Got Oil?
Text: Matthew 25:1-13
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, Utah
November 3, 2024
Back in September Nancy and I were invited to a wedding of some dear friends. They were part of our church in Salt Lake City. We are fairly close. The son was getting married. We also knew there would be many people we would know.
We had the date marked ever since the invite came in the Spring. We kept talking about it in the days leading up to the wedding. Saturday night came and we got all dressed up. Nancy was in a beautiful dress and I was decked in a suit and tie. We hopped in the car and drove to the wedding which was at a country club. We pulled into the parking lot and there were several cars but not as many as you would expect for a wedding. In fact, it looked kind of quiet.
We got out, walked into the building, and there was a maintenance worker and a woman at the desk but that was it. No people. No sounds. I asked and they said that there had been a wedding the night before but they were pretty sure there was not one tonight.
Did we have the wrong place? Nancy checked the invite on her phone.
We had the wrong night. The wedding, indeed, had been the night before. We had missed it. We felt so foolish. We texted our friends with deep apologies and our explanation.
The parable that Jesus tells is about the foolishness of missing a wedding. The wedding is God’s wedding. Weddings are joyous occasions and in the Bible weddings sometimes symbolize the kingdom of God and the joy that awaits all who belong to him.
This parable is really a continuation of a longer stretch of teaching and parables from Jesus all having to do with the coming of the Son of Man. In chapters 24 and 25 of Matthew Jesus is teaching about the end of time and his second coming.
The second coming of Christ can be the farthest thing from our minds. We are caught up in day to day living: going to work, getting the kids off to school, grocery shopping, planning our next get away, hobbies, what’s happening in the neighborhood, keeping up on the news. But Jesus spoke of a time when God will bring down the curtain on this world. How that will happen and what it will look like, is hard to imagine. But Jesus said it will happen when he comes again.
For some the second coming is an obsession. Some have tried to predict this. Some have acted foolishly by selling property, quitting jobs and buying into the foolishness of some media preacher who says he knows the time of Jesus’ coming. Jesus says the time is known only to the Father.
We can’t nor should we pay attention to calendars, dates, and predictions. The word of Jesus to his disciples, both then and now, is to keep watch. Not obsess or try to figure out but be ready. What does it mean to be ready?
This parable is also one of a string of six parables that Jesus teaches in the days and hours right before he will go to the cross. Final words often have a sense of urgency. These parables are some of Jesus’ final teachings before he will die, and they are filled with urgency. Jesus wants people to be faithful and wise, and found living Christ-glorifying lives when all of this ends.
There is a seriousness about these final parables. There is a drawing of the line, separation of what is and isn’t of God, and a sense of finality. Jesus spends his final words teaching about the kingdom of heaven. The way to enter the kingdom is to be rightly related to the King who is Jesus.
In this parable, Jesus likens his kingdom to a marriage feast. It is about ten virgins/bridesmaids who are invited to the wedding. Five make it in. Five miss it. Jesus teaches that it’s possible to be left out of the wedding. It’s possible to have the master show up and he finds us not addressing any of his concerns. Everyone wants the Jesus of love and acceptance, but there is also a reckoning.
The tone is serious but I don’t think Jesus’ point was to scare people. He teaches and tells parables to open the door to God not close it. This parable puts us on watch. It awakens us to God.
This parable starts “At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like…” He speaks in the future tense. In some parables Jesus says the kingdom of God is like something – present tense, but here he is speaking of what is yet to come.
Whenever we read a passage of the Bible we need to pay attention to the context. What comes before and what comes after. Often it makes a difference in the meaning of a passage. This parable is in a string of three illustrations that are all about being ready for someone to unexpectedly show up. Jesus uses these illustrations to speak of when he will come.
The first image is of a thief coming in the middle of the night. Jesus says:
If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
Jesus says, “be ready.”
The second image is of a master returning to see if his servant is taking care of his household. The servant was to take care of the property and the people. If the master returns and sees the servant beating the people and partying he will cut off that servant. Jesus teaches, “Stay ready by doing what God wants you to do when he comes.”
The third image is in this parable of a bridegroom returning unexpectedly.
Before and after these illustrations Jesus says, “Therefore, keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come/ you do not know the day or the hour.” Keep watch means to be spiritually alert. To keep watch is to be living as God wants us to live. It is to be awake in a spiritual sense to the Lord Jesus.
In this parable Jesus says the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins (or bridesmaids) who took their lamps and went out to meet the bride groom.
The setting is a wedding. Weddings are by invitation. You don’t have a right to be at a wedding. You get invited. To be invited to a wedding is an honor and an act of grace.
God out of his goodness and love invites us into his joy and to be a part of his kingdom, and a celebration that will far outdo anything anyone in this life can come close to.
Weddings in Jesus’ day were very different from ours. When we have a wedding invitations are sent out for the exact day, time and location. We celebrate for a few hours, and we are done.
In ancient Jewish weddings it worked differently. There was a general sense of the day and time of the wedding ceremony, but not an exact day and time. Usually the bride and groom would have been engaged for at least a year, and the groom was busy adding onto the house of his father – “preparing a place” – for he and his bride to live. They were considered as married which is why when Joseph learns that Mary is with child, though no ceremony had taken place, it says he decided to divorce her.
After that year or so, and when the groom made all things ready, there was a sense that the wedding could happen anytime now. The bride would be surrounded by her bridesmaids waiting for the time her bridegroom and his family and entourage would come to get her.
Part of the tradition was to catch the bride unaware so the bridegroom’s entourage would often come in the middle of the night, although there was a general sense of when this would happen. When that happened a shout would go up, “The bridegroom is coming! Get ready!” The bride and her party would have to get up and be ready to go.
The bridegroom would then take his bride back to the place of the wedding ceremony. It would actually begin with the consummation of the relationship, then would come the ceremony, followed by a large and lavish party filled with joy that would last up to a week.
Can you imagine a week of partying? The music, the food, the bills?
Because this took place at night a person needed lamps to give light and participate. Today we have flashlights and lights on our phones and street lights. But in ancient Palestine you carried oil lamps so you could see and get to where you needed to go. And then, you needed lamps also to light whatever house or place you were in.
The design of a lamp was such that the wick would lay in the bowl that held the oil. The wick would be lit to provide light. You would trim your lamp to get it working.
The difference between the wise bridesmaids and the foolish bridesmaids in this parable is having oil. The foolish bridesmaids don’t take any oil with them. The wise bridesmaids took jars of oil along with them.
The bridegroom is delayed in coming. Part of this parable is about living in light of the bridegroom’s delay. The bridegroom is Jesus, and after two thousand years he is certainly delayed. Everyone has to go about their business and wait. Finally, he arrives.
A problem ensues when five of the bridesmaids realize they don’t have any oil to provide them light to get to the wedding and enter the celebration. They are unprepared. They don’t have any oil. They ask the other five but the other five have enough only for themselves. So the five without oil go to buy more oil. But the bridegroom comes while they are gone.
When the five who were unprepared finally go to the wedding the doors are shut and they cannot get in. They cry out to the bridegroom to let them in but he responds, “I do not know you.” In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught that there will be those who say, “Lord, Lord” but he will say “I never knew you” because they didn’t do the will of the Father. When the foolish bridesmaids say “Lord, Lord, open to us” it sounds very much like that. We want the Lord to know us.
It seems that the oil is what is important in this parable. But what is the oil about? What does Jesus want us to understand about the oil?
To have oil for our lamps is to have the stuff of the Lord Jesus Christ in our lives. The oil in our lamps is a faith in Jesus that is alive and active. I suppose the picture Jesus would use for our time would be batteries for our flashlight, or to keep it somewhat rustic – kerosene for our Coleman lantern.
Some people perhaps acknowledge Christ but don’t really have a life in Christ. It all dwindles away. They are enthusiastic at first but don’t stick with it or continue. Maybe the effort is too much? Maybe there are too many other things that allure them?
We need to get a life. A Christian life. We need a life that burns like a lamp for Christ, and for a lamp to burn it takes oil. It’s not enough just to discover faith in Christ. We also have to be filled.
We get oil for our lamps when we pursue lives of Christian discipleship.
We nurture our faith.
We practice our faith. We grow. We serve. We love.
We fall and stumble and do it imperfectly along the way, but we seek Jesus. We have jars of oil for our lamps.
We are ready.
This oil is our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That faith comes by grace but also is kept by practicing our faith. In both the Old and the New Testaments it says that those who are right with God will live by faith. Faith is lived. So many of Jesus parables are about a faith lived, a faith that is put into action…
• the seed that is accepted, and takes root and grows.
• a wayward son who changes direction in his life and returns to his father.
• a Samaritan who shows mercy to a half-dead man.
• never giving up in prayer like a woman who won’t leave the judge alone until she is heard.
• going into the vineyard and working for the father.
• being a faithful servant, doing what the master wants us to do in the household even though he is away.
There are people who have faith that Jesus died for them and forgives them. But they have no investment in Christ. They have no life in him. We don’t do it to be saved. We do it because we are saved and have known the goodness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
One time Jesus also said this, in kind of a reverse of this morning’s parable,
Be dressed and ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like people waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him.
Again, Jesus speaks about waiting, lamps burning, readiness.
And Jesus also said, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” Our lives are like lamps that shine for God.
For that light to shine – and Jesus would have been thinking of a lamp – it takes oil. Amidst all the things that fill our day to day lives we come to worship, we read our Bibles, we pray, we serve, we fellowship, we feed our faith in order to keep oil in our lamps.
Now, you might be wondering why couldn’t those five with oil have been gracious and generous and given some to those other five? Because faith can’t be transferred. You can’t borrow a relationship with Christ. You have to have one yourself. You can’t live on the spiritual capital of others. You can’t depend on others for your relationship with God. We have to have our own.
Jesus ends the parable with, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.” Indeed, we don’t. But we can be ready, prepared, wise.
We plan ahead for retirement, care, vacations, school. What about planning ahead for what is ultimate: our lives before God? Because someday the Lord Jesus Christ will return. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. I can scarcely imagine it. But I know that I want to be ready.