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According to Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus told this parable of the ten bridesmaids during that intense week between Palm Sunday and Easter. On Palm Sunday he entered Jerusalem for the first time and to great acclaim. Five days later he was dead. In that brief interval he focused most of his teachings and parables on end times. His disciples wanted to know when the end would be. What sign should they look for that the end was near? Jesus responded, in effect: that is not yours to know. Only God knows the time of the end. Your job is to live in such a way that no matter when it comes, you will not be taken by surprise. You will always be ready. This parable of the ten bridesmaids serves as an alert.
On the face of it the parable presents problems. For instance, we find it hard to admire the five wise bridesmaids who were unwilling to share their oil; and yet, selfish as they seem, they were rewarded by getting into the banquet. Can that be right? The bridegroom also puts us off. Here are the five foolish bridesmaids, his bride’s own friends, and he not only refuses to let them come into the party, but he denies that he ever knew them. We pity the bride of such a harsh, punitive character. We also wonder: what does all this harshness have to do with the kingdom of heaven? If Gospel means “good news,” what would bad news sound like?
Before we think about those questions, let’s put the story in its cultural context. In Jesus’ day weddings took place at night. Then as now, for Jews sunset marked the beginning of a new day; so it made sense that the start of a new life should take place at the start of a new day. The ceremony took place at the groom’s home. The groom would typically be out with his friends before the wedding, so the bride and her attendants would wait for word that the groom had returned to his home; and then the ceremony could begin. The bride initiated it with a lighted, festive procession from her home to his. She honored her special friends by naming them as bridesmaids, for the bridesmaids carried the all-important lights. This was a sacred occasion, not only for the wedding couple, but for the whole community, and the procession depended on the lights. We could call the bridesmaids’ role a sacred trust.
At this point I think we can see why the five wise bridesmaids refused to share their oil. It would be bad enough to have only five lamps burning; but unthinkable to have all ten lamps go out before the procession reached the groom’s home. No matter how much the five wise bridesmaids wanted to help their five improvident friends, they could not jeopardize the whole ceremony. Their friends should not have wanted them to.
This is the first part of Jesus’ teaching. Let’s stop and ask, what did he intend the oil to signify? Oil, of course, was the source of light. What, then, is the source of spiritual light? The book of Exodus tells us point blank. Moses had gone up on Mt. Sinai to receive the ten commandments. Afterward Moses came back down; and, the passage tells us, “the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” (Exodus 34:29) I once met such a person. I had been asked to lead a retreat together with a priest I had never met. I went to the church where we were to design the retreat and there he was, a short, elderly man with brilliant white hair. We went down to the undercroft of the church and set to work. In minutes, though we sat in a dimly lit basement, I felt the way you do when the sun suddenly pierces an overcast day – light, bright, joyful and at peace. As our meeting went on, I realized that, like Moses, this man spent a lot of time, as Exodus put it, “talking with God.” In short, he was a person of prayer. Prayer serves as the oil for our spiritual life.
Jesus crafted his parable this way, because, for the people of his time and culture, sharing the oil under these circumstances would have been unthinkable. This is exactly the case when it comes to spiritual oil. It is as if I asked you to swallow my antibiotics for me. Some things cannot be shared, and spiritual growth is one of them. So to his disciples’ concern about knowing when the end would come, Jesus said in essence: keep current with your prayer life and you have no need to worry. I’ll say more about what prayer life means in a moment.
Now, what shall we make of the groom’s harsh response to the five foolish bridesmaids? Whom does the groom represent? We are all too prone to answer: God. That would be a mistake. God would never close the doors to us, or claim not to know us. God wants us in, every one of us. God’s whole power goes toward helping us get in. The trouble is this: God has an Achilles’s heel. In one tiny area, God let our power be greater than God’s. God gave us free will. We have the power to shape ourselves as we see fit. You may have had one of those toddler toys: a barn with a gabled roof, and on each side of the roof were holes – one circular, one triangular and the third rectangular. You were supposed to fit various blocks into the barn, but the block had to be the same shape as the hole or it would not go in. The groom represents that reality. With this part of his parable Jesus is saying: what you do, or fail to do, has consequences, and even God cannot set them aside.
Now here we have to pay special attention. You may be thinking: oh, she’s talking about sin. No, I’m not. Our sins will not keep us out. Jesus took care of that. So what could keep us out ? Let’s go back to the five improvident bridesmaids. Here is a similar story. Suppose that St. Gregory’s planned a major concert. We drained our coffers to put it on; we advertised it everywhere for months, even in The New York Times; we spiffed up the grounds and cleaned the church. When the great day came, half of the chamber orchestra showed up disheveled and hung over. The concert disappointed everyone. Why? They played badly, yes; but behind that lay the real issue, for the musicians as well as the bridesmaids: commitment. Performance is one thing. God can forgive a poor performance. God can work with us on that. Commitment is another. God cannot help us with that. Commitment flows from our radical freedom; and God can only wait and hope. What then could keep us out? Who would say in the voice of the groom, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you?” Only ourselves.
Prayer and commitment go hand in hand. We can scarcely imagine the one and not the other. What does it mean to pray? When we pray we simply give our time to God. It may be in silent meditation, or in silent words of praise, thanksgiving, confession, supplication, intercession. It may be in words spoken aloud. It may be repeating a formula or speaking spontaneously from the heart. It could even be raking leaves if we do it with loving awareness, doing it beautifully and intentionally for God.
Giving our time to God is one way we manifest commitment. We manifest it also in one other way: giving our money. As with prayer, this is not negotiable. We must give. The amount we give is up to us. Who we give it to is up to us; though we must give in a way that supports God’s will for the world. These are the twin lamps that we modern-day bridesmaids carry – our time and our money – and they need never go out, for what could exhaust our oil of commitment? End times hold no terror.