Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 8, 2020 – Wisdom 6:12-16; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13

Anybody who has had an association with scouting during their lives probably knows the Scout Oath, the Scout Law, the Scout Motto, the Scout Promise. What you probably don’t know is that when Lord Baden-Powell created scouting, he asked the help of a friend of his who was a Benedictine monk to create those slogans and those lists of virtues for boys and girls. The shortest of them all is the Scout Motto, “Be Prepared.” “Be Prepared.”

Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.” And that’s kind of the message behind today’s gospel. That’s why I asked you to listen for its inconsistency. The motto at the end of the gospel says, “Therefore be alert,” or the translations say, “Be awake.” But it’s the wrong motto, it’s the wrong lesson for the story that Jesus just told.

Jesus tells us the story about being prepared. The virgins, some of them brought extra oil, some of them didn’t. They were unprepared. The inconsistency is that all ten virgins fell asleep. So, at the end of the story, you can’t say the motto is to be awake if all ten of them fell asleep. What happened here? 

When Jesus told the story, there was no moral at the end of the story. It ended when the bridegroom said, “Go away, I don’t know you.” But then, as the story was retold and Christians experienced different ways of being Christian, the moral was added to it. Because, as you heard in the second reading, the earliest Christians thought Jesus was coming right back, and they had to be ready right away, they had to stay awake because they might miss the second coming. When He didn’t come back, they had to readjust their understanding of what Jesus meant by his promised return. Then it became a question of preparedness for the Christian life.


Most people who were in scouting probably never realized that they were living out Christian ideals that came from Catholic background, but they were insinuated into the life of scouting. The same thing is true with other things as well. That’s why I asked you to figure out, if you might, what was the anomaly in the first reading. The anomaly is that wisdom is portrayed as a woman. 

Why is that an anomaly? And why is it so? Because this Book of Wisdom, and most of the other wisdom literature, was written in the last century before Jesus was born. By that time Greece had conquered the Mediterranean. When the Jews came back from the Babylonian exile, it was because the Persians really didn’t care all that much what you believed. When Cyrus wanted to cement his relationship with all the peoples in the area, he let them go back home again. When they got back home they decided that the only way to be truly Jewish was to enforce the Torah in all of its rigor. And they lived in a very patriarchal society. There were many very difficult laws regarding women. So it is ironic then, that the wisdom literature chooses to cast Wisdom, the daughter of God, as a woman and not as a man. Why might that be so? Because, probably, these books were written to combat Greek culture. 

Unlike the Persians, the Greeks had a very high culture. If anybody’s ever heard the word Aristotle or Plato, you’ll understand right away what I’m talking about. And the youngest generation of Jewish people living under Greek rule began to think that maybe Greek philosophy offered a better way of life than the Torah. So the wisdom literature was written to say, “Hey, no, no, we have our own wisdom.” The goddess of wisdom in Greece was Athena, and so they cast Wisdom as a woman to combat that. But here’s the greater truth there - the concept of woman as equal to man, and as having a valid place in society, comes through in that reading. Lady Wisdom is not married to anybody. She’s her own boss. She makes her own decisions. She goes out after people instead of waiting for them to come to her. In every way she is what we would call a modern woman. So, insinuated into this strongly patriarchal Torah, now comes this alternate version which bubbles up in different ways. In St. Luke’s gospel you can see it because every time Jesus tells a parable with a male central figure, He tells a parable just like it, with a female central figure. Matthew, who is thoroughly Jewish in his background, tells the story we just heard this morning, and creates as the heroes and villains, a bunch of bridesmaids. It comes up again in the very earliest days of Christianity when most people entering the church were of Jewish origin and women baptized the women, while men baptized the men. Again it comes through in the listing of the martyrs in the very earliest Christian consecration prayer for the Eucharist, where all the female martyrs are listed along with all the male martyrs. Then again in the earliest part of medieval Christianity, when the religious orders begin to be formed, the Benedictine rule has within it rules for female orders as well as male orders. And, in that context, the Mother Abbess of a congregation has as much authority in Church law as a bishop. Even though she couldn’t consecrate the Eucharist, her power over her subjects, if you want to call it that, was equal in canon law as that of a bishop over his priests. All the time this comes bubbling up insinuated into a larger context.

I tell you that because we have to be prepared. In today’s world we are faced with a whole bunch of challenges. How do we be prepared for those challenges? In an individual sense, it comes from our religious background - from the gospels, from our teaching, from our practice – but, in a broader sense, it’s not an individual thing, it’s a community thing. All of us together need to be prepared. For what? To meet Jesus where He is. Jesus is in each one of our crises - in the crisis regarding universal health, in the global pandemic - Jesus is there, inviting us, comforting us, challenging us. In issues regarding justice and rights, Jesus is there in the midst of the conflict, inviting us, comforting us, challenging us. In all of those different things, Jesus is there. The message that comes through from all of our readings this morning is simply two words - Be Prepared!