Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Wisdom 6:12-16 · Psalm 63 · 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 · Matthew 25:1-13
Sometimes everyone is off at the merchants’ just when what they were waiting for arrives.
The first reading speaks of Wisdom as if she were a person. Those who love her soon see her; those who seek her find her. She is there before those who long for her. Whoever looks for her early in the morning won't have to work at it: he finds her sitting at his door. She goes about herself, looking for those worthy of her, and comes to meet them on every path.
Here, Wisdom is not the reward for great effort. She is already sitting there when you open the door in the morning.
In the Gospel, ten young women take their lamps and go out to meet a bridegroom. Five have brought flasks of oil, five have not. The bridegroom is a long time coming, and all ten grow tired and fall asleep, including the ones who planned ahead. In the middle of the night a call goes up: Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him! The ones without oil ask the others for some of theirs, or their lamps will go out. The others say there would not be enough for any of them; they should go to the merchants and buy their own. While they are gone, the bridegroom arrives. Those who were ready go in with him to the wedding feast, and the door is locked. When the others come back and call out, open the door for us, the answer from inside is: I do not know you. The parable closes: Stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
We never learn why the wise ones won't share. The locked door puzzles me too. What I notice is the change of direction. In the reading from Wisdom, something comes to meet people; in the Gospel, they have to go out to it.
Stay awake, the parable ends, and yet all ten fell asleep, the wise ones too. What sets them apart is the oil they had with them when the call came. Staying awake, here, means being ready, and no one has to be up all night for that.
I know them only too well, the five who run off to the merchants in the middle of the night. When something goes wrong, the busyness starts: a crisis meeting, an action plan, a status report every morning. Anyone who suggests waiting a few days is taken for someone who hasn't grasped how serious things are.
Acting is often the right thing. Sometimes, though, everyone is off at the merchants' just when what they were waiting for arrives. Waiting calmly comes easier if you have seen it happen once before: things went on when you no longer knew how to go on.
In the second reading Paul writes to the community in Thessalonica about their dead. They are not to grieve like the rest, who have no hope. He does not forbid them to grieve; he distinguishes two ways of grieving.
This week, on my other blog, Despair Overcome, I wrote about a book that quotes a line by Georges Bernanos: Hope is despair overcome. With that line in mind I read Paul differently. Then whoever has come through despair has hope, whether they believe or not. Paul closes with: Therefore, console one another with these words. A short form of the reading is permitted, and it stops before that.
Bernanos wrote The Diary of a Country Priest in 1936. I saw the film at seventeen, read the novel a few years later, and have read it so often since that I almost know it by heart. His village defeats the young priest, so does his own body, and he dies young. I read him as a man who, in the end, stops trying to make for himself what can only come to him.
His last words are: All is grace.
Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. The texts are given; I listen for what comes across.