It would be really easy to read the story we’ve just heard as a classic morality tale, a story of right and wrong, good and bad, allowed to enter God’s kingdom or banished to the other place. Be prepared! Or be prepared to face the consequences! Be like the wise bridesmaids, who bring extra oil for their lamps and get to attend the wedding party, not like the foolish ones who let their lamps go out and find the door slammed in their faces. Simple, right?
Well, maybe. But if we look a little more closely, it becomes apparent that the story is not as straightforward as it might, at first, appear. Why does the bridegroom arrive for his wedding at midnight? What on earth holds him up so long on such an important day? Why is there no mention of a bride? Where are the foolish bridesmaids going to find an oil-dealer open for business at midnight? What is actually going on here?
This is, as so many of Jesus’s parables are, a story that works on many different levels, but today, as we gather to remember those who gave their lives for the sake of peace, freedom, and justice, I would like to suggest that one way of reading the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids is less as a morality tale and more as a cautionary tale about the danger of making assumptions about who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’, who will get to take their place at the wedding feast and who will not… a story about the misguided human propensity to draw nice clear demarcation lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
These demarcation lines are nowhere more evident, of course, than in warzones. I am reminded of the story of the ‘Christmas Truce’ of 1914, when German and Allied soldiers famously laid down their weapons and sang carols and played football in No-Man’s-Land. Only five months into the war, it still seemed possible to break down those demarcation lines – powerfully and tragically symbolised by the opposing lines of trenches –, even if it was for one day only. But it never happened again. How could it? As the war went on and on, the losses piled up, and the situation became more and more desperate, it must inevitably have become less and less possible to see potential friends and brothers in the faces of the enemy.
War, though, is one thing, and peace – our peace which was so hard-won, by the soldiers on the Western Front, and by so many who have fought and given their lives in conflicts since – is quite another. Peace demands the overcoming of divisions, the rebuilding of bridges, the regaining of trust, the re-establishing of community. And I wonder whether there might not, perhaps, be a message about the challenges of overcoming division and building community in Jesus’s story about the kingdom of heaven, which is, by definition a kingdom of peace, too.
What if our ten bridesmaids represented a community (a family, a city, a church, a kingdom) – a diverse group of different people with different strengths and weaknesses? What if some of the bridesmaids had heard about the bridegroom’s delay and others – not foolish, but simply uninformed – had not? What if some were poor – too poor to stock up on extra supplies? And what if the wise bridesmaids were not so much wise as selfish? What if they could have shared their oil (at least until all of them had got into the reception) but chose not to? What if they looked down on the so-called ‘foolish’ bridesmaids for some perceived insufficiency (too stupid, not pretty enough or well-dressed enough, too young or old, from too poor or insignificant a family)? What if they had always secretly hoped that those sorts of people wouldn’t get into the feast, and sending them off on a wild-goose chase looking for oil at midnight was just a ploy to get them out of the way?
Read this way, the story becomes a story not – or not only – about being prepared materially, but about being prepared to love and serve our neighbours (yes, even when we think of them as foolish… or worse, as ‘the other’, ‘the enemy’). Might we read Jesus’s parable as an invitation to question the easy way in which we sometimes draw those demarcation lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’? Might this, then, be a story about the challenges – and the necessity – of acknowledging the things that divide us but, instead of setting those divisions in stone, working to break barriers down, to build a community that transcends them. And might this not, therefore, be a story that is hugely relevant both to Remembrance Sunday and to today’s ever more divided world?
The challenging words of the prophet Amos seem to support that suggestion. If we look back at the horror of war and fail to see it as a cue to build a better, more peaceful, more loving community here and now, is it not like escaping from the jaws of a lion only to allow ourselves to be eaten by a bear? Speaking through Amos, God looks at the world and despairs, rejecting the insincere offerings of those who think themselves wise and holy, but who are anything but…
The implications of Amos’s words are explained even more clearly in the later prophecy of Isaiah, in which we hear not only of God’s rejection of the phoney offerings of the unjust, but also of a potential remedy, a way back into the wedding feast: ‘Is not this the fast that I choose’, God says, through the prophet: ‘to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?
This Remembrance Sunday, then, as we remember the horror of war and the way in which it destroys community, compassion, and love for our neighbours, let us commit to working to break down the barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’; let us pledge to share our oil, to loose the bonds of injustice, to feed the hungry, and to work, in whatever way we can, for peace and harmony in our communities, so that we can, with confidence, allow God’s justice to roll down like waters, and God’s righteousness like an everflowing stream.