Recently, at St Albans church in Blurton, Julie Birkin preached on the passage from Matthew about wise and foolish virgins. I liked what she had to say so much, that I cadged a copy of her notes and permission to reprint it here. Enjoy.
Catherine.
Matthew 25: 1-13
Jesus is talking to his disciples about what we usually refer to as the “end times”, or his second coming. It is often likened in the Bible to a wedding, with Jesus the bridegroom coming back for his bride the church. In this parable Jesus gives us a picture of ten virgins, perhaps what we might think of as bridesmaids or attendants, waiting for the wedding to take place. Unlike weddings in our culture, when it’s the bride who keeps everyone waiting, the wedding feast can only start when the bridegroom arrives and for some reason on this occasion he has been delayed.
As they wait they all fall asleep. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they all stayed alert and kept looking out for the bridegroom, otherwise they would all have been considered foolish, because the point is that nobody knew when the bridegroom was going to arrive. At the time when most of the New Testament was written, believers expected Jesus to come back at any time and lived accordingly. But ever since that time people have speculated and tried to predict the time of “the end of the world” and so on. But if you look at the passage before this one in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus states very clearly that no-one knows when the things he speaks of will take place. It’s foolish to try and predict something that even Jesus himself didn’t know. So if it’s not about being alert and watching out for Jesus’ return, then what is it about?
In the parable, the virgins all had lamps with them. Apparently, those lamps would have been used to welcome the bridegroom on his arrival. So they all set off for the wedding with their lamps lit and ready for action. If the bridegroom had arrived straight away there wouldn’t have been a problem of course, all ten girls had oil in their lamps. But only five of them had considered the possibility that they may be waiting a while and took extra oil with them just in case. They were ready, not just for the expected, but the unexpected too.
As a church, I don’t think we are always prepared for the unexpected. Often it seems as though we can only cope with the familiar, the tried and tested and the organized. But life is unpredictable. If we are to make a difference in the world, we have to be able to adapt and to meet unexpected needs. We have seen a good example of this in the news this week with the protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Whatever your opinion of this and whichever side you agree with, there is no denying it has caught the church unawares. It’s one thing to preach about helping the poor, standing with the oppressed etc, but what do we do when the practicalities of that have such an unexpected impact? It’s my own personal opinion, and you may agree or disagree, but I believe if Jesus were there in person, he would be more likely to be in a tent with the protesters, than inside the Cathedral complaining about health and safety! And I believe that when this situation began the church missed an opportunity to witness to the love of Jesus, and to make a stand for fairness and justice, simply because it was unprepared and unable to adapt its thinking in order to meet an unexpected challenge.
It would appear that the problem is a rigidity of thinking, a focus on things which, in themselves may not be wrong, but become obstacles to doing the will of God when they become over important to us. They become distractions. When we begin to invest too much importance in buildings, rituals, routines, structures, finance, all the things which help us function on a practical level, they take our focus away from what is really important, which is God’s love for each and every person on this planet. We stop seeing people as individuals and instead begin to see them as problems to be solved, or to be avoided altogether. Or we may want to reach out to people, but we still get it wrong because we try to give them what we think they should have, rather than asking them what they actually need. The oil the church needs most of all to keep its lamps burning is the ability to listen and to keep our focus on Jesus, and to recognize the reality of what is going on around us.
We can become distracted on a personal level as well, often without even realizing it. It’s easier to keep our focus on God in the good times and the special times, like when we first become Christians, when things are going particularly well for us and we feel God’s blessing, celebrations like Christmas and Easter, joyful occasions like weddings and Baptisms. At these times we have all the oil we need and our lamps are burning brightly! But what about the bits in between? Do we, like the foolish virgins, let our lamps burn brightly for a time, then fizzle out to nothing? Or are we prepared for the unexpected, equipped for the times of waiting when God seems far away. How do we keep our lamps burning during the dry times and the difficult times when we feel as though we are waiting forever for our prayers to be answered? Again, the problem can often be that we are distracted by our own agendas. We think God will answer our prayers our way and in our time. When that doesn’t happen we become preoccupied with what we think should happen. But often it’s not that God is far away, or not answering our prayers, it’s just that He is working in ways we have not anticipated, or using a situation to speak to us and teach us something about ourselves – if only we are able to listen and to understand. It has been my experience that God is less likely to change our circumstances than He is to use our circumstances to change us. We might want Him to swoop in and rescue us and take away the things that cause us pain every time we ask, but, if He did, what kind of people would we be as a result? We would be like helpless children who never grow up. It’s the difficult times which make us stronger and wiser.
Focussing too much on our circumstances and too little on God can also make us turn inward, when actually we are called to reach out to each other. It’s always easier to withdraw and to keep people at a safe distance. This is especially true in church. The institutional nature of church allows us to keep a safe distance from each other. We can come to services, chat over coffee etc and then go home again without having genuinely engaged with anyone else at all. What would happen if we actually responded honestly when someone asks how we are? And if we responded to others not by trying to fix the problems, or to offer what we think people need, but by just simply listening and reaching out with gentleness and compassion. When we say “I’ll pray for you” it can sometimes sound a little empty, because it means we might just be offering to ask God to remove the problem, rather than being willing to stand alongside someone in a difficult situation and saying “I will pray along with you because we are in this together”
The foolish virgins in Jesus’ parable were unprepared because they took for granted that the bridegroom would be there when they expected. In other words they were expecting God to follow their agenda. The wise ones were prepared for the unexpected. As a church and as individuals we have to be ready to adapt to what God is saying to us every moment, instead of rigidly sticking to our own script. If we do that we will be better equipped to respond both to God and to each other and to face the reality of who we are and what God wants to change in us.
