31st Sunday of ordinary time
October 30th, 2011
Mt 25, 1-12
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
Matthew’s parable of the ten bridesmaids looks simple, but isn’t. There were five fools
among them, and five wise. The issue was oil. In the middle of the night, the bridegroom
arrived, and the fools had run out of oil. They wanted to borrow from the wise. [The wise
were probably Arab – they owned the oil.] The wise sent them to the oil moguls. They came
back late. They were not let in. ‘I don’t know you’.
I’d like to read between the lines here. Once the bridegroom has arrived, history has changed.
You aren’t waiting in the dark anymore. You don’t need lamps anymore. You don’t depend
on oil anymore. If you get around carrying lamps in a well-lit wedding hall, you look silly.
Maybe all ten were fools! They are behaving as they did in a previous age, as if it were
still going on…. ‘I don’t know you’ means you look like a Swiss Guard in a modern army.
Matthew seems to aim this parable at Pharisees. Matthew’s objection to Pharisees is that
they do things mainly to be seen. They look for the most prominent seats in synagogues, and
the best couches at meals. They want to get their photo in the equivalent of the Catholic
Newspaper every week… and get a free meal at a club. They turn up where they can be
noticed, without doing anything much for others when they get there. [It’s interesting that an
old Catholic tradition is the opposite: find a seat right at the back!] They dress up to be
noticed! Orthodox Jews used to wear around their heads little boxes with scripture texts in
them from the Torah, so as to have the Torah always ‘before their eyes’. There’s nothing
wrong with that as long as they were keeping the Torah. It’s a bit like Catholics of an older
generation wearing scapulars or medals. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, as long as
the motives are healthy, and the behavior follows suit. The Jews wore tassels or fringes on
their clothing. If they could afford it, they wore long robes… Nothing wrong with that in
itself, even Jesus seems to have done it sometimes. But if it was saying, we are the good,
nice, proper, clean people around here, not the riff-raff… and you others who aren’t dressed
properly as we are, you’re the riff-raff… then the motive is definitely wrong. The Jews liked
being greeted with honorific titles, like Rabbi, like Teacher. Or is it now among Christians,
like Father, or my Lord, or (Very, Most) Reverend, Doctor, Professor… ‘Father’ was a term
that Jews reserved for the patriarchs. ‘Lord’ was a term claimed by the Roman Emperors,
and given by the early Christians only to Jesus in direct challenge to the Roman Emperors.
Bishops got to be called ‘my Lord’ in England when they also had seats in the House of
Lords. Titles come from cultural backgrounds. But cultures changes, like the times…
You could well say, isn’t it ok to go for a seat in a corporate box, or in the committee room at
the races, if you can get them? Isn’t it the right thing to look like the right thing? Matthew
would say, the problem is why you are doing it. Have a look at your motives. The problem
is your interest in self-promotion. Your individual self-promotion, etc, but the self-promotion
of your organization, too. You want it to look like it can’t end.
Beneath the obvious messages here, there is a bigger one, and it might let us be a bit
sympathetic to the Pharisees. They were only doing what all organizations do when their
day is over. They were trying to keep the show going.
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The organizations that are best at this, as history shows, are empires. They all work hard to
keep themselves going well after they have had their day. Look at the Roman empire, the
British empire, the American empire, the Soviet empire… When they are gone, they try to
carry on as if they are still what they think they were in their heyday. They live the illusion
that they can still live imperially, without actually being an empire any more. I think
that’s what the Pharisees were trying to do after Jerusalem fell in 70. I sympathize with them
in their aims, and am sorry for them because they couldn’t turn the clock back to pre-70!
They lost the temple, they reorganized around the synagogue in each area. They lost the
priests, they set up the Rabbis. Etc. It’s hard to say it, but they were trying to live in a new
cultural epoch as if the old one could just continue on…. And they didn’t have the means to
do that….
Empires do it. In Australia there’s still a feeling that the economy is good as long as we can
buy out the natives’ land and get the oil under it; as long as we can plant some foreign shrubs
and flowers in a neat English style house and garden (and pay a mortgage eventually to an
overseas insurer at a higher level of empire). In a past age, we thought of university
education as training for civil service jobs for the better people: now we expect almost
everyone to go to university and have the government pay for it, and when we finish there,
there are no civil service jobs anyway. The country is run by an inherited quasi-military
organization (officers and men, of the police, the fire brigade, the ambulance, etc.) The
schools are run by similar organizations. Like good scouts, we take it all for granted. We
don’t think outside a two party political system. It is at the service of an unchanging
administration which itself is in the interests of trade and power. It puts on the appearance of
listening to the common sense of the people when it really ‘governs’ in the way ‘government’
has ‘always’ been…
Once was empire. Do we have the oil to keep up the appearance of it? Or can we do a
quantum leap to a new time and a new culture?
How does this apply to the church? I wonder if the church isn’t doing something similar!
It is historically true that the church took on imperial ways – think of Constantine, think of
Gregory the Great, and there are other moments in that history. With the advent of modernity
(and now post-modernity) the church, I think, is largely trying to carry on as if its own longstanding imperial ways can still go on. A lot of missionaries still dispossess natives of their
local religion and get their land to build a European style church. A lot of local bishops and
priests still dispossess the faithful of a sense of belonging to the world as well as the church.
The numbers are smaller but the practice is the same. Look at liturgy: where do the
vestments come from – the age of empire. [Dressing up makes you look like part of the
system.] Yes, we tend to drop the bits that weren’t nice in the empire days, and just keep the
nice bits. Yes, we do have a two party theology (progressive and conservative) but we –
nearly all of us – are the same sort of people with the same family background and the same
education Yes, we do have church leaders flying around various places to meet and nod
their heads at things that any ordinary bloke knows was common sense anyway… Yes, the
people still dutifully give money to keep this show going…but there are less people….
The problem is that we don’t have the means to do this any more, and I don’t mean just the
financial means. Even if you think it is a good idea, or something God wants, do we have the
vision, the flexibility, the capacity to continue all this in a world that is very different from
what it was when these customs started and flourished? Can we see what church we can start
to be?
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And that leads to the question, how much of it do we need to keep up? How much is
necessary for genuine church life now? If someone had asked the Pharisees that question,
and they had seen the point of it, where would Israel be now? If someone asks the present
church that question… what could it be like and where could it go. Just a moment, Matthew
is asking Israel and the Church exactly that question… Hold the line, someone is knocking at
the door trying to get it…
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