If you go on the internet and look up “liturgical cycle,” one of the first illustrations that you’ll always find is a circle with colors. Part of the circle is purple, then a little bit of it is white, then some green, then some more purple, then some more white, then some more green. It’s blocked off into what they call “liturgical seasons.” We’re in the very first one right now for this year - the season of Advent - followed by the season of Christmas, and so on. You’d get the impression, from looking at the charts, that nothing ever changes. The only thing that really changes is what scriptures were used. Right now we’re beginning “Year B.” We just finished “Year A.” Next season will start “Year C.” They’re defined by which gospel is the primary gospel used during that season. But the charts are incorrect, because we do not have an endlessly repeating cycle in the life of the Church. It’s not a cycle at all. It’s something very different.

Carrie Underwood had a big country hit, and when I say country hit that means beware of overstatement. She had a big country hit called “Jesus Take the Wheel.” And it was a great idea. The story she’s telling is that she is overtired, car full of kids, and drifts away for just a second, and all of a sudden is confronted with an 18-wheeler bearing right down on her, and she panics. And says, “Jesus take the wheel; I don’t know what to do.” And the story goes on for two verses. And she flips the image into a metaphor about how the wheels frequently come off the car of life, and the only thing we can do in our desperation is say, “Jesus take the wheel.”

I was reminded of that because this very powerful parable that we just heard from Matthew’s gospel actually is based on the first reading, from the book of Ezekiel. And Jesus told, all together, in all the gospels, about five parables that involve shepherds in some way. All of them are rooted in the shepherd imagery from the book of Ezekiel, a little bit from the book of Isaiah, and the beautiful psalm we had as the psalm between the readings, “The Lord is My Shepherd.” The compound image has always been taken as one that is very gentle, very sweet, but the story in the first reading tells of a different tale.

All those of you who are now working for a living, or have ever worked for a living, think about the highest annual salary you ever made. Now round that figure up to the nearest thousand. Got it? Now multiply by five. I’ll wait. Got the figure? That’s how much the guy of the five talents got in 2020 figures. It’s a boat load of money! Even the guy with the two talents, even the guy with the one talent, got an awful lot of money.

And, since the story says that the master was gone for a long time, that means this money was invested in something that would yield a long term benefit, at least a CD. Nowadays, maybe one-and-a-half percent on a CD. But, in the stock market, which is ironically booming right now, that would’ve brought an enormous return on the individual investment. I mean an incredible amount of money.

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? 

All of us who received a religious education, whether in a parochial school or in a religious education class, up until probably the early 1970s, were required to memorize the eight Beatitudes, and give them back orally or in a written form on an exam. Imagine my surprise then, as a little boy, the first time I was at Mass and the priest proclaimed the gospel I just read. I said to myself, “Ooh, Jesus had to memorize them too.”

That’s because we were not aware. we were not made aware, that what we memorized was part of gospel passage. That, in fact, altogether there were nine Beatitudes, the last one aimed directly at Jesus’ audience rather than at a presumed group of people. The “this,” and the “that.” You, “you were persecuted in my name.”

In order to understand what we need to know about these Beatitudes, first of all we have to realize that when we were taught them they were treated as individual maxims, separate from one another. And that each one of them was analyzed for us as though a particular virtue, which was meaningful enough as it stood. But the way the gospels were formed tells us a very different story about the Beatitudes.