and pointlessness, and fill it with purpose and courage.
Let us face this parable frankly. When it was first spoken, it uttered a sentence of condemnation against the religious autocracy who were confident in themselves and their own piety and virtue, and it brought a new divine life and divine mercy to religious outcasts and sinners. Now you cannot split congregations into two parts and treat some as Pharisees and some as sinners. The truth is that every one of us is part Pharisee and part sinner, and the present God who imparts truth in the midst of time meets us on both parts. But to his judgment and grace, the answer is the same—the obedience of faith, which owns and accepts his judgment and believes his love.
11. Editor’s Note: This is obviously a much expanded version of the earlier and much shorter homily entitled “The Feast,” which for the sake of comparison follows this sermon.
“THE FEAST”—Matthew 22.1–10
[Preached once, on 10/18/53 as a homily for an ecumenical Communion service—the Free Church Societies’ Communion, Durham Congregational]
I need not use more than one of my precious minutes in recalling to you the outline of the story. A great man made a great feast. A number of people had had invitations long in advance, and when the feast was ready a servant was sent round to tell them so, and bid them come. But it was a long time since the invitation was given, and they had lost interest in it, so they all excused themselves. All the excuses were fundamentally the same: land, oxen, a wife, were all more interesting, important, and pleasurable than the feast. So the King who had made the feast duly punished his invited guests, who had murdered his messengers. More messengers were sent out to find new guests, and the banqueting hall was filled with the ragtag and bobtail of the streets.
We generally read the parable as a vivid representation of the Gospel, and take to ourselves no small comfort therefrom. We think of the goodness of God in calling us to his heavenly feast, the feast that is anticipated on earth in the life of faith and is especially concentrated into this monumental meal, the outcast and the despised, and conclude that therefore there is life even for ourselves.
We are right in this—the parable is a preaching of the Gospel. The good news of God’s love for the undeserving. But perhaps we are wrong in the place we find ourselves in the story. I suppose that when Jesus told this story, he had in mind, in the first instance, the Jewish authorities, and especially the Jewish pietists—the Pharisees, men who supposed, and did not suppose wrongly, that of all persons they might expect invitations to the Kingdom of God, and on the other hand, the people of the land, careless, untaught, irreligious by the best standards and unclean according to the Law.
Now if we were to transplant the parable to England in 1953, we must see where we come in. We primarily are the privileged; we are the intellectual aristocracy; we have lived in good homes and had good schools; we have been brought up in the Church; we are full of good works and activities of one kind or another. We are the people who murder God’s emissaries and rank our own affairs above, not his work (we are very busy with that) but above his feast. Is this not true? Are we, the religious backbone of the country, not so busy doing God’s work for him that we forget that we are at best his guests, recipients of his bounty? Aren’t we more like the hired servants than the prodigal son?
Of course I have deliberately over-simplified in order to counter another over-simplification. In fact, the only way to understand this parable is the dialectical way. Jesus didn’t mean that God called sinners into his Kingdom only by a sudden happy after-thought. What sort of God would a God who did that be? We are both; and we can only come rightly to this sacrament as we recognize that—gratefully thanking God for our privileges, penitent for our abuses of the privileges and especially of the dying love of Christ; and recognizing that we are at our best, poor, weak, lame, dirty beggars who may yet come to be fed at the King’s board.
“THE TEN VIRGINS”—Matthew 25.1–13
[Preached twenty times from 12/1/63 at Elvet to 11/6/05 at Newton Hall]
This is a good parable. It is true to human life. Some of us, in our most cynical moments, may feel is not the proportion of wise to foolish rather too high at 50 percent, but at all events it recognizes that we are a mixed bag. More than that, and more seriously, it rightly represents the Church as it lives between the two Advents.
THE TWO ADVENTS
This portion of Matthew reminds us that Advent, if we rightly understand it, means always not one Advent of Christ, but two. In the parable there are two elements of great importance. Interpreters have nearly always seen in it a reference to the future coming of Christ. The bridesmaids wait for the coming of the bridegroom that they may go out to meet him; the Church awaits the coming of the Lord to bring judgment and redemption. A generation or so ago, however, perhaps because people were finding the idea of a future coming of Christ difficult, they picked on another point; the fact that the all important question in the parable is whether or not you have oil in your lamp, and in your vessels here and now. That is, the distinction between the wise and foolish virgins is made not in the future, but in the present.
Which of these ways of interpreting the parable is right? They are both right. All through the Gospels, the Kingdom of God has a future and a present aspect. One must make decisions here and now that will decide the issue in the future. Seed sown now yields a harvest in the future. A person must be ready to venture all his wealth now, to buy a field, which will yield him treasure in the future. He must sacrifice all the pearls he has collected in the hope of obtaining the pearl of great price. And so on.
You can’t get rid of these past and future elements, and between them the past and future control the present in which we live. Of course the coming of the bridegroom is a metaphor, and how God means to wind up history and make up his accounts with us is more than I can say; Christ is the end for Christ is the beginning. Christ is the beginning, for the end is Christ. Now if we may for a moment go back to the parable, one thing you don’t expect in a wedding is to swap bridegrooms part way through. There may be a case for a substitute in a football match part way through, in a wedding, most weddings anyway, a similar move would be distressing. I hope I am making my point clear. There is a unity all throughout the Christian story, and the unity is Jesus Christ. I suggest two aspects of this.
First, the future advent, however we may demythologize it, means judgment. And we cannot pretend we don’t know the basis upon which the judgment will proceed. Not that Jesus ever laid down a code of rules with penalties for transgressions neatly attached. It is enough that we know that he who shall come to be our judge is—Jesus. A late parable puts it in this way, that which makes the difference between the sheep and the goats is whether they have or have not clothed the naked, fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited the stranger in prison. Has it occurred to you that what this amounts to is the question: Have you treated your fellow human beings as Jesus treated them? For there is no doubt as to his attitude towards the sufferer, the needy, the oppressed.
Second, he whose coming puts us to the test, is also the one who appoints us our task and equips us for it. Have you considered the ghastly blasphemy of some of the medieval pictures of Christ, in the apses, for example, in some of the medieval churches in Italy and Sicily. Again and again Christ appears as a frowning judge, with no hint that he is more. Yet it is he who not only calls us, but supplies us with the strength to do his service. He who shall be our judge is he who made and makes possible the life of obedience, releasing persons from sin, from all the forces that bind and constrain them and make it impossible for them to live the life God wills. The process is a unity through all
Bishop Lightfoot,
