Sermon text: Matthew 25:1–13
Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Waiting in line has been called a timeless form of torture. According to a study done a few years ago, in the US alone Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line. A 2015 study by Microsoft found that the average human attention span is now eight seconds long, one second shorter than a goldfish’s.
And technology is making matters worse. Technology is teaching us to expect instant gratification. But the real, physical world rarely works that way. We want what we want, and usually we want it right now. Reading a book takes too long. Stream a movie instead. Fast food is faster than making a home-cooked meal, so it’s the drive-thru.
Christians have been waiting for a long time — since the promise of the return of Christ, which is, by the way, recorded in Acts chapter 1. And it didn’t take long for Christians to get antsy about the return of Christ. In the opening years of the New Testament church, there was an ardent expectation that Jesus would come back very soon. And very soon meant He’d be back in days or weeks or months, not millennia. That expectation, along with misunderstandings and foolish decisions, led to the authorship of First and Second Thessalonians. Some Christians in those congregations were, so to speak, packed and ready to go. They made preparations, divesting themselves of things like employment. They thought that since Jesus was coming back very soon, there was no reason to work and no reason to develop a plan for the future, since the world was about to end.
As time went on, months turned into years, years into decades, decades into centuries, centuries into millennia, and the wait became too long. Christians began to wonder if they had misunderstood Jesus and His promise, and if the promises of Christ’s second coming would ever be fulfilled. After all, the promise of Genesis 3, that a Messiah would appear, took thousands of years to manifest itself. Waiting on God in general, and for Christ’s return in particular, requires faith — faith in what came before the promise, and hope in what is supposed to happen in the future.
Risk also comes along with long waiting. We can forget, lose hope, become distracted by the things of this world, and worst of all, our faith can wither away and die while waiting. The assigned Gospel lesson from this Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, and the third-to-last Sunday of the church year, is part of a lengthy discourse — a sermon on the end of the world in Matthew 24 and Matthew 25, consisting of a long sermon about the second coming of Christ. The particular parable before us this morning is the parable of the ten virgins.
In itself, it is a beautiful, hopeful, exciting, and also a terrifying parable. It’s a dramatic reminder that Jesus is coming back and will on that day judge the living and the dead, believers and unbelievers alike.
Now, the struggle that comes with waiting for God to appear and fulfill His promise is one thing. But outright unbelief is quite another. A lot of people believe in the second coming of Christ. They believe in the end of the world and the beginning of a new one. Yet at the same time, a good many of these people have come to believe the prophecies of modern-day climate change prophets and priests.
An increasing number of people believe that the planet as we know it will come to an end, and that this has nothing to do with the second coming of Christ to judge the quick and the dead and to usher in the new heaven and the new earth. These secular prophets make outrageous projections that the world takes seriously about what’s going to happen to our planet in the next 12 years, or 120 years, or 12,000 years, or 250 million years. And many Christians buy into the hype. Listen to the headlines of some scientific publications from September 2023. From newscientist.com: “Almost all land animals on the earth will die out in 250 million years.” I hope so. According to a computer model of how the planet’s continents and climate will change in the long haul. CBS News gave this story the headline, “Volcanic supercontinent will wipe out humans in 250 million years.” The New York Times had the headline, “Mammals’ Time on Earth Is Half Over.”
In the Gospel lesson this morning, we have before us Jesus’ parable of the ten virgins. He told this parable and other last-day parables during Holy Week, just a few days before His crucifixion. He tells them the parable with the full knowledge that He will soon leave His disciples. Jesus won’t be with them as He had been with them the three previous years of His holy ministry. Jesus will leave them, first by way of death. Then a few weeks later, He will ascend back into heaven and sit at His Father’s right hand. As He faced His own death, Jesus promised the Church that He would return — first from the grave in the resurrection of the dead, and second on the last day to bring about the end of the world. The first promise of His return was fulfilled. We call it Easter. The second promise is the one that we continue to wait for, in full confidence that He will fulfill His promise to come back and collect His Church unto Himself.
As Jesus grew closer to Good Friday, He began to focus His teaching on two aspects of His work. First, and closest in time, was the teaching that He would be rejected by the religious leaders of the day, that He would be beaten, mocked, and crucified, but on the third day would rise again. Second, He taught that Christians and the Church needed to be alert, ready, and found earnestly waiting for His second coming.
Jesus said, “At that time, the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five of them were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.” The wise were prepared for the long haul. They brought the extra oil. That is the only distinguishing mark.
The oil is the only thing in the parable that separated the wise from the foolish. All ten, both wise and foolish, fell asleep, just like the disciples did in the Garden of Gethsemane. All ten fell asleep. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, the text says, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. This should put every Christian in mind of Gethsemane, another lesson in which the disciples misunderstood the time and the moment. Jesus would be taken from His disciples at any moment, yet both the disciples in Gethsemane and the ten virgins in the parable could not stay awake. Jesus could return at any moment, and most would be found sleeping — at the very least spiritually asleep, if not physically. The disciples didn’t understand the meaning or the gravity of the moment, but Jesus did. In Mark 14:37–38 we read, “And He came and found them sleeping, and He said to Peter, ‘Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.'” It’s not as though the wise virgins were stronger Christians whose strength enabled them to stay awake. They too fell asleep. For the foolish virgins of Matthew 25:1–13, they were not likened unto the servants and the slaves in the parable told in Matthew 24:48.
In the parable, the master puts the slave in charge of his affairs and tells him that he will return. But the evil slave, the text says, says in his heart, “My master is delaying his coming,” and he begins to beat his fellow slaves, and he eats and drinks with the drunkards. This slave used the master’s delay for evil purposes. We don’t have a very kind picture here. The foolish virgins just failed to supply themselves with the oil needed to keep the flame of faith alive. The foolish did not act as if the bridegroom was going to be delayed. They thought it was going to be a short wait, and prepared accordingly. Thus, no oil.
Verse 5: “The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and slept. At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’ ‘No,’ they replied, ‘there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.'”
As for the important elements in the parable — the lamp, the oil, the flame — most commentators believe the oil in the lamp is faith and the flame their good works. The wise virgins were women whose faith carried them to the wedding feast; the foolish, to death. The problem with equating the oil to faith is that one Christian cannot give a measure of faith to another. Faith can’t be shared in that sense. We can’t believe on behalf of another. Besides, saving faith is a gift of God, created and sustained by the Word and Sacrament ministry of the Church. It would be better to think of the oil as that which keeps the flame of faith burning — that which keeps Christian faith alive. That means the means of grace, the Word and Sacrament ministry of the Church, the bread and butter of the Christian life. The lamp is the vessel for the oil and the flame. The lamp is the Church. The oil is the Word and Sacrament. The flame is Christian faith — faith in the heart that is created and fed by the Word and Sacrament ministry.
The foolish are those who once attended church, availed themselves of the Word and Sacrament ministry, but over time they didn’t think that they needed the Church. These are the ones who stopped coming to church. They stopped offering their confession of sin. They stopped listening to the words of absolution, to the Word of God read, spoken, and sung in the liturgy of the church service. They neglected the means of grace. As a result, the five foolish were not ready when the Bridegroom came for them, so they heard the most terrible words the Lord could speak to another person: “I tell you the truth, I do not know you.”
The wise virgins were wise because they fed the flame what it needed. They made use of the Church’s oil — the Word of God, Holy Baptism, the Divine Service, Holy Communion — and received the forgiveness of their sins throughout their lives. In this parable, Jesus teaches that we wait either for our departure from this veil of tears through the normal process of nature — death — or as a result of the second coming of Christ. Regardless of which it is, we are to be in the business of oil — the oil business, the business of keeping our faith supplied with God’s grace and the forgiveness of sins through the Word and Sacrament ministry of the Church. The oil of God’s Word is found only in the Church, the true Church, which never runs out of oil. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the oil that is the Word of God never passes away.
And you who go about your daily business, engage in your respective stations in life, do not neglect the vessel — your body, soul, and mind. Keep the lamp full of oil, confident of this: 1 Thessalonians 4:14–17 — “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
You are the wise ones in the parable. For you who are here, hear the Word, drink of the blood, and partake of the body — all of which God has given to you as you wait. God Himself has made you ready for your departure from this world and for the life of the world to come. Your sins are forgiven, and the best news is, there’s no waiting in line.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.