24th Sunday after Pentecost “What is Wise?”
November 12, 2023 Matthew 25:1-13
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Dear brothers & sisters in Christ;
‘Wise’ or ‘foolish’ ? I’ve heard the parable of the 10 virgins compared to a number of things. For example: you are wise if you have a smoke alarm in your home; but what are you if you let the battery go dead & you don’t replace it? You are wise to have insurance; but foolish to let the premiums lapse; so when you have a disaster, & call the insurance company, they will say: ‘I do not know you.’
You are wise to prepare for your retirement. As old age comes on, there will be a time when we can’t do our job anymore, but we will still need food, shelter, & medicine. The time & effort you & I put into preparing for our retirement years can compare to the ‘readiness’ Jesus speaks about in this parable. When a person is younger, they work 8-10 hours per day, for 5-6 days each week – for about 40 years – & that’s a lot of time to get ready for retirement.
If it’s wise to prepare for retirement, it’s much more wise to prepare for eternity. And just as it is foolish to think that you can postpone the things you enjoy doing until retirement time, so it is also foolish to believe that we can postpone living in the Kingdom of God until later, when we might have more time & interest. It’s wise to understand that the Kingdom of God is not ‘retirement’, it’s ‘life’. It’s not just ‘later’, it’s both now and later. That’s one of the lessons of Jesus’ parable: that if we wait with God’s things, it’ll be too late.
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So, Jesus teaches us to watch, & be ready; for the Kingdom of God is among us now, thru His Church, even while there will be more ‘kingdom’ to come. Even tho the preparation Jesus teaches is simple, it’s a real challenge for us – as sinners. Preparation means more than ‘good intentions’; it means investing real time in God’s Word, being found in His Sabbath presence & living by His teaching. This is what Paul means when he says we ‘live in Christ.’
In Phil.1:21 he says ‘to die is gain,’ but to ‘to live is Christ.’ This is a word-to-the-wise: we live with Jesus Christ right now, by His Word, in faith; we live in His kingdom now, putting His teachings into practice – for the good of our family & neighbor. And we do it now, because we don’t know the day or the hour when our time is up.
In the verses just prior to this parable, we hear of two servants of The Master. The one is faithful & wise, & is found doing what the Master wants done when He returns.
That servant is commended & blessed. The other servant becomes foolish & wicked.
He decides that he can live his own way while the Master is gone. But the Master returns suddenly, and that servant is rebuked & thrown out, into the place of weeping & gnashing
of teeth. To ignore Jesus now makes us foolish & unready to meet Him when He arrives;
and He is The Door. God’s Living Word calls us to a life of living faith; our life of walking in Jesus’ teachings NOW is what prepares us to live with Him LATER & forever.
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As we come to the end of the season of Pentecost, the church year ends, having us think about Jesus’ second arrival. Then we enter the season of Advent, when we review His first arrival – with His birth. Our life & time in salvation’s history is a mix of those two arrivals. Jesus came among us, and He will come again; we have our Lord & His things now by faith, and the time is coming when we will have Him & everything by sight.
The Ten Virgins is one of those parables that have this warning to anyone who claim they ‘know Jesus’ – but they don’t live with Him. God’s warning is real: if we expect to be with Jesus later & eternally, we must be hearing Him, trusting, & walking with Him now. So, our life in Christ is both ‘now’ and ‘not yet.’
This combination of the ‘now & the not-yet’ is why we pay special attention to the two kinds of teaching the Scripture has: Law and Gospel. Jesus’ parables use both. The Law is the part of His teaching that confronts our foolishness, & condemns our sin & rebellion, & makes us uncomfortable. The Law makes us ask ourselves: am I being one of the foolish ones?
Am I being neglectful or disobedient, resistant or lazy?
This Law is necessary, because it makes us realize that, if it wasn’t for God’s mercy & gracious rescue by His One Savior, we will never make it into His Kingdom. That’s absolutely true. The Law shows us what foolishness is by defining ‘right’ & ‘wrong’. The HSp uses the Law to turn us around, -even daily- to come back to the cross; which shows us our only hope.
So, Jesus is our Gospel. By His cross, our sin is forgiven; by His teaching, our foolishness is stopped & corrected – so that it will not ruin our faith. There is only one kind of wise person in this world: the one who heeds the Law & believes the Gospel. The wise person can see both the ‘now-value’ & the ‘later-value’ of the Son of God & His cross.
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This parable of Jesus is another one of those that teaches about the wrong idea we might have of ‘once saved ~ always saved.’ In a number of places, the Bible teaches that a person can lose or walk away from saving faith. For example, we believe that when an infant is baptized, they are brought into saving faith, with a spiritual birth as a child of God. By the Word & the Spirit, they are to grow up in that faith, obeying The Lord & producing the good fruit of His kingdom.
But later, if they turn away from Jesus & His teaching =maybe they join with another religion, or just walk away – living by the ways of the world= their trust in Christ is gone.
And when their days are done, the Lord must say to them ‘I do not know you.’
Like in the parable of The Seed & The Soils, God’s Word & Spirit, like seed, can be sown among thorns. It grows into a plant, but the plant becomes choked out by the cares & desires of the world; no fruit is produced & the plant dies. Scripture warns us many times to keep alert, stay awake, walk with His Spirit – in the narrow way, and strive toward the goal to win the prize. This life-in-Christ is a gift of His grace & work; but IT is a living thing which must be fed & nourished, or else it will starve & die.
If this was not true, God would not need to either warn us or encourage us. But He does encourage us to abide in Him; & He warns us about the temptations & lies of the devil. And since Jesus is the ‘living bread’ and the Word & Spirit are the ‘living water’, and those are the gifts of God that feed & nourish our faith, so it’s not our works that save us; His working grace does. Jesus says: a fig tree will bear figs, not thorns; & a faithful servant listens & obeys, & does not rebel. A branch attached to The Vine bears fruit, or it will be cut off.
Is this a harsh Word? Yes! God’s Holy Law is strict; it condemns us eternally! And yet it works together with the Gracious Gospel of Christ so that we have His promise & hope in Christ. The Law makes us realize that our only hope is to live with the one Savior & to follow Him. And all of this is done with The Bible = God’s written, taught, & preached Word. That is how the Holy Spirit sustains the Christian’s life in a wise, Living Faith.
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Now, this parable has a little Jewish culture in it. The ten virgins are all part of a wedding ceremony; to be chosen for this was a great honor. To be a virgin until marriage was a noble thing; here it symbolizes purity & devotion & obedience in life to the one true God.
Jesus is the Bridegroom, and the 10 virgins represent those of the visible faithful Church, made pure by grace – thru faith in Christ, who are to be faithful to Him alone. So, Jesus is talking about you & me – as washed & purified bridesmaids in His wedding party. We are His Church; both as individual believers, and together as the congregation of believers.
But not all of those who have their name on the rolls of a Christian church have to be brought into the wedding banquet when our Bridegroom returns. Not all congregations are being the faithful lamp-stands seen in the Book of Revelation; and not all individuals have kept themselves pure, repentant, & obedient in the Biblical faith. So, some will not pass into the Great Hall. *Why is that?
Because some of those who were called & chosen attendants no longer had oil in their lamps; they did to begin with, but they foolishly let it run out. By their own neglect, they were not ready for the arrival of the Bridegroom; which was the whole reason for being a waiting attendant! Often, the Jewish marriage feast would begin after sunset, so each attendant needed to see where she was going to meet the bridegroom. As Jesus tells the parable, all of them fall asleep, because this life can be long & boring for us. Suddenly, the call goes out to meet him.
All ten rise to light their lamps; those who neglected the oil tried to go get some, & when they came back the door was shut. This parable is a symbolic comparison, but what Jesus teaches is very real & practical in our Christian lives of faith. The lamp represents our outward faith in Christ, being lived now with those around us. The flame of the lamp gives light for us to see God’s right & safe path in this dark world of sin; that light is also a witness to others around us. We need this lamp & light, because ~according to the Law~ there is only one narrow path into the Great Hall. All other paths end at the gate of hell.
Every child of God receives this gift of lamp & light by The Spirit, in the hearing of the Gospel & with the water of Baptism. It’s what we need. Psalm 119:105 says, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.” As the oil in the lamp makes the flame burn, so God’s Word of His grace in Christ is the oil for our lives; that Word connects us to our Savior Jesus thru our repentance, forgiveness & obedience to Him.
In the parable, 5 of them had a religious-lamp, but no longer any oil. They let themselves run out of that Word of repentance, forgiveness, & God’s truth for their daily living.
Do we know some people who were once active in God’s church, regularly receiving His Word & Sacrament, showing the faith in their lives, attending worship & encouraging others & being encouraged, BUT they’ve walked away, & now live as children of the world rather than children of God; they are Christian-in-name-only ? It happens when the oil-of- the-Word runs out. The Word carries God’s Spirit; without that Word, there’s nowhere for faith to go but downhill, to empty. And when Jesus tells a parable like this, ‘empty’ is a dangerous place to be.
In His great wisdom, God gave us the 3rd Commandment. ‘Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.’ ‘Six days you shall do your labor, but the 7th is a sabbath to the Lord.’
This wise pattern combats our old nature so that we will be & remain wise attendants, & not foolishly run out of the oil of our faith. Every week we are wisely replenished, because we don’t know the day nor the hour: either He will arrive again, or we will go thru death to meet Him. Every week we are wisely replenished by His Word & Spirit, because every week we live in His kingdom. The kingdom of God is not our ‘retirement’, it is our life now, even while there will be more to come.
Our resistant old nature needs His warning so that it will be turned to seek His mercy & help. This is the Law and the Gospel of God’s Spirit-filled Word. Our Bridegroom is our Savior, who by His cross & thru the tomb, has given to us forgiveness & new life. He has gone away, out of sight. For now, He has chosen us & honored us in His kingdom to be His waiting attendants. The time will come when we will go in to the Great Hall, to ‘celebrate the marriage feast of the Lamb in His kingdom which will have no end.’ Those are His words.
This life of faithful waiting can be a challenge for us, but God has given us all the tools necessary to remain awake, and ready to meet our Lord. We have His Spirit thru the Word & Sacraments, and we have the encouragement of each other. Jesus says – this is what the kingdom of God is like. It is like wedding attendants, waiting with their lamps to meet the Bridegroom. We belong to Him ‘now’, and we will rejoice with Him ‘later’.
Amen