Wisdom's Light

Lanterns, by oione

Propers: The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 32), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

Keeping awake, keeping alert, is an admonition found throughout the length and breadth of Jesus’ teachings. One might go so far as to call it a theme. As though to drive the message home, Matthew’s Gospel sandwiches the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids between two other passages, two other stories, each emphasizing the necessity of readiness, of preparation, for the return of one’s master at any time.

First a bit of background. Weddings in Jesus’ day were a communal and family affair, even more so than they are now. Etiquette dictated three simple steps. Initially, the engagement, when the fathers of the bride and groom would set up a formal contract. Next, the betrothal, when the bride and groom, in the house of the bride, would declare their fidelity one to another. The groom and any witnesses would at this juncture give gifts to the bride. This betrothal period was legally binding, and often lasted up to a year.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this was to make sure that the bride wasn’t pregnant at the time she got betrothed. We need look no further than to Joseph and Mary. Also during this betrothal period, the groom would be required to pay a brideprice to his father-in-law, possibly in services rendered. Amongst other things, this brideprice proved that the groom could support a family, like a diamond ring today. Show me the money.

Finally, at the end of the appointed year, the groom would come with his entourage to lead the bride from her father’s house to his own, in a ceremonial torchlight procession, there to be wed beneath a tent. It was all very formal, all very festive. The wedding feast would last for days, and include the entire community, even the folks you didn’t like.

In the tale as Jesus tells it, something unexpectedly delays the groom, perhaps some final accounting with her father. And the bridesmaids, the young women of her entourage, fall asleep as the night grows dark and late. Half of them had prepared for this eventuality, bringing extra oil for their lamps. The other half had not, and so find themselves excluded from the festivities as they run about searching for light in the night.

That last bit, where they come banging on the now-locked door, only to be told that nobody recognizes them, may well have been tacked on. But that doesn’t make it any less unsettling. “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

Yet how does one do that exactly? How do we prepare for the unexpected, and thus be accounted amongst the wise? It might not be as easy as it seems. It might also help to know just for what we are waiting, or at the very least for whom.

In all the various ways that the biblical canon describes the relationship held betwixt Yahweh and Israel, the Creator and Creation, Christ and His Church, far and away the most pervasive image is that of a wedding. God takes us for His own, through thick and thin. And it’s a pretty rocky relationship, to hear the Prophets tell it. But God will not break His covenant. God will not cast off His people, no matter what we do. There are consequences for our actions, but at the end of it all, God is there to heal and repair.

The Christian Scriptures famously culminate in the wedding feast of the Lamb, the end of this age of the world, when Christ shall hand over His Kingdom to the Father, and God at the last shall be all in all. For all its violence, all its fantastic imagery, the Revelation of St John is the story of a wedding, the story of a Bridegroom who has come to claim His Bride. So is that what we’re waiting for? Are we to wait for the end of the age, for another 2000 years?

Well, maybe. And then again maybe not. The repeated admonition to keep awake, keep alert—these are the same words that Jesus uses in Gethsemane, when His disciples cannot keep awake as He goes off to pray. He’s about to die, and they all fall asleep. Elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, in what scholars call “the little apocalypse,” Jesus appears to be warning His flock about the destruction of Jerusalem, which will occur in AD 70, less than 40 years after His death and resurrection. John seems to warn them of the same.

Then again, as we used to say in seminary, should the apocalypse not come to us, then we will go to it. We are of course quite mortal, are we not? We like to pretend otherwise, to imagine that payments and pills might keep the reaper at bay. But any one of us could leave at any moment, hurled out of time and into eternity. Shall we keep awake for death, who comes like a thief in the night, in a million different guises and a million different ways?

In summation: This parable might be about Jesus’ Crucifixion, or the destruction of Jerusalem, or the end of the world, or simply the end of you. It has been interpreted in all of these ways. Yet regardless of the goal, the message remains urgently the same: Keep awake. So how do we do that? Well, for starters, keeping awake cannot mean that we never fall asleep. I know that sounds contradictory, but bear with me.

All the bridesmaids fall asleep, the foolish and the wise. What distinguishes the two, what shows herself as wisdom, is that half of them were prepared not only for the groom’s arrival but also for his delay. They were, in a manner, ready not to be ready. And just more generally, the only way to keep alert, to keep awake, in any sustainable sense, is to get a good night’s rest. To stay awake, you go to sleep: paradoxical but true.

Awake here doesn’t mean coiled like a spring, overscheduled, over-caffeinated, as we often are. No. Jesus here equates wakefulness with wisdom. And wisdom is a whole other conversation. Wisdom is more than just knowledge. Wisdom is more than just clever. Wisdom is prior to prudence, because prudence is the application of wisdom to daily life.

Rather, wisdom deals with the big picture, with the things that really matter and the things that really don’t. Not so much right and wrong, as good and evil. Not so much fact or fiction, as beauty and truth. Wisdom is a capacity of the mind that allows us to understand life from God’s perspective— which sounds at first impossible. How can the finite contain the infinite? Yet God deigns, in His wisdom, to dwell with us, as one of us, mirabile dictu, within us.

Which is why the Bible speaks of her as a character: as Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. Wisdom is the idea of human beings within the eternal mind of God, and also the mind of God made manifest in man. She is thus the principle of divine and human unity. Hers is a mystical, loving encounter, a wild and lifelong affair. Rather like a wedding.

To keep alert, keep awake, is to ground oneself in Wisdom, to ground oneself in God: to have faith in His faithfulness regardless of our state. If Christ is ever with us, then who can be against us? And if we both die and rise in Him, what have we left to fear? When we keep our eye on Christ, then nothing can surprise us, nothing catch us unaware. To be grounded in God is to be at rest even when in motion, and to be in motion even at rest.

In such wisdom as this, we cling to nothing, yet are open to everything. We are aware, we are awake, no longer sleepwalking through our lives. Goodness, truth, and beauty, these alone endure. Not hardship, not pain, not death or debt or deadlines. They all pass away. Be awake to the wonder of life, to the miracles all about us. Be open to others’ pain, and present in their distress. Expect nothing, yet welcome everything. For wakefulness is often just a blank and open mind, a walking meditation, a living out of gratitude in bliss.

This then is Holy Wisdom. And when we have her, it hardly matters what shall happen next. Cities could fall, worlds could end, I could die today. And what of it? I ought already to live as though I were both immortal, yet were dying even now; as though the Groom were at the gate, while the night yet waxes long. All that matters truly is that Jesus Christ is with me, in Sacrament and Word and in my neighbor in his need.

Cling to Christ and keep awake, and love will light our way.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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