Atomic Jesus
Lections: The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 32), AD 2026 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.
Humans need a horizon.
We need that intersection where heaven meets the earth: a line to which we lift our eyes, even though our feet can never reach it. This, more than anything, separates us from our fellow creatures. Crows use tools. Whales have language. Elephants mourn their dead. But given what they need in order to survive, other animals remain perfectly content being what they are. They needn’t fret over notions of purpose or value or meaning.
We alone yearn for transcendence. We alone contain the bone-deep conviction that the way the world is, is not the way it ought to be. We alone have within ourselves a God-sized hole, a hunger for infinity, that nothing in this finite world can fill—no matter how we try. And so humanity needs a horizon, that we ourselves might be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
This is why religion tends toward eschatology, “the study of last things.” Whether it’s the karmics escaping Samsara, the Abrahamics angling for Armageddon, or scientism seeking secular salvation, all of us are trying to transcend the world we know. All of us are yearning for the horizon. And so all of us have to wrestle with some degree of disappointed expectations. “But we had hoped!”
There’s a fairly common thread in entry-level scholarship whereby Jesus is presented as an apocalyptic preacher like so many others of His day. The people of Judea looked to their Prophets for promises of liberation, for divine intervention to throw off the yoke of Roman oppression, and to bring about a new world order of righteousness and justice. They wanted God to come down here and start cracking heads.
When Christ was killed, the story goes, His followers then took up His banner, eagerly expecting orbital strikes and angelic invaders any day now; any decade now; any century now. And so we are still waiting for Jesus to end the world. But I find this too simplistic. Yes, people expected Christ to be like other prophets. But He wasn’t. That’s why we remember Him, and not them. “My Kingdom is not of this world,” He said. He didn’t come to fight, to raise the sword, to rain down flames from Heaven.
Indeed, His refusal to initiate violence, to meet apocalyptic expectations, is likely why Judas betrayed Him—in order to force His hand, in order to make Him fight. When He didn’t, when instead He was crucified, Judas was so distraught that he took his own life.
Moreover, many New Testament texts take for granted that the end of the world already has occurred. John says that Judgment Day happened on the Cross. Luke places it at Pentecost. Matthew seems to think that it was the destruction of Jerusalem, which indeed proved to be the fiery end of all the old order of things. As for Jesus’ Second Coming, that’s in many ways fulfilled by His Holy Spirit in Baptism, His Body and Blood in the Eucharist, His promised presence here amongst the poor.
And so while much of the talk of the Endtimes applies to things that happened in the first century, on a deeper level we see the Kingdom of God fulfilled not at one ossified point on our timeline—neither in the petrified past nor the fiery future—but as an eternal reality transcending time, the horizon toward which all of existence arcs.
And whenever that truth breaks into time, it reveals, unveils, the workings of the world; like a flash of insight reflected in the shards of a shattered mirror. This is what the word “apocalyptic” literally means: revealing, unveiling, showing us the truth. We must keep all this in mind when we read together the apocalyptic parables of Christ over the course of the next several Sundays.
“The Kingdom of Heaven will be like this,” Jesus proclaims to us this morning. “Ten young bridesmaids went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five of them were wise. All ten had lanterns, yet only the wise brought with them extra oil. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all understandably grew drowsy and slept. Then the cry arose at midnight that the bridegroom had arrived! They rose, trimmed their wicks, and the foolish asked if they might share the oil.
“But the wise knew that there wasn’t enough for them all. So as the foolish bridesmaids went to purchase oil in the night, the bridegroom brought the guests and the wiser women inside, while the foolish came too late and found themselves shut out from the party. ‘Truly I tell you,’ the bridegroom called through the door, ‘I do not know who you are.’”
This scenario refers to a ritual whereby a groom would set out from home, to the house of his bride, in order to escort her back into her new household. The bridesmaids are there to provide light in the darkness and to welcome their newlywed master with his bride. Yet they encounter some delay—the cause of which, who can say? Perhaps the father of the bride had difficulty saying goodbye, or simply wanted to send her off with libations.
It isn’t that the foolish bridesmaids are stupid. In this context, the “wise” would be those tied to God, and the “foolish” to the ways of the world. Moreover, it isn’t even that they’re unprepared; it’s just that they’re not overprepared. It doesn’t seem terribly fair. But five aren’t there when the groom shows up, and so they miss out on the feast—at least until morning. These wedding celebrations tended to last a week or more.
A great deal of American Evangelicals appear to expect Jesus to show up, any day now, by calling in an airstrike. Their eschatology reminds me of nothing so much as the nuclear bomb drills that I endured in elementary school. My junior high was a fallout shelter. And read in that light, this parable could seem terrifying: five girls damned on a technicality? This is Christianity fit for the bunker.
But Jesus tells us explicitly that the lesson here is to “keep awake.” And that’s an odd admonition if you think that Christ will soon show forth upon a mushroom cloud. In that case, it would seem that He’d be fairly hard to miss. Rather, this is a parable for a quieter Kingdom, for a Christ who creeps in like a thief in the night, whom we might not notice.
Luther interpreted this as a parable of faith. The oil which the wise ones brought signifies not some preparation that we must make, not some work that we must do, but simple trust in Christ. That’s what faith is: trust. And that’s why it cannot be lent out. The faith of another grants little comfort, I’m afraid; for we all inherit the promises of God in Christ; but what good does a promise do us, if we have no trust in the one who made it?
Yet a heartfelt faith—a simple trust in Jesus Christ—will illuminate the Groom, and welcome home His bride, and sweep all of us up and into the Kingdom of their joy. Simple trust lets us see Christ at work within our world. Faith welcomes us into the Church, who is His holy bride. Thus we enter the eternal Wedding Feast, which breaks even now into our reality, unveiling the presence of Christ within our fallen space and time. The Kingdom is already here! —when we trust that it is true.
So keep awake. Keep awake to see Christ in our neighbor. Keep awake to find Heaven on earth. Keep awake to His living Spirit, and to His presence here amongst us. Keep awake to find eternity in time! The Kingdom’s all around you, beyond you and within you. Tend the little lamp of faith within your heart, and witness the horizon come to you.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Pertinent Links
RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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