Two-Minute Homily: Why Now? Because I Said So                     

FINDINGS II

Proper 27 - A - November 6, 2011

Matthew 25: 1-13        

Harry T. Cook

Matthew 25: 1-13

When the end of things is at hand, heaven's rule will resemble [a wedding] to which 10 pubescent girls carried their lanterns and went out to greet the bridegroom. Five of them were clueless, five of them were on the ball. It's like this: the clueless ones took their lanterns but carelessly forgot to carry oil [for them], while the prudent ones not only took oil, but extra besides. When the bridegroom did not arrive at the expected time, the girls fell asleep. Come midnight a shout was heard: "Hey! He's coming! Let's get out there to meet him!" The girls arose and trimmed the wicks of their lanterns. The clueless ones said to the prudent ones, "Do give us some of your oil, for our lanterns are about to go out." But the other girls said, "No way. There will not be enough oil for our lanterns, much less yours. You better go somewhere and get some oil for yourselves." Whilst they were gone, the bridegroom finally arrived and the girls whose lanterns were lighted in welcome walked in with him to the wedding banquet. At long last, the girls who had gone off in search of oil returned and called at the door, "Lord, lord, please open up and let us in." He responded, "In truth I don't even know you."

(Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook)

RUBRIC

Carelessness and procrastination seldom effect much more than failure. There are some things that one postpones to his or her own disappointment, discredit or even self-made disaster -- e.g. that last cigarette or getting one's affairs in order, executing that last will and testament sitting there on the desk waiting for you to put denial behind you and do what needs doing. That is the general theme of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, as traditional texts will call it. The parable is of the Matthean tradition and is found in no other gospel, though its underlying motif of readiness is found at Mark 13:33 and Luke 12:35-48 (using similar props of a night-time wedding and lighted lanterns) and at 21:36. You know that it is getting towards Advent when these notes are sounded.

HOMILETIC WORKSHOP

"The rule of heaven" clearly has its rules and deadlines. That is what Matthew seemed to want to convey to his late first century C.E. communities of Jesus Jews and Gentile converts. From some backlog of Palestinian stories, Matthew raked up the parable of the silly and serious-minded young women, i.e. those who lay about the sorority house all day eating bonbons and planning their next dates with the jocks and those who burn the midnight oil over their texts of Shakespeare, Hegel and Spinoza.

The theme at hand is readiness and attention to the passage of time. The Hebraic mind understood time as having a beginning and an end, thus what one did with his or her time mattered because it was finite. One time around for everybody. Psalm 90:12 is as clear an expression of that understanding as you will find: So teach us to keep track of our days that in them we may gain a wise heart./1 That, Matthew's parable says, is what heaven's set of rules implies. And not only are there time constraints to which attention must be paid, but with those restraints come requirements. It is not enough merely to show up and even show up on time. You have to have the goods.

Thus is the rule of heaven here not conceived of as a utopian Eden, but as a dynamic rather than static set of conditions in which passivity and dawdling will not serve a person or a cause very well. It is a venue in which everyone has a function that is important to the central initiative. In this regard, see I Corinthians 12:4ff.

Heaven's rule is centered on Jesus (the bridegroom in this allegory masquerading as a parable), and, in actuality, his ethic. It needs to be acted out now. Following and practicing its principles are vital to the human community. One needs to be ready and indeed willing to apply that ethic whenever an opportunity presents itself. Those who are "on the ball" (φρόνιμος, meaning "pragmatically wise," "sensible" and "prudent") will be ready to roll. Those who are silly, clueless or uncaring (μωρός, meaning "dull," "sluggish" or "stupid") will say ma�ana.

Those who miss opportunities to act on the Jesus ethic will be at best back-benchers at any celebration of its realization wherever and whenever. Those players on a team who have been dilatory about conditioning, attendance upon practice and effort on the field will not be ready for the big game and, consequently, will have consigned themselves to warming the bench. It's not punishment. It's a consequence. And when the team wins the game by dint of smart play, the bench sitters will leave the field strangely unfulfilled.

This passage has been pretty thoroughly rationalized, but many commentators say that Matthew and his communities may have been caught up in the apocalyptic vision that seemed so real to Paul and presumably to the Pauline communities. Whatever Matthew had in mind as an urgent requirement with a real-time deadline seems writ large in this text. Could it have been an address or object lesson to persons preparing for convert baptism?

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Two-Minute Homily                                 

Why Now? Because I Said So  

By Harry T. Cook

Getting something done on time does not mean doing it at warp speed with cut corners just to get the task out of the way. Responding to the mandate of "now" for those who are φρόνιμος will entail careful planning, deep thinking, thorough consideration of the appointed task and, finally, the beginning of a deliberate process toward its finish. Those who are μωρός may respond by scurrying off to do what, long since, should have been done that they may return in a sweat to do that which, long since, they should have been doing.

Coming to mind here is a devil-may-care chorus from the W.S. Gilbert-Arthur M. Sullivan operetta The Gondoliers:

Life's a pudding full of plums,

Care's a canker that benumbs.

Wherefore waste our elocution

On impossible solution?

Life's a pleasant institution,

Let us take it as it comes.

Set aside the dull enigma,

We shall guess it all too soon;

Failure brings no kind of stigma --

Dance we to another tune!

Withal, the parable of the wise and foolish girls clearly has an apocalyptic, end-time feel. But other than the human-generated apocalypses of global warming, nuclear war or some other earth-abusive behavior, stable and rational persons do not countenance a rapture-like intervention. Why, then, any urgency at all?

The often-overlooked moment in the parable under consideration is the hiatus between the maidens' hasty trip to the wedding hall and the later arrival of the bridegroom on whose presence the whole thing depended. The prudent girls were ready for his coming at any time; the careless ones were not. They were there, but unprepared. Their unpreparedness was to them, apparently, beside the point.

If Woody Allen was serious in remarking that -- "Ninety percent of life is just showing up" -- he is a fool. Just answering "present" at roll call is not enough. You are required to bring what you need to do the task that will be assigned or that is obvious for its needing to be done. And then do it.

The world ends and will end in many different ways for different people in different circumstances in different times and seasons. It will not end in any wedding feast of any bridegroom. It may well end in the consequences of poverty, the planetary degradation of uncontrollable floods and droughts, the shortages of food and water and the onset of pandemic diseases.

As we hear in one of the familiar strophes of Advent: The night is far past; the day is at hand./2 Now, then, is the time to begin what long since should have been begun. If your lanterns have no oil, you'll be off getting some while those who are prepared will try to light the way with theirs in the struggle not only to endure but to prevail./3 They will need and deserve your help, however you can muster the wherewithal to give it.

/1 Translation and paraphrase by Harry T. Cook

/2 Romans 13:12 KJV

/3 The author's riff on lines from William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech: "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."