Image by Vlad Vasnetsov from Pixabay
The Big Parade is based on Matthew 25:1-12
Alternative Possibilities
This was one of the first parables I ever saw ‘retold’ – a minor updating for children, replacing the oil lamps with more modern torches (‘flashlights’ in US English). The oil that was carried by five of the girls became spare batteries.
So it’s possible the parable only needs a minor tweak to be comprehensible. However, this puts the focus on the batteries/oil, on the ‘be prepared’ part of the parable. Left unanswered is why you’d need a torch/flashlight at a modern wedding – is the bridegroom getting married in a field?
Paula Gooder, in her book on the parables, says the ‘virgins’ in the parable may have been eleven or twelve. When we translate ‘virgins’ to ‘bridesmaids’, we lose the fact that Jesus was talking about kids. Pre-teen kids. The ‘thoughtless young girls’ are still expecting an adult – any adult – to help them out. The ‘sensible girls’ are a parent’s delight: they turn up with their lamp and their oil.
Their young age also fits with some suggestions that this is a comic parable – until the bridegroom’s rejection ends the comedy. The audience, like the thoughtless girls, expects someone to help the kids out. But the sensible girls refuse; then the bridegroom rejects them. It’s a shocking ending, but it drives home one of the main points of the parable – you are the only person who can prepare yourself to welcome the Lord.
Oil?
Is the oil an allegory? Or is it just oil?
In many sermons, the spare oil becomes allegorical – representing ‘good works’ or ‘prayer’. But if one point of the parable is ‘be prepared, be ready to welcome the Lord,’ then you need something to be prepared with. After all, there needs to be a way to differentiate between the girls.
The five sensible girls were responsible; didn’t rely on their mums to come rushing along with the spare oil. Nor did they expect oil sellers to be available at whatever time they’d need them. Instead, they made sure everything they needed to play their part in welcoming the bridegroom was ready. They could afford their nap.
So I’d suggest that the oil isn’t an allegory. It’s not ‘flags to hand’ or whether we’ve done our good deed for the day. Rather, it’s whether we are prepared to welcome the Lord. What we need for that could be different for each one of us.
Time
In Matthew’s Gospel, this parable finishes with an exhortation to stay awake – strange, when everyone in it (prepared or not) has fallen asleep! That suggests ‘Stay awake!’ may have been idiomatic rather than literal. In the same way, we might tell someone they’ve ‘hit the nail on the head,’ even though they’re not doing carpentry.
In the parable, the sensible girls don’t need to stay awake. They’re ready for the bridegroom’s arrival; all they need is the welcoming shouts to wake them up. The foolish girls? Well, as one commentator points out (Stanley Saunders) – why didn’t they find some oil instead of falling asleep? There was plenty of time, so why wait until the last second?
The parable is both a warning against wasting time and a call to be prepared for the Lord’s arrival. If we know we’ve fallen short (and we all have), start working out what to do about it. Don’t wait until the last second.
Artificial Intelligence
When I started this blog series, artificial intelligence was not at the stage where you could feed a writing request into a chat engine and expect to get a complete story back. Now you can – a request for ‘a modern version of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins’ will return a complete modern story.
But I didn’t use the story it provided. Why not?
An AI (in computing’s current stage) doesn’t quite understand what it’s doing. So it works on what it’s been ‘told’ about the parable – commentators say it’s about preparedness. Without being informed, it can’t understand the purpose of the preparedness. A human, Christian audience will realise a parable by Jesus is telling them to prepare for God; an unthinking AI won’t. The story I got back was well constructed, a great ‘parable’ – but incorrect. It was about preparedness, not about the reason for it.
It’s a very useful exercise for finding out our underlying assumptions. The assumptions which are so obvious, we never mention them. But, if we’re talking to non-Christians, we may need to.
Preparedness versus welcome
Commentators often discuss preparedness. They don’t discuss what their audience is supposed to be preparing for – their audience should know this is part of a series of parables on preparing for the End Times, for Judgement.
But if this parable is being retold to a non-Christian audience, just what or who is the listener is ‘preparing to welcome?’ It needs to be spelt out. After all, ‘Do you have enough oil/batteries/sandwiches in your spiritual backpack?’ is not a specifically Christian parable. And the audience might not even know why they need anything in their ‘spiritual backpacks’.
The question that needs to be asked, for Christians and non-Christians alike, is: when God comes, will we be welcoming? Or will we be rushing off to find an oil seller open at midnight?
Previous Parable: Counting the Cost (Luke 14: 28-33)
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