Our parable this Sunday is about 10 virgins with oil lamps, waiting to meet the bridegroom for the evening banquet. In the parable, the wise women brought extra oil but would not share it with the thoughtless women whose lamps had run out. Why? “Oil lamps” from those times would fit in the palm of a hand and were meant to be tucked into little niches in the walls of rooms. And the flasks for the extra oil one might carry for this occasion were also small. So the “foolish virgins” had to leave to buy more oil and thus missed the bridegroom’s arrival and their chance to be at the wedding feast.
What did this parable mean for Matthew’s Gospel community? His was a community that had been waiting for the return of the risen Lord at the “end time,” called “Kairos time,” for 50 years since Jesus’ resurrection. Waiting for something for a long time is hard. The expectation that the thing being waited for will really happen begins to dull. Attention turns to other things, and the importance of what we wait for begins to fade, or we just lose hope. That happens also to us in various ways. Will a relationship we are in really get better, or should we just give up trying and “live with it”? Is there really any point in contacting our representatives in Congress about an issue? So many things that prompt us to act are complex, and absolute “proof” that we should act is not there — only persuasive reasons subject to human interpretation. And what if we make a mistake? So we don’t act. In our spiritual life, there is the same slowness to change, to act. Routine, busyness, fatigue and other things make it so easy to sleepwalk through life. Our long lifetimes make it easy to procrastinate about attending to our relationship with the Lord. Like the waiting women, or the apostles trying to pray with Jesus in the Garden, we fall asleep. We don’t notice the signs that we are slipping away from the Lord, or slipping up. Vatican II issued a strong cry that our Church, and its members, need to pay attention to the signs of our times. What are they? What is our Kairos hour, signs calling us to pay attention and act? What is stopping us from acting? The light from the lamps we carry is the light of Christ, given us in baptism. Is it burning brightly in us? Where does our small or large world need it to shine? Questions for us from this Sunday.
— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia
The post November 8, 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Action Needed: a Sunday Scriptures blog first appeared on Sisters of the Precious Blood.