|
Kingdom Parables:The Ten BridesmaidsAugust 29, 2010 Sermon by Rev. Bill Azbell |
First Presbyterian Church Concord California |
I have a few recurring dreams which occasionally infiltrate my sleep, and it's very interesting for me to think on their meaning and why all of a sudden my brain was conjuring one of them up. I'm sure many of you experience the same.
One of my recurring dreams places me back in high school. I find myself at school and I’m late so the hallways are empty because all of the other students are already settled in their classrooms. And it's the day of a major test, which somehow I had forgotten about, and I haven’t studied, and, interestingly, I'm in my pajamas.
Another one is similar except for the context. I oversleep on Sunday morning, and I haven't finished writing my sermon. I rush off to church, arriving late to the waiting congregation, not fully knowing what I'm going to say. And, wouldn’t you know, I'm in my pajamas again. I hope this dream never comes true, so you can be spared seeing me in my pajamas.
There's a common theme here. It's being unprepared. Deep down I must have this fear of being unprepared. It's probably a healthy thing to have a little fear of being unprepared for situations we face in life. And it's a healthy thing for us spiritually as well to have a certain degree of fear of being unprepared.
It seems that much of chapters 24 and 25 in the book of Matthew are targeted to give us warning about the consequences of not being prepared for what God has planned. These chapters are toward the end of Jesus' public teaching ministry, as he heads into Jerusalem where he will face betrayal and a torturous death.
These are severe chapters, and they're meant to be taken with utmost seriousness. In chapter 24, Jesus teaches about the signs of the end of the age, the end of the world as we know it, when Jesus Christ returns.
At the end of chapter 24 and through the end of chapter 25, Jesus then tells three parables of the judgment which will accompany his return, and then an account of the judgment itself with Jesus sitting on his throne with all the nations of the world gathered in front of him as he separates people one from another just like a shepherd separates sheep from goats.
In our parable this morning, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a wedding banquet and the festivities leading up to it. This story may seem a bit foreign to us, but it was a slice of everyday life back in Jesus' time.
These ten young women appear to be bridesmaids whose role it was to help prepare the bride for her big day. They're gathering together, most likely with the bride, to await the coming of the bridegroom. According to some scholars, the tradition was that the bridegroom and his groomsmen would go to gather the bridesmaids on the night before the wedding and escort them in a kind of lamp-light processional to a feast hosted by the groom's parents. Early the next day, the groomsmen would go back and get the bride. They would serve as kind of an honor guard for her carrying her up on a sedan chair. The wedding ceremony was held followed by days of celebration. Weddings were joyful community-wide events.
So, the bridesmaids are together to wait for the bridegroom. We're told five of them were foolish and five were wise. What is the criteria for dividing them this way? It's whether they brought extra lamp oil with them or not. The ones who didn't are the foolish ones. The ones who did are the smart ones.
Well, the groom is delayed. He doesn't come as quickly as they had expected. It's getting late and the bridesmaids are getting tired and so they do a little napping. At midnight, unexpectedly, they arrive, one of the groomsmen announcing the groom’s arrival: "Come on everybody, let's get this party started."
Unfortunately, five of the bridesmaids are running out of lamp oil. And they're out of luck, because the other bridesmaids don't have enough to share. So, these five young women run back to town to buy some, but by the time they get back the bridegroom has come and gone, and he's taken the other five women with him to the banquet. In a last-ditch effort they knock on the shut door, but it's too late. They are turned away. Jesus says, "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour" (Matthew 25:13, NIV).
Jesus is using these five foolish bridesmaids as an example of what not to do. Where did they go wrong? I mean like the others, they had eagerly received and embraced the invitation to be part of the wedding. They hadn't stayed home. They were excited to meet the bridegroom. Their lamps were lit. Sure they dozed off, but so did the others, so that wasn't their problem. Their problem was that the bridegroom took longer than they expected. If he had come just a little bit earlier, they would have been fine. They would have ended up at the party. They hadn't set aside reserves of oil like the others to accommodate the long wait. They were unprepared for this meeting.
Five of the women looked at this encounter as so important that they brought extra oil, just in case, whereas the five oil-deficient bridesmaids seem to have approached the evening a little more casually or even flippantly. One commentator says their attitude is something like half-Christians, those who eagerly embrace Jesus at first, but whose experience lacks depth, or you could you say lacks reserves of lamp oil.
I can resonate with this since it's how I began my relationship with Jesus. I began it on a spiritual mountaintop, so to speak. After years of going to church with my parents because it was a family requirement, I got turned on to Jesus. I went away to a Young Life summer camp in Windy Gap, North Carolina, and late one night after a riveting message by our speaker, went off to a hillside where I gave my life to Jesus. I was excited. I was sky-high, higher than those Smokey mountains surrounding me. It was a magical week. But, somehow I couldn't sustain that mountaintop experience, the emotion of it, the thrill. When I got back down into the valley, my eagerness began to dissipate. Went off to college where other forms of excitement carried me away. Probably went to church about ten times in four years of college. Our Christian life may begin on the spiritual mountain-top, but preparations must be made in the valley, in the hum-drum, mundane activities of life.
What are these preparations? What does being prepared to meet Jesus at his return look like? What does it not look like? There are some clues to this leading up to our text.
Look at verse 11 in our text. The late bridesmaids knock on the door of the wedding banquet, "Sir! Sir!" This can also be translated "Lord! Lord!" "Open the door for us!" Unfortunately for them, the bridegroom responds, "I don't know you."
This may sound familiar to you, if you've read through Matthew. It recalls words of Jesus way back in chapter 7. Listen to his words in 7:21. "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." And verse 22: "Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?" Jesus says to them, "I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!"
As Dale Bruner says, he's talking about people who have done some pretty amazing things for the church. They are big wigs in the church. Evidently, however, they had forgotten to do the will of God in the every-day of life. So, being prepared doesn't look like that.
Let's let the immediate context of our text interpret what being prepared looks like, or doesn't look like. As I said, in chapter 24, Jesus talks about what it will be like when he returns. There will be false prophets and wars and earthquakes and persecutions preceding that time. He then says in verse 12, "Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved." So being prepared doesn't look like our love growing cold. It looks like standing firm to the very end; it's like love which stays burning all the way to the finish line.
And finally, let's look at the parable right before ours in chapter 24:45-51, another parable of coming judgment. The scene is a household and the master has put a servant in charge of the others, to feed them and take care of them. Jesus says it will be good for this servant to be about this work when the master comes back. He would then be put in charge of much. But if the servant begins to shirk his responsibilities and even begins to mistreat those he's supposed to be caring for and the master comes back then, that servant will suffer severe consequences. So being prepared looks like continually serving the master by doing what he says to do.
Putting the pieces together here, it appears that being prepared to meet our master Jesus looks like us being obedient to the will of God, not just occasionally, because Jesus could return at any time, but every moment of every day, obedient to our last breath.
Even when it's hard. It's easy to follow Jesus on the spiritual mountaintop, when we’re flooded with emotion, when we feel the warm glow of connection with God. But, it's harder in the valley. It's hard to be who God wants us to be when your children are fighting or when you’re grown children aren't living the way you taught them to live; it's hard to be obedient when you're not feeling well, when you're in chronic pain. It's hard when you're being treated unfairly at work. During these times, we may not feel God's presence. We may not feel like serving him.
But, the Christian life is not simply about feeling. It's about trusting and obedience and great patience. It's in the valley when we make our preparations to meet Jesus. That's when we pack up our reserves of lamp oil, so we can keep our lamp burning for Jesus.
For many things in life, we can kind of get by if we're unprepared. If our house isn't totally clean when company comes over, they may not notice. If we're not prepared for a test at school, there's a chance we may get by ok, especially if the teacher is grading on the curve.
But we can't wing it if we're unprepared when Jesus shows up. When he comes, it's too late to go back and clean up our messes and begin building our Christian life.
And preparedness is not something we can borrow from someone else, as William Barclay says. It doesn't work that way. Your spouse or mom or dad or child may be obedient to God, but are you? You can't get by on their faithfulness. Now is the time to prepare. Now is the time to embrace God's call to a long and sustained obedience to him.
May we be a ready people because Jesus is coming back. May we be ready for that most important meeting in our lives, ready to add our voices to that great multitude in the book of Revelation which is gathered around his throne which shouts out, "Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready" (Rev. 19:7).