Homily for the Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

As we approach the final days and weeks of the present liturgical calendar, the Lord offers us three Parables about “the End Times,” and our preparedness to meet the Lord when He comes for us, both individually, at the moment of our death, and collectively, at the Second Coming and the Final Judgment.

So we hear today:
+ about the foolish bridesmaids

next week:
+ about the waste of talent

finally:
+ about the Separation of the Sheep and the Goats.

The Parable that we heard today focuses on the Last Things, specifically about God’s Final Judgment. In telling this story, the Lord uses a technique frequently found in apocalyptic literature: it’s highly imaginative, and future oriented. Indeed, this particular Parable is rare among the Lord’s stories in that it is spoken in the future tense where most of His stories are told in the present tense.

When looking closely at the story, three essential elements emerge for our instruction:
+ the meaning of the story
+ the reason for telling it
+ what the listener should do upon hearing it.

The Meaning… 
… is that the soul should always be prepared. Less like the Boy Scouts’ motto, “Be Prepared,” the lesson to be learned here is closer to the motto of the Marines: Semper Fideles: (always faithful). We, as the Church Militant, are meant to be watchful, vigilant, and prepared, in a word: faithful.

In this Parable, the Wise sleep alongside the Foolish. but one kind of sleep is taken in trust, the other in neglect. When we take to our beds, it would be good to  consecrate our sleep, and even our lives, to God: a little like the child’s prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep…” but perhaps more like Pope Saint John XXIII who put his Guardian Angel in charge of the Church when he retired for the night, praying to God, “It’s your Church… I’m going to bed.”

Not an act of presumption, this is faith in action, trusting God to do His part when our part is temporarily interrupted. Yet, as we will hear in our upcoming Advent Readings, we must “stay awake” in our wakefulness, even more so than the Apostles who nodded off in the Garden of Gethsemane as Our Lord faced His Passion.

The Reason…
… the Lord gives us this Parable is that we don’t know the day nor the hour of the Bridegroom’s (Christ’s) arrival, be it either at the moment of our death, or at the Lord’s Second Coming.

Saint Martin of Tours (4th-century Bishop) was told in a vision when he would die. He used the rest of his life preparing for this event, and God received Martin’s soul at the very moment He had promised. Saint Martin lived his final years and days not in sorrow or fear, but in peace and joy, as he continued his work as Bishop, maintaining, as it were, the Oil of Preparedness that the Wise Bridesmaids retained.

The oil that ran out for the foolish Bridesmaids can be likened to the Wisdom that is praised in our First Reading. We heard there, that Wisdom, spoken of in the feminine, and regarded by the Jews as the highest of virtues, is “readily perceived by those who love her, and readily found by those who seek her.” We heard further, that “whoever watches for her at dawn (meaning whoever holds Wisdom as highest priority) shall not be disappointed.” And finally: “… she makes her own rounds,
seeking those worthy of her.”

Though the Virtue of Wisdom is spoken of in the feminine, the ultimate personification of Wisdom is revealed in the masculine: It is Jesus, who as the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity is known to us as The Wisdom of God. The Old Testament Book of Wisdom, from which we have heard, presages the Second Coming of Christ who, while always available to those who seek Him, will actually seek us in love and judgment at His Second Coming.

What to do in preparation
This brings us to our final consideration: What we are to do in preparation for the Lord’s Coming. In our watchfulness, what, are we meant to be watching for?  Two things, mainly:

First: 
Our unique patterns of sin. This would involve regular examination of conscience, and more frequent Confession. The motivation for this would be less about fear and more about what we pray concerning sin in The Act of Contrition, which is:
“most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art all good, and deserving of all my love.”

Secondly:
We must consider failed opportunities for Charity in our sins of omission, and, therefore, lost moments of Grace because the Sacraments (especially the Eucharist and Penance, which we can receive frequently) give us Sanctifying Grace, while our charitable works give us Actual Grace.

Like the foolish Bridesmaids, we can run out of Grace, and therefore, our torches will burn out. To use an analogy from the art of baking, for example, we can run to the neighbor to borrow a cup of sugar if we’ve run out, but we cannot, when meeting the Lord, borrow from our neighbor a cup of Grace.

Looking ahead to how we are to live, I will close with a quote from Saint Augustine:

“Watch with the heart, watch with faith… make ready the lamps, make sure they do not go out. Renew them with the inner oil of an upright conscience. Then shall the Bridegroom enfold you and embrace you in His love, and bring you into His banquet room where your lamps can never be extinguished. (Sermons 93, 17)