"Radical Stories, Radical Christianity:
The Wedding Banquet"
Matthew 25:1-13
February 11, 2007

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and
went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the
foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with
their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But
at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’
Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the
wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No!
there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy
some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those
who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later
the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I
tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor
the hour.

When I was a newly minted freshman student at the University of Alabama, I took a
decent load of classes, though, like alot of freshmen, I wasn’t all that interested in
actually being in the classes themselves.  I was much more enamored with just being in
college and away from home.  One of my first semester classes was Introduction to
Biology taught by the guy who wrote the textbook we were using for the class—Dr.
Graham.  I’ll never forget him.  It was one of those huge lecture hall classes, hundreds
of students all situated in a half-circle auditorium setting.  I had gotten through high
school pretty easily except for math and science, but I had always come through with
being able to cram the night before a test and getting through it and I thought this
strategy might work in Dr. Graham’s class.   So I didn’t even bother opening the book
until literally the night before the first test of the class, and the first actual test of my
college years.  I fell asleep that night at some point, with the book on my chest, and
woke up at 8:15 AM, 15 minutes after the test had already begun!  I totally, totally
freaked out, threw on some clothes, literally sprinted—a full sprint, mind you—across
campus to the Biology building, running into the auditorium panting like a dog, only to
find the rest of the class already working away on their test.  I slinked down to the
bottom of the class, with Dr. Graham there waiting for me there, hands folded, and I
asked him whether or not it was too late to take the test, knowing that it would result in
a two grade deduction if I had to take it later.  He told me he shouldn’t allow it, while
looking at me skeptically, and then he finally handed me the test, which made me a
very happy man.  I wasn’t too late, thank goodness, so I immediately looked for a place
to sit in the crowded lecture hall and, while I was trying to squeeze in between people in
order to get into a seat in the middle of a row, I, of course, fell, which caused a huge
roar of laughter from the rest of my classmates.  Finally, I sit down, red-faced and
embarrassed beyond belief, only to find that in my fall, I had broken my #2 pencil in
half…and so, as quietly as I could, I started asking others next to me if they had a
pencil I could borrow.  Of course, that brought me back to Dr. Graham’s attention, and
he just scowled at me from across the room, but he eventually came up to me, and
asked me if there was anything he could do for me.  I just held up my broken pencil,
and he snatched it out of my hand, and went to the pencil sharpener, and sharpened
the usable piece of my pencil.  Since that moment, I have NEVER been late for a test,
never, and have always, always set my alarm clock for important morning meetings,
sometimes checking it two or three times to make SURE I’ve got the alarm set!  

Well, being late is sort of the focus of this parable, this interesting, but, yet-again,
disturbing parable.  I’m glad that Dr. Graham let me take that test—it probably meant
the difference between passing and failing, but I wonder what his limit would have been,
how late was too late for me to take that test?  That is one of the questions that seems
to haunt this parable, and actually, haunts the whole 25th chapter of Matthew.  We
arrive at a set of stories that are commonly grouped together as the Parables of
Judgment, whereas we’ve been mostly familiar with the Parables of Grace and the
Parables of the Kingdom the past few 6 weeks or so.  The tone changes now, as Jesus
moves closer to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, to his fate on the cross, and as the ending of
his own life now looms large, so the larger, Greater Ending of history becomes an
urgent part of the stories he now shares with his disciples.  

The 25th chapter also contains the parable of the talents, where a man leaves his
servants with different amounts of property that are meant to invested well, and then
there is the famous parable of the sheep and the goats, where the kingdom of heaven
gets divided up between those who feed and clothed and visited others, others that
were really Jesus himself, of course, and those who didn’t do any of these sorts of
things.  All of these parables are parables about the kingdom, which if you pay
attention to the stories, you realize quickly include the good and the bad, the sheep
and the goats, the faithful servants and the fearful ones.  These parables are not
warnings about whose in or out of kingdom, but rather what we will do with our new
status as insiders, of being part of the flock, of being one entrusted with the Master’s
goods, of being one of the bridesmaids or virgins, as the Greek text says.  We mustn’t
get confused here, because these stories aren’t about God dividing up the world into
the heaven bound and the hell bound.  These stories are about us insiders, the
unexpected guests, all of us, who find ourselves surprisingly included in the kingdom of
God, and I suspect that group of unexpected guests is everyone of us here, as well as
a whole lot of “them people over there”—and yet we are people who have not lived up
to the great gift we’ve been given, the grace that surrounds us, the kingdom of heaven
which includes us.  

I want us to look at this parable a little bit more closely, this beginning parable of
judgment on us—remember, it’s not about them—it’s about us.  As was the custom in
ancient Jewish circles, the bridesmaids are expected to show up to greet the groom as
he enters into the place where he is making a new home—remember the wedding feast
from last week’s parable.  Five are called foolish, the other five are deemed as wise,
but let’s look at this issue of wise and foolish a little bit more empirically.  The reality is
that the foolish here are not as foolish as one would think, because the custom was
that the party would start in the early afternoon and go into the early evening, with the
groom arriving at a reasonable time in the early afternoon or early evening.  These
young foolish women simply carry with them the amount of oil one would expect to use
in this circumstance—its like thinking you have enough gas in your tank to get to point
A, if everything goes according to plan, and there’s no 40 mile detour because some
truck has jackknifed and stopped traffic on the highway.   The problem in this parable is
that there is indeed an accident of sorts—the groom doesn’t arrive on time, he is
delayed, and so all 10 of these girls fall asleep, including the ones who, ironically
enough, were the nervous Nellie’s who overdid it with the lamp oil, the wise ones who
are carrying along an extra bottle of oil, just in case, cause you never know what is
going to happen!  I just want to stress that what the foolish bridesmaids did was not all
that foolish, not all that crazy—I mean, most of us don’t carry an extra gallon of gas in
the back of our cars, right?  Some of you maybe do that, but not most of us.  We trust
that there will be no 40 mile detours and plenty of gas stations, just in case, right?  

But the bridesmaids are woken up by the late-arriving groom, who is the God figure in
this parable—think about that for a second: the late-arriving God.  Even God is not
without fault here; God’s hands are a little messy in this little story by being arriving late
to the party thrown in God’s own honor.  The foolish girls, the one who brought enough
for the lamps, if the groom arrives on time, they quickly realize they are in deep trouble,
since the guy didn’t arrive in time and they’ve run out of oil for the lamps, which was
their ticket into the party being thrown inside.  They even beg the wise bridesmaids to
share their oil with them, the ones who prepared for the unexpected, who prepared for
the possibility that real life might interrupt even the best of well-laid plans, the ones who
trusted the groom to be responsible and on time, but knew that even the most reliable
people sometimes get delayed.  Now, I can’t explain why the groom is late, and what it
might say about God, or why the wise virgins didn’t share with the foolish virgins, and I
must admit I’m disturbed by their unwillingness to share their oil—but being disturbed,
and leaving with a few questions is what parables are meant to do their listeners, and
this one does that job beautifully.  

Nonetheless, the foolish ones go away, get some more oil, and rush back to the party,
only to find the door shut, and the groom unwilling to even acknowledge knowing these
girls in the first place.  Considering it was him who showed up late, who had made a
mess of this moment, I must admit that it’s a hard thing to hear from him, at least for
me.  Its interesting that you often find portraits of God in the parables that aren’t all that
attractive of pictures of who God is, but I  think these disturbing pictures of God exist so
that we are reminded that there is a difference between the God we want and the God
who is, and the God who is, is sometimes as ambiguous and mysterious as we are to
each other sometimes.  That is a very Jewish understanding of God, and these hints of
who God is reminds us of how profoundly Jewish Jesus really was. The story ends
abruptly, with the foolish bridesmaids outside the party, and a warning from Jesus,
about keeping awake, for you know neither the day or hour, a warning to the wise and
foolish alike, both whom had fallen asleep waiting for the party they had been invited to
begin.

And I keep thinking that maybe the whole point of this parable is that there is a point on
this side of eternity when it really is too late—too late for us to make it right with each
other, and thus with God; too late for us to make it right with ourselves, and thus with
God.  We’ve got to arrive ready and prepared for the long haul in this life; we got to be
prepared for the messiness that comes along with journeying with people and God who
sometimes arrive late, with a God who sometimes won’t do what we want God to do.  Its
not enough to be just prepared for the reasonable, for the logical, for the expected,
because life and people and God are unexpected, and are mysterious and ambiguous,
and if we’re not prepared to love each other for the long haul, and if we’re not ready to
forgive each other seventy times seventy times, if we’re not prepared to be patient with
a God who sometimes doesn’t show up on our schedule, our sensible and totally
reasonable schedule, then we’re going to find ourselves too late, too late to be fully
included.  We will find ourselves outside the gates of the city, outside of the party that
God is throwing in this world.  

What does this mean?  It means us being prepared for the messy work that is real life,
carrying some extra oil, so to speak, and working hard to make it right, with each other
and ourselves, which makes it right with God, on this side of eternity, the best way we
can.  Again, this is not about heaven or hell, but it is about making the most of being in
the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, that place and space that doesn’t begin
when we die, but starts right now, right here, on this side of eternity.  The party is so
much better when we don’t just simply accept that grace and goodness and help and
forgiveness from God, but we pass it onto those whom we know need those things from
us—friends, relatives, strangers, people who deserve it and those that don’t, and even
those who won’t acknowledge they even need our grace, our forgiveness, our help, our
goodness.  God knows that God does that with us!   In doing that, we prepare
ourselves for the arrival of the One throwing the party in the first place, the party that
all are invited to, but some never fully appreciate because they don’t prepare
themselves for the long haul, like the guy without the wedding robe a few weeks ago, or
the foolish virgins who think that life and everything else will run on some sort of
predictable and manageable schedule, which, as we know, never does.  

In the book study we’ll be wrapping up this Wednesday on the stories of Wendell Berry,
there was a beautiful story called The Wild Birds that really illustrates the possibility of
making things right, of doing the right thing on this side of eternity, not because being
included by God is the goal, but having already been included elicits such a response
that it propels the main character to finish the unfinished business he has in his own
life.  Burly Coulter had been secretly seeing Kate Helen Branch for years, and these
two single people create a child, Danny, though both never outright acknowledge that
he is the result of their lovemaking.  Burly has always seen a good time in Kate, and
through the years their relationship is faithful and true, though Burley never proposes
to marry her and she never pushes him or brings up the subject to him.  Finally near
the end, Berry writes that “she became sick and died; how at her death, seeing it all
then, Burley would have liked to have been openly and formally her mourner, but,
faithful to appearances, he had shown himself only an interested bystander, acting a
great deal more like himself than he felt.  Behind appearances, he paid the doctor, paid
the hospital, paid the undertaker, bought a lot in the cemetery; he saw to everything.”  
(360)  

The story now finds Burley in the office of his lawyer, telling of his desire to leave his
farm to his son Danny and his wife, whom he had taken in after Kate’s death, but who
was still only known to his son as Uncle Burley.  He wants to make it right, to
acknowledge what he did not have the courage to own earlier in his life, which was that
he loved this woman, and he must make it right with her by leaving his land to his son,
their son.  What Wheeler, Burley’s lawyer friend, is performing, being asked to assist in,
perhaps too late, but nonetheless necessary, “is a kind of wedding between himself
and Kate Helen Branch.  It is the secrecy of that all-but-marriage of his that has been
his great fault, for its secrecy prevented its being taken seriously, perhaps even by
himself, and denied its proper standing in the world.”  (356).

Maybe it was too late, maybe it wasn’t, but Burley knows what this parable knows, which
is that there does come a moment when it is too late, when our unwillingness to clean
up the messes we’ve made will be ultimately laid at our feet, when it will be clear that
we, like the foolish virgins, didn’t plan for the messiness that is real life and we won’t
have a chance to make it right anymore.    Though it is not a requirement to be
included in the kingdom this Jesus keeps telling us about, that he keeps telling us we
are living in the midst of right now, it is most certainly a response to being included into
this kingdom by this loving Christ—and now is the time to make it right again, to own
our mistakes, and to forgive those who’ve made mistakes with us, for one never knows
neither the day nor the hour when the Lord will come for us, when it really will be too
late.  Amen.