The Kingdom of God is a party, Jesus says (in Matthew 25) and this sounds rather familiar!
Jesus talked a lot about parties. He gave us quite specific instructions on how we should hold parities: ‘Don’t just invite wealthy and respectable people who can return the favour to you, but invite the poor and the lame and people who can’t pay you back!’
Jesus attended a lot of parties. Indeed, in the minds of some people, Jesus attended too many parties – the wrong sorts of parties with the wrong sorts of people. ‘A glutton and a drunkard’ some people called him (Luke 7:34)!
And Jesus, on a number of occasions, spoke of the Kingdom of God as being like a party! Indeed, if you remember the parable that we read only a couple of Sundays ago, the Kingdom of God was said to be like a great big party (a royal wedding party in fact) where everybody is invited – the rich and the poor, the important and the unimportant, the socially acceptable and the socially unacceptable, the good, the bad, and the ugly … everybody!
Today we have another story of another wedding party, though it’s a smaller party where the reception is being held at the groom’s house, and so there is a correspondingly smaller guest-list. The focus of the story though is again on those who are attending the party – on ten young women in particular – and we meet them as they stand outside the groom’s house, waiting for him to arrive.
And they wait and they wait and they wait for the groom to arrive and open up the house so that the party might begin. And some of them, it seems, were more prepared for the wait than others.
Apparently the groom doesn’t appear until around midnight, which seems like a ridiculously late time to start a party! Even so, the girls have waited, though half of them have run out of oil for their lamps. Those without oil therefore head off to the 7-11 to buy more, but by the time they get back the party is already well underway. They bang on the door but the groom doesn’t recognise them and thinks that they are gatecrashers. The door is shut!
It seems so unlike Jesus!
‘When you have a party invite the poor, the lame, the blind …everybody’. Open your door wide. That was the way Jesus partied – a friend of prostitutes and sinners, a friend to everybody.
And didn’t Jesus likewise tell that story about the workers in the field who all turn up at different times yet all get paid the same amount? Some start early, some late, everybody gets paid and everybody parties!
That is the Jesus we are familiar with – come rich, come poor, come early, come late, come as you are get here however you can! Everyone is welcome, everyone is included … but not you girls! You are too late!
It’s a bit rough, isn’t it? What did these girls do wrong? They waited outside the door till the middle of the night. Yes, they were a bit foolish not to have been better prepared, but we don’t normally punish people too heavily for being foolish, and these girls may have been foolish but were surely not evil! And yet there is a level of reality in this too. In one sense the invitation is always open. There is always time – come and join the party! And yet there also comes a time when there is no more time! You fall over, your ticker stops, your life flashes before your eyes, your time is up and the door is shut!
Whatever time you had to make choices about your life and about how you were going to live your life and what you were going to devote yourself too – that time has passed and all decisions have been made!
Now I’m not suggesting that the point of this parable is all about preparing yourself for death – not at all. The problem for the girls in the parable is not that any of them dies waiting for the bridegroom to arrive. The problem is rather that they weren’t prepared for the long wait, and it is a long wait!
I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of waiting for the happy couple to arrive. As someone who has taken numerous weddings, I certainly have had that experience. You open the church, the guests arrive, the organist is playing but the couple are nowhere to be found! What could be keeping them? In my experience the answer is always the same. Photographs!
Proper protocols used to dictate that you get your wedding photos done after you’ve actually been married but, of course, this can interfere with the timing of the reception. What a lot of couples prefer to do nowadays is to get their happy couple photos done before the wedding.
This procedure is recommended by those who run reception centres, I suspect. It is certainly never the idea of the priest conducting the marriage – he who is left looking at his watch with a church full of agitated people!
The priests at our local Catholic Church (St Brigid’s) have passed on to me horror stories in this regard that far eclipse anything I’ve experienced, including one case where the father of the bride died during the ceremony!
It wasn’t being suggested that he died because of the long delays, of course, but it was pointed out that if it hadn’t been for the delays he might have died sometime after the marriage vows had been taken! At any rate, they also told me of an instance of being kept waiting for two and a half hours! Father Tom told me he had the service itself over and done with within five minutes!
That might sound rough but I think, in truth, that Father Tom undoubtedly handled that wedding much better than I would have. I do not like waiting! Patience is indeed a virtue but I confess that it is not one of mine!
Maybe I suffer from having been brought up in an age where so many of our most vital commodities can be purchased via a slot-machine. We put in the coin, we turn the handle and we get what we want – instant gratification!
Of course that’s not just me, is it? Nowadays that is everybody! We live in an age of instant gratification, and this does at times become pathological.
I was talking with a friend earlier this week who repeatedly damages himself financially through an obsession with poker machines. A gambling addiction is really the incarnation of the need for instant gratification, and it’s a very hard obsession to break!
This guy is a regular at Fight Club though he often can’t afford to contribute anything financially. I remember when he first joined though one of his first questions was ‘how long will it take to become a professional boxer?’
I had to break the news to him that it would take a prolonged period of dedicated training and competition to reach the stage where he could expect to earn the sort of prize money he had in mind – an amount that would solve all his financial problems. Like gambling, professional boxing is not a good solution if you’re looking for a quick fix!
The wisdom I passed on to my friend was the same wisdom I often repeat to myself – that every complex problem always has a simple answer and it is almost always the wrong answer!
For most of life’s problems there is no simple answer – no quick fix. No, the answer is to commit yourself to the long haul, to have patience, and to wait for everything to come good, and sometimes you have to wait a long, long time!
I’m 52 years old now and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in those 52 years it is that everything worth accomplishing takes a lot longer than I thought it would! I’ve been in Dulwich Hill parish now for almost 25 years. How long should it take to build up a congregation to the point where we have at least a hundred people attending our weekly Eucharist each week? A bit longer!
How much longer will it take for us to become financially self-sufficient? How long will it be before I get a shot at a world boxing title? How long will it take for me to get my bush camp running properly and fulfilling its mission? How long is it going to take me to learn how to be a decent husband and father?
Of course the focus of the parable isn’t on me and my personal goals but on the far greater goal of the coming of the Kingdom of God in history – the coming of that day when God’s will will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!
The Kingdom of God is at hand, Jesus tells us. The new world is coming! The day will come when injustice will be wiped away and when people will beat their swords into ploughshares and study war no more (Isaiah 2:4) and when the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9) but when?
We look around our world and we don’t see a lot of evidence that this reality is in process. The Palestinians don’t seem any closer to getting a state of their own. The people of Gaza continue to pay the price of the Occupation. Syria continues to be bombed and we seem to be on the brink of a third world war. Meanwhile our sisters and brothers in Africa who escaped the AIDS epidemic are now being struck down by the Ebola virus!
Where is justice? Where is freedom and love? How long is it all going to take, O Lord? How long?!
This is the cry that is at the heart of Jesus’ story. We believe that the bridegroom is coming and we believe and justice and peace will come but how long is it all going to take? In truth, we really weren’t expecting to wait this long, and some of us just weren’t prepared for the long haul!
That’s the problem confronting the young girls. It’s not that they don’t care about the bridegroom, and they do want to be a part of the party. They just weren’t prepared for the long haul!
What went wrong? Why weren’t the ‘foolish maidens’ better prepared? Why hadn’t they prepared properly but putting aside enough oil to keep their lamps burning for as long as it was going to take? It’s a fair question. My guess is that they probably got distracted worrying about their hair!
I’m sure that sounds very chauvinistic but, as I’ve indicated, I’ve had plenty of experience with weddings and I know full well what the priorities are!
If you have any doubts as to what is essential in a wedding just take a look at a copy of ‘Bride to be’ magazine. What do you find in a periodical designed for those about to marry? Is it filled with articles on how to improve your communication skills with your prospective spouse? Are you likely to find there an analysis of the wedding vows with tips on how to make sure you keep to them? No! Weddings are all about dressing up and looking good!
And I’m not really wanting to belittle that either. After all, it’s supposed to be a party and it’s entirely appropriate that we make an effort to dress well and to look good for the party. It’s important. It’s just not the most important thing.
Competing priorities – that’s all of life, isn’t it, and I think it’s this problem of competing priorities that ultimately leads these girls to end up on the wrong side of the gate when the door is shut and the party has started!
We never intend not to spend time with the kids. It’s just that other entirely legitimate things get in the way and take priority! And it’s not that we don’t have a good sense of what God would have us do with our lives and the things God wants us to focus on, but there are bills to pay and appointments to keep and a whole long list of entirely legitimate things that need to be done and … we didn’t even realise that the party started without us!
‘Seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice’, says Jesus, ‘and everything else will fall into place behind that’ (Matthew 6:33). For if our focus is right then our priorities will be right and we’ll be prepared for the long haul!
I can never read this party parable without being reminded of an account given by the Reverend Jim Clelland – once a chaplain at a single-sex all-male High School. Jim claims to have preached on this same text but to have made the mistake of ending his sermon with what had been intended as a rhetorical question: ‘Think about it boys. Where would you like to end up – in here, in the light, at the feast of the bridegroom, or out there in the dark with a group of foolish young girls?’
And so we are left with another image of instant gratification that is very much in keeping with the spirit of Jesus’ story.
Yes, the Kingdom of God is a party, and yes, it is a party to which we are all invited. Come one, come all, come rich, come poor, come early, come late, everybody is welcome, all are invited.
And come as you are, but come prepared too – prepared for the long haul – for yes, the Kingdom of God is at hand and justice and peace will come, but we may have a bit more work to do yet!
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 9th of November, 2014.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
