Lamp Oil

 

Here’s our parable for the day: There are some bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom to show up so they can all join the feast. Apparently this is how weddings worked back in the day. And since this bridegroom might show up at any time, day or night, the ladies have to have their lamps ready.

If we ran a wedding reception that way nowadays, it would be chaos. We live by clocks and schedules, and if we say an event will start at 6, it starts more or less at 6. I guess concepts of time were more organic back then.

So the bridegroom takes longer than the ladies expected, and some run out of olive oil in their lamps. It might seem like the wise bridesmaids were being mean, not sharing their oil with the foolish ones. But imagine what would happen. If these wise bridesmaids had split their their oil with the others, everyone would have run out before they got to the wedding hall. They’d all be in the dark, and the wedding party would be lacking any bridesmaids.

So why would Jesus tell a story like this and say it’s like the Kingdom of Heaven? The Gospel writer says it’s about something that’s called the Day of the Lord. We have interpreted it, most of us, as the Second Coming of Christ, the Parousia as I was taught in Catechist training, the time when God will be all in all. You know, what’s also sometimes called the end of the world as we know it.

It’s easy to see why this is often interpreted as an end times story, especially when it’s paired with what Paul had to say about the resurrection. That rather fanciful imagery of meeting our predecessors in the air was probably comforting to early followers of the Way whose friends were being fed to lions, among people who hadn’t yet figured out the earth was round.

But maybe the Bridegroom isn’t only the one who (lo) comes on clouds descending. May be he doesn’t come with a trumpet. Maybe Jesus wasn’t actually referring just to himself. Maybe it’s not a single point in time. Not the end of time. Maybe there are many Days of the Lord. In fact, I wonder if any old day might be the Day of the Lord, if we’re paying attention.

When Jesus says we don’t know the day or the hour, maybe he’s saying that the bridegroom could be anyone, at any time, any random person we encounter who is made in God’s image.

This one time in choir practice—I won’t say where—some guy wandered into the church on Easter, an hour before the service. He said, “They say when you come to Jesus you won’t be turned away.” He took a seat in a pew.

The choir director said, “Yes, but right now we’re rehearsing,” and turned away.

I was new in that parish and didn’t yet have the guts to leave the choir loft and go to the man, to tell him he was welcome to listen while we practiced and that the service would start in an hour.

No one said that to him. I tried to catch the priest’s eye, but they were also busy with Easter preparations and didn’t notice me.

The man went away and didn’t return. I am haunted to this day by that failure. Here was a Bridgegroom coming at an unexpected hour, and we were all so caught up in preparations for what we thought was the wedding feast that we were utterly unprepared to meet him.

Ironically, since it was Easter, we all renewed our baptismal vows and promised, with God’s help, to seek and serve Christ in all persons. But we had failed to find Christ in the man who came early, expecting not to be turned away.

I left that morning feeling like one of the foolish bridesmaids, stuck outside the feast, my oil too little, too late.

So here’s what I think. The bridegroom is all around us. We could be called on at any moment to be and bear light to someone in the dark of this world’s midnight. The bridegroom could come as the neighbor who doesn’t speak our language, as the refugee who is already a deacon, as the man huddled under a thin quilt on the church office porch. There are bridegrooms everywhere. That’s why we have to be ready all the time.

To seek and serve Christ in all persons means to see the Bridegroom in everyone, to be ready and alert to offer the light we’ve been given. If we aren’t paying attention, if our lamps aren’t tended, we might miss an opportunity to incarnate the Day of the Lord to someone who needs our light.

So what is the oil? The oil is love, compassion, understanding, empathy. It’s the fruit of the Spirit. Our oil dealer is the Holy Spirit, who fills our lamps, tops up our tanks, keeps the little flames burning on our heads.

That’s what we mean by saying “we will with God’s help”. We have to be always letting the Spirit fill us up and keep us lit, so we are able to see the Bridegroom at any hour and to find our way into the feast.

If this parable were only about the second coming, it would be kind of one-dimensional. But if we look at it in the context of Jesus’ other parables, it might take on a broader implication.

What the Bridegroom says to the foolish bridesmaids, “I never knew you,” echoes what Jesus says the goats will hear, those who failed to see him in the least of these, their neighbors who were hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, or imprisoned. The goats are the ones who think the Bridegroom will only be found in one person. They have missed the point that the Bridegroom is everywhere.

When we call the Parousia the time when God will be “all in all,” THAT is what we are saying. The Day of the Lord is when we finally see that everywhere we look, there is God.

We need to be constantly filling up with oil from the Holy Spirit  Once our lamps run dry, by the time we find the oil again, the opportunity to greet the bridegroom may have passed us by. We need to be continually on watch, expecting to see him in every face, by the light of those tongues of flame we all carry. Jesus is the Bridegroom, yes, but so is everyone else we meet because it’s our job to see him in all of them.

Give me oil in my lamp. Keep me burning.