I don’t often preach on the bus, if by preaching you mean talking about Jesus or the Bible. Rant maybe, but preach – nah, that’s just not how I roll. But a while back, I actually found myself trying to explain the Parable of the Ten Maidens on the bus. In my attempt to save a little money during the school year, I park my car at the mall and ride the bus to school. As I was making small talk on the bus one morning, I found myself explaining to a doctoral student in anthropology that this parable was tormenting me. (Why a tale about ten maidens is tormenting to a single man is another story for another time.)
Well about two hours later we ended up on the same bus again - I in the front and her in the back. As we were waiting for the bus to leave, she shouted: “So what’s this parable all about anyway?” In front of a cadre of Emory students, I then explained my take on the parable, with its five wise maidens and five foolish ones, the lamps, the sleep, the groom and all of it - my exegetical and homiletical brilliance on display for the whole bus to see. My new friend was, well, unimpressed. “Don’t you think the parable should be more actual? I mean, five wise and five foolish - it should probably be more like nine foolish and one wise.” The parable itself was foolish, she said. I felt her pain.
If John Dominic Crossan is right and parable does subvert the world, this little tale in the Gospel of Matthew is certainly a parable. Those of you who know me can say without a doubt that it’s a rarity when I think of myself as foolish. I actually like to think of myself as quite wise. But after wrestling with this text, flip-flopping more times than I can remember about how to preach it, I felt foolish. The anthropologist said the parable was foolish. The preacher felt foolish. Foolishness was all around. In that case, maybe this parable simply confirmed the world.
That’s because foolishness appears, at least to me, to be all around. A sex-obsessed society has left deep scars in its wake: fatherless children, marriages destroyed, the devastation of HIV, waves of women and men with needs and desires unfulfilled and unmet. It’s not just sex, though. An ever increasing percentage of American children are overweight and out of shape. Stories and faces of anorexia, bulimia and devastating eating disorders haunt us. We can too easily name friends and families ravaged by the terrors of alcohol and drug abuse.
We live in a world wrecked by war and on a planet victimized by violence. We know a world where deep inequalities rooted in selfishness leave very few with far too much and way too many with far too little. We might like to keep foolishness out in the world and wisdom in the church, but unfortunately we know all too well that there’s plenty of folly inside our sanctuaries too. Newspaper scoops and television gotchas have exposed that power plays of folly abound in our churches, whether it be the high-profile abuse scandals or government sponsored inquiries into the finances of prosperity-peddling preachers.
About a year ago I heard James Forbes preach in
When we hear Christian talk of foolishness and wisdom, Paul looms large, and wisdom can sometimes get a bad wrap. God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, Paul writes. But Matthew is a different story. Matthew is drawing on the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament, like Psalms and Proverbs - staples of the faith. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Proverbs tells us. Wisdom is not what prevents us from experiencing God, Matthew might say, but wisdom is what points us towards God; to understanding justice, righteousness, and the good path.
A cursory reading of Matthew’s Tale of Ten Maidens doesn’t appear to give us much hope, or wisdom either. There’s no way around it - Jesus is telling us a parable about eschatological judgment, a statement about who will be in, who will be out, and the difference between the two. From chapter 21 when Jesus enters
Our parable is a warning: be prepared for the long haul. In the parable, only the wise and their lamps are allowed into the wedding banquet, the foolish are left alone in the dark. The bridegroom, who we are to take as Jesus, gets rid of foolishness by getting rid of the foolish. The foolish arrive late to the party, and are told, “I never knew you.” Many commentators have speculated that Matthew wants his reader to interpret the lamps as faithful discipleship, and that those who lived faithfully throughout their lives could be welcomed into the Kingdom.[1] Johnny-come-lately Christians trying to cheat the system need not apply. “I never knew you,” the bridegroom says. Those of us who look in the mirror and see more fool than wise aren’t left with much hope by this reading.
However, despite the parable’s context and original intent, I don’t think this is the only word that God has in it. For if this parable is to be Gospel - if it is to be good news - then it can’t only be a word of judgment and blood-curdling fear. And Jesus’ vision of the
This might reek of a liberal trying to avoid judgment, but I don’t think it is. This reading of the parable leads us to one of the core elements of the Christian life –sanctification. The foolish maidens aren’t allowed into the wedding banquet because foolishness itself isn’t allowed in. Only wisdom that leads to righteousness is. The good news of this parable is the good news of the Christian life – that God is never done with us, that God is continually pruning the foolish away and replacing what is gone with Godly wisdom so it is possible for us to enter the banquet. It is in this process of sanctification that God is actively refining us so that we look less like sinful human beings and more like Jesus.
Fortunately, God is not passively watching to see if this happens and judging us if we don’t make it, but is working with us, molding us and shaping us to reflect divine wisdom instead of sinful folly. The point of the Christian life is the sanctification that leads to holiness and a life modeled after the God we know to be revealed in Jesus Christ. And it is Gospel that God provides the sanctifying grace to help make it happen.
We know, deep down, that this is true. We can each look back at some of the foolishness in our lives that has been replaced by divine wisdom as God has worked within us. Some of the sins that once owned us – and we could all recite a laundry list of them – no longer define us. We can look back at the people we were when we first knew Christ and see where foolishness has left the building, and divine wisdom has moved in.
Hillary is a friend of mine, who throughout the course of her life, has been riddled by doubt. For much of her life, Hillary confronted her demons by drinking alcohol, lots and lots of alcohol. A friend recalls a day-long drive to a meeting when they had to stop three times on the trip, not for lunch or gas, but so Hillary could buy more beer, which she would then put away in the car. Well, not surprisingly, all this came crashing down on her, and after an alcohol-induced altercation at work, Hillary had to leave her job.
This isn’t the end of the story, however. Forced to enter rehab, Hillary examined her life and vowed to leave the alcohol behind. Sober for five years, she attends weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and preaches a message of hope for those wanting to live a life without as she calls it, “the booze”. At a dinner over the summer, Hillary announced that her alcohol-induced public disgrace was the best thing that ever happened to her. Her foolishness behind her, she no longer is trying to numb the pain but is celebrating the new life God has given her.
We also know that Hillary’s story isn’t the only side of the coin. We look around our world and see that foolishness still abounds. We realize that sometimes my friend on the bus was right, that it seems like there are nine foolish maidens and one wise one in ourselves, in our churches and in our world.
But we know that God is at work, and that God’s word is not one of unbearable fear but of unlimited hope. That’s because the end point of sanctification is not a time when some of our foolishness is gone, while some remains. John’s Revelation claims that we are waiting on a new heaven and a new earth, where sin will be vanquished and the divine wisdom of righteousness will reign. Those victimized by the societal foolishness of war and inequality now have hope that the way it is now is not the way it always shall be. There will be a new heaven and a new earth; this sin-stained creation, with its pain and its tears, its mourning and its crying, is not the last word.
The good news of this parable is nothing less than what Miroslav Volf calls the central Christian hope – that there will be a final and irrevocable reconciliation in which all will be made right.[2] The foolishness that shackles our souls will be gone, replaced by wisdom that will free us to announce and proclaim the glorious light of God’s goodness and new creation. For those mixed up with equal parts wise and equal parts fool, this is very good news indeed.
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