I first met this couple while I was closing up the Eskdale church
in the Hawkes bay. They drove up in this
beaten up old Bedford Camper Van. The van stopped in a puff of smoke and the
graunch of gears. Out piled the kids and initially I thought they had simply
broken down on their way up the Napier-Taupo Highway, I walked over to see if I
could help. It turned out I could because they were out scouting a place to get
married. So a month or two later I officiated at their wedding ceremony.
Now when I take a wedding I normally tell the bride to be
about ten minutes late. It gives guests who have had to struggle getting kids
or their husbands dressed and into the car and struggled through traffic to
arrive before the bride. Also it builds up the tension for that grand entrance
into the church …And let’s face it… Brides are worth waiting for …right ladies…
so they’re worth waiting for…. But in this case Forty minutes after the service
was due to start I was still nervously standing outside the church waiting for
the bride to arrive. Thinking all those things you think at that time. Maybe my
imagination was shaped by a diet of bad TV shows and rom com movies… was this
going to be my first no show? Had she got cold feet? Had something tragic
happened?
But it seems I was
the only one who was nervous. Firstly everyone knew that the bride didn’t need
an invitation to be late that was her natural state, so they, even the groom
were relaxed. Secondly they were using that old camper van as a bridal car… and
it had to coaxed across town at a stately dawdle, I think it had to stop a
couple of times or it would have overheated. Besides they were all txting her
and keeping track of her progress.
Almost an hour late the bride turned up. I breathed a sigh
of relief, walked into the church, let the groom know he needed to put his
jacket back on and then invited people to stand… we were now ready for the
bride.
Jesus had started byworking his way through a list of signs that would happen before these eventstook place, like birth pangs, but says Jesus no one will know the hour or theday of his arrival, the important thing was to remain watchful and ready. He articulates
that in four parables that we are working our way through.
While we may be tempted to fall into the same mind set as
Jesus disciples wanting to know when things will happen, David Turner is right
when he says ‘Jesus teaching on the unknowable hour and day makes this a folly,
eschatological (the study of the last days) correctness is ultimately about
ethics, how we live, rather than speculation.’
The parable of the wise and foolish virgins is quite strange
to our ears because we are not used to the etiquette and wedding customs of
Jesus day. We are used to waiting for
the bride, where as in the ancient near east and in many cultures today the
groom comes in a procession to the bride’s house. He comes to claim his bride; A New Testament
image used of Jesus and the church. As in all of these parables there is a
delay. We are not told why he is delayed maybe it was a normal occurrence in
those days. There may have been stops along the way to various family members
and important people and hospitality was an important part of this culture at
the time, and people would want to celebrate with the groom on this wonderful
occasion, and it was hard to get away.
The ten virgins are brides maids, the brides attendants and
it seems that part of their role was to welcome the groom to the house and they
needed lamps because the procession could come at night. They would have had
clay oil lamps, with them that would need to be refilled every so often to keep
them burning, so part of their duty and role for the wedding would to be ready.
People used to carry a small vile of olive oil attached to their figure for
such an eventuality.
The foolish virgins therefore find themselves unprepared and
there isn’t enough oil to share and well what olive oil merchant is going to
open at midnight, remember this is before 24hr shopping. It may seem that the
punishment that these girls face is rather severe being shut out from the
marriage feast, not recognised by the groom. But some of you are probably used
to a culture where there are high expectations that people will perform
culturally mandated tasks at such events and if they don’t they are shunned. It
would be like the modern day bestman actually forgetting the rings. While a
playful slap dance pretending to have forgotten them is permissible and a tension
relieving gag, to forget the rings would be an unforgivable faux par.
This says Jesus is supposed to be a warning and
encouragement for us to be watchful.
What are we to make of this parable? How are we to interpret
it? How does it help us today as we endeavour to follow Jesus, through world
changing times, until the end of the world?
Firstly, Jesus starts off by saying ‘At that time the
kingdom of God will be like…’ There is a sense that Jesus uses this whole
wedding scenario to make the one point that the reality is we won’t know who the
wise and foolish are until the bridegroom comes. Jesus told a similar parable
in Matthew 13 about weeds being sown by the enemy in a field of wheat. The only
time that the weeds could be identified and removed without damaging the wheat
was at the harvest time. The wheat would produce its crop and the weeds would
then be gathered up and burned.
Maybe after the parable of the two servants we may have been
lured into thinking that we are saved by our ethical behaviour. But here Jesus
goes beyond that. Because in this parable all ten bridesmaids were virtuous,
they are virgins, it isn’t a matter of ethics that differentiates them. And all
ten get sleepy and fall asleep waiting for the bridegroom to come. It’s one of
the problems with oil lamps, not only do they give off light but also make it a
smokey environment. It wasn’t a matter that the wise virgins stayed awake and
the foolish didn’t. The difference between the wise and foolish is that the
wise have enough oil to trim their wicks and provide light too joyfully, and
oil in the Old Testament is often connected to joy, greet the coming
groom. It begs the question for all of us
in the midst of all that could go on, in the midst of the whirl and swirl of
history, in the face of persecution even the challenge of keeping our faith
alive and healthy even through the sameness of everyday life, what keeps our
faith burning bright. I have meet many people who have had an encounter with
God that has meant that it’s been like a fire has caught in their life, but as
time goes on it dwindles away again. It is only living out of that saving
relationship with God and investing into that that gives us the spiritual oil
to keep on going to the end. That enables us to keep doing what Jesus has said
for us to do.
One of the issues when it comes to Jesus parables is how to
interpret them. Parables are stories that have one spiritual truth behind them. Down through history however people have treated them as allegories;
some of the ones we have interpreted by Jesus for us have that feel. But we can
go too far, wanting to identify this and that in the story with very specific
things. I want to go out a limb here and focus on something that I believe is
important, here. It would be easy to simply see the oil in terms of salvation,
or religious fervour but If I may I want to focus on something else.
Down through the centuries the church has often forgotten
that they need the Holy Spirit, we tend to think it depends on our won efforts or our own intelligence our own spiritual passion, but it is the Holy Spirit's presence and power that enables us to be who God has
called us to be, to follow Christ. Put crudely it’s the petrol for our tanks
ore in terms of this parable it can be seen as the oil for our lamps.
Some people see it as an optional extra like leather
upholstery or hands free blue tooth in a luxury car, or that it is for special
people, but not for me. Of course the prophecy in Joel 2, quoted in Acts at Pentecost, that talked about the
coming of the messianic age was that God would pour out his spirit on all
people, on all who believed, despite their gender, age, socioeconomic standing
or societal status. In John’s Gospel Jesus says if you love me you will keep my
commandments, and I will give you an advocate, the Holy Spirit, who will be
with you forever. Sadly some of the excesses of the charismatic and Pentecostal
movements in the past have put people off. They equate it with weird stuff,
yup, that happens but the Spirit is a gentle person and does not override our
self… it’s being filled not possessed… The spirit ultimately brings shalom,
peace and wholeness to us.
All the way through the service today we’ve had as our
resting image, a picture of a lamp and Paul's words from Ephesians 5:18, be
filled and because of the Greek tense of the verb, it also reads and keep on
being filled, with the Holy Spirit. It’s a command to an on-going relationship
with God’s Spirit in our lives. It’s why it wasn’t simply a matter at the end
of the parable that the virgins without the oil could simply get some from
someone else. It’s important that we continue to allow God’s spirit to fill us
up. My friend Jim Wallace says when people ask him why he needs to keep on
being filled he relpies because I leak. There are times when other things
mussel in and take God’s place in our lives. We need to be asking God to
continually fill us afresh with his spirit.
I resisted singing that children’s song today ‘Give me oil
in my lamp keep me burning’ But that is the prayer I want to leave us with
today. And we can pray that pray trusting God to answer it. Because as it says
in Luke’s version of Jesus Knock, seek and ask saying that we encountered in
the Sermon on the Mount… If we are evil and know how to give good gifts to our
children how much more will our father give the spirit to those who ask him.
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