Friday in the 21st Week of Ordinary Time, August 26, 2022

Matthew 25, 1-13

Jesus told his disciples this parable: “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 were wise. The foolish ones, when taking their lamps, brought no oil with them, but the wise brought flasks of oil with their lamps. Since the bridegroom was long delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight, there was a cry, ‘Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all those virgins got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise ones replied, ‘No, for there may not be enough for us and you. Go instead to the merchants and buy some for yourselves.’ While they went off to buy it, the bridegroom came and those who were ready went into the wedding feast with him. Then the door was locked. Afterwards the other virgins came and said, ‘Lord, Lord, open the door for us!’ But he said in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, I do not know you.’ Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

The sin that offends the Lord Jesus the most is the contempt that has its greatest sign in complacency.  Here, for instance, the foolish virgins do not make any attempt to do justice to the honor accorded them, in not stocking up on the oil they will need.  The Lord condemns this again in the Parable of the Wedding Feast (Matthew 22, 1-24), in which the king comes across a guest who is not wearing the proper wedding garment and will not answer his question as to why not.  Again, in the Parable of the Ten Talents (Matthew 25, 14-30), the servant that is punished has not even tried to make money for his master.  None of these characters in the parables act in accordance with their responsibilities or even in their own self-interest.  As a result, they are put “outside”, that is, their choice to separate themselves from the others is honored, and they remain in their own darkness of self-reproach and self-destruction.

The virgins the Lord calls “wise”, or, “prudent”, are those who take seriously the honor accorded them and simply carry out their duty.  They do nothing extraordinary — a fact the Lord makes clear when he says that they fall asleep while waiting for the bridegroom to return.  That is, they succumb to wounded human nature.  But they accomplish their task by recognizing the potential problems they might face and act so as to minimize them: they buy enough oil so that even if the bridegroom comes later, they will have enough to relight their lamps for him.  The “foolish” virgins are not let off through their weaker intelligence: they could have, but did not, follow the example of the prudent virgins.  This is a matter of the will, not of the intellect, and so they are faulted by the bridegroom. 

At the end of the world, the wicked will attempt to excuse their actions by claiming ignorance: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty . . . and not serve you?” (Matthew 25, 44).  That is, they will acknowledge that they failed to carry out their duty, but only because of inherent weakness for which they could not be blamed.  But the Lord, in replying to them in virtually the words he replies to the just — “As long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me” — tells them that they had the example of the just to follow, and they refused to do so.  The Lord thus exposes the contempt which the wicked manifested through their complacency and attempted to disguise as ignorance.

The Lord knows full well that we are prone to human frailty.  As he said to the sleeping Apostles on the night he was arrested, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”.  But he will aid us in our need if we desire to do his will.  That the Apostles did not do his will and fled into the darkness when the leaders of the Jews came for him was not due to their human weakness but to the fact that they did not do as the Lord told them in order to receive his help: “Keep watch, and pray that you enter not into temptation.”  They neither kept watch nor prayed, but fell further into the slumber of sin.