bridegroom is gonna arrive at 6 pm, and it’ll take 2 and a half minutes to
march down the aisles, five minutes for the bad rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon
and seven for do you Sarah take this man Abraham, yadda, yadda, yadda, so we
oughta be at the banquet table by, oh . . . seven-ish.” Events like weddings happened when they
happened, when things were ready, and that wasn’t up to the guests or, in that
day, the bride. They happened when the bridegroom
showed up, and him being late wasn’t all that uncommon. Often times, a little last minute negotiation
with the father of the bride would have to be done, a little last minute
squabbling over the terms of her dowry which, unlike today, was of critical
importance to the whole shebang..
And
so although they had a general idea that the bridegroom would arrive there that
evening, they weren’t sure when that would be.
That’s why we’re told the bridegroom was delayed, and in fact, the Greek
word cronidzo we render as delayed might be more accurately translated as
“taking time”, so you must get say the bridegroom was taking his own sweet
time, but it’s not that he was late, because there was no deadline that he
could be late from. And of course, this
is exactly the nature of the parousia, the second coming—whatever it’s going to
be— isn’t it? Paul says it will come
like a thief in the night, Jesus himself warned of the futility of predicting
the exact time and date . . . it will come when it comes, it will come when the
bridegroom—and in this parable, that’s Jesus himself—is ready.
But
that hasn’t kept everybody from Jack Van Impe to Hal Lindsey to Jerry Falwell
from trying to predict the time and days.
The latest I know of was Harold Camping, former head of Family Radio,
who predicted the rapture on May 21, 2011 followed by the second coming and
destruction of the world by God on October 21 of that year. When the rapture didn’t happen, he said
there’d been a “spiritual judgment,” and that the rapture and destruction of
the world would happen on October 21.
When that didn’t happen, a
major theological publication—The International Business Journal—labeled him a
false prophet. And to that I say “well, Duh.”
Putting
aside the question of why these people would so clearly disregard the advice of
Jesus and try to predict the unpredictable, it is this unpredictability that
this parable hinges upon. The
first-century Christians had expected the second coming within their
generation—mainly because Jesus said so at one point—and they were getting a
little antsy. And this story said
something to their impatience . . . but what?
Let’s see . . . there are ten bridesmaids waiting where the wedding is
to be held, and what they’re waiting for is to line the streets, to observe and
perhaps ooh and ah, over the procession of the bridegroom and also of the
bride. Jewish weddings began this way,
perhaps because after the wedding processing would be out of the question. And remember that the bridegroom is taking a
long time in coming, and the bridesmaids had fallen asleep, but that isn’t the
problem. It isn’t like with James and
John and Peter in the Garden who couldn’t keep awake, the bridesmaids were
human beings and they’d been waiting a long time. No, the problem is that it’s dark by the time
the bridegroom arrives, midnight, in fact, and so here’s the scene: ten
bridesmaids snoozing away and suddenly there’s a shout: the bridegroom! The bridegroom is here! And they all wake up with a start, and they
start trimming their lamps, so as to light the way for the bridegroom, when the
lamps of five of them—who hadn’t brought any extra oil—begin to sputter and go
out. They can’t relight them to light
the bridegroom’s way because they have not anticipated that he might arrive
after dark. They had assumed he’d
process when it was light, when he was supposed to, for Pete’s sake, and they
are caught flat-footed, unable to honor the bridegroom when he arrives.
By their lack of planning, of taking all
contingencies into account, they’d made assumptions about when he was to come,
they’d put him in a little box of their own making. In a way, they’d dishonored his authority,
his ability and right to come whenever he wanted to, whenever the time was
right, when it was fulfilled, and not before.
They’d done the same thing as our latter day end-times predictors, the
Tim LaHayes and Hal Lindsey’s, only the bridesmaids presumably didn’t make any
money off of it.
And
we in the church are always doing that, aren’t we? I know I am . . . I’m always reading my own
agenda into scripture, thinking “God, you can’t want that, can you? After all, you’re not like that, are
you? You’re like this, or like that over
there . . .” We often mistake our own
agendas for God’s, trying to get God to arrive in our own time, surely before
it gets dark, or get God to behave the way we think God should. We think God can’t really like that
new-fangled style of worship—I just know God hates drums—when it’s really we
ourselves can’t stand ‘em. And like the
foolish bridesmaids with the bridegroom, this dishonors God, it presumes that
God doesn’t have the freedom to act in whatever way God wants. It presumes that we know better than God,
that our own tastes and preferences are to be followed rather than the Divine.
Well. The bridesmaids without oil frantically try
to borrow some from the ones who have it, but they say they don’t have enough, and
they go into the wedding banquet and the door is shut, bang. And it’s midnight, for Pete’s sake, yet the
foolish bridesmaids go out looking for an oil seller. What, is Achmed the oil-dealer open 24/7
these days? Is the Ameristop keeping
holiday hours? And though we’re not told
whether or they get any or not, I suspect they don’t, because they come back
and bang on the door, saying “Lord, lord, open to us.” But the bridegroom opens the door and says
“Truly I say to you”—and you know it’s serious when he says that—“Truly I say
to you, I do not know you.” And though
the Greek word we translate as “know” means literally
“to see,” it has a deep range of meanings—to know about, to be intimately
acquainted with, to understand—and the bridegroom doesn’t know the foolish
bridesmaids.
When
the disciples brought his mother and sister, Jesus would not see them, saying
instead that his brothers and sisters and mother are those that do the will of
God. Those he knows, those he
understands, those he has intimate familial acquaintance with are those who do
God’s will, not their own. Therefore,
sisters and brothers, let us be prepared . . . let us do what the bridegroom
wants us to do, not what we think he
does. Let us honor the bridegroom by
letting him determine the course of his ministry: it is
not up to us. Let us be ready for his
coming by doing what is expected of us, by working in peace and harmony and
loving cooperation, joyfully doing the will of God, lest the time of the
bridegroom’s coming takes us unaware.
Amen.
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