Sermon — November 8, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
I’m sure that many of us have had the kind of friends who always cancel plans at the last minute; or the kinds of friends who lean on you for support, but disappear when you need them. Or the kinds of friends who say they don’t want any french fries, and then reach over to eat your french fries—right? But have you ever had the kind of friends who, when you’re all in a wedding party together, and the groom is running super late coming from those final Evans family photos after the ceremony, and your phone is running out of battery, and you ask to borrow your friend’s charger, they say no—except you really need your phone because the bride specifically asked you to post photos #HappilyEvansAfter and so you go to CVS and while you and half the other bridesmaids are trying to find a charger that actually works with your phone, everyone else gets in the limo to the reception and leaves you behind? Anyone have friends like that?
You might notice there’s a bit of a vibe shift in our readings today. As soon as sunset comes before 5 o’clock, some of the themes of Advent begin to appear: darkness and light, expectation and anticipation, judgment and death and apocalyptic change—you know, everything you expect from the holiday season. We always get a kind of pre-Advent season in November. So here we are, for the next three weeks, in Matthew chapter 25, hearing the final parables Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew before he’s betrayed and handed over to death. And the tone is beginning to shift.
But it isn’t only the tone. It’s the actual substance of what Jesus says. Just a few weeks ago, we heard the parable of the workers in the vineyard, in which those who showed up late to work at the eleventh hour were paid just as much as those who had been working hard all day; a story about a gracious and loving God who rewards us in a way we don’t deserve. But now, Jesus tells a very different tale, in which alertness and attention and immediate response are what matters; in which—rather than extending grace to those who slept in late—Jesus commands his disciples, in a somewhat threatening tone: “Keep awake! For you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13)
This doesn’t sound like the same God of grace. And the parable and its conclusion are rather strange. “Keep awake!” Jesus says. But the problem in the story isn’t that the bridesmaids are asleep when the groom arrives. If they’d been awake all that time, burning the midnight oil, even the wise ones would’ve run out! No, the real problem seems to be that some of the bridesmaids weren’t prepared for the groom to be delayed so long. Perhaps they thought it would be light still when the groom arrived; and so they hadn’t brought oil for their lamps.
“You know neither the day nor the hour,” Jesus says. But whose fault is that? Not the bridesmaids’, who showed up exactly when the invitation says. It’s the groom who’s delayed, who’s thrown the whole thing off. The groom is running late. That was a real concern for the early Church; and in fact, that’s the context for the passage we read today from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians.
The early Christians believed that Jesus would come again; that, just as he had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, he would descend from heaven to rule the earth. We still “proclaim the mystery of faith” that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, [and] Christ will come again.” But for them, this was an immediate idea. They thought that Christ would come again soon; not in some eternal sense, but on a real date, during their lives.
But the years had turned to decades, and Jesus had not come. And worse than that, some of the faithful people they loved and knew had died before his return. In other words: the bridegroom was running late. So the Christians in Thessaloniki had written to Paul, and asked him: What’s the deal? Will the people we knew and loved who died before Jesus returned be left out of his kingdom when he comes? And Paul writes to reassure them that this isn’t the case at all; in beautiful, imaginative language, he tells them that the same Jesus who rose from the dead will raise them from the dead, and we will all see God face to face, and “be with the Lord forever.” (1 Thess. 4:17)
He writes this to “encourage” the Thessalonians (4:18); to remind them that while we, as Christians, grieve the loss of those who’ve died, we do not “grieve as others who have no hope.” (4:13) And you can probably hear some echoes of the themes of All Saints’ Day from last week.
By the way, this letter is the first book of the New Testament to be written. The gospels that tell the story of Jesus’ life weren’t written until a few decades after his death. And so, even though Paul didn’t know Jesus when he was alive, and his ministry began after Jesus’ death, Paul actually wrote his letters before the four Gospels had been written down. And it’s pretty remarkable, that the main concern in the very earliest Christian text is that it’s been so long already, and Jesus hasn’t yet returned.
By the time today’s parable had been written down in the Gospel of Matthew, even more time had passed; the question of what to do when the bridegroom was delayed had become even more important. And in a sense, we’ve spent the last two thousand years waiting for the bridegroom to arrive, and many of the questions we bring with us to church are about that delay. Why doesn’t God show up on time when we need a miracle? Why doesn’t God intervene to make things right in the world? And how should we behave toward one another while we wait?
If parables were like fables, simple stories with clear morals, the answer to that last one would be obvious. We should act like these wise bridesmaids, carefully preparing ourselves for every eventuality and refusing to share with people who don’t deserve it. But parables aren’t fables. They don’t illustrate simple morals; they provoke us to think. When we read this parable, we might amid that these five “wise” bridesmaids are acting prudently from a business perspective; but wait, is this really how Jesus usually says we should behave?
It certainly isn’t how Jesus behaves. I said earlier that Matthew 25 is the last chapter of Jesus’ teaching ministry, before the Passion narrative begins. In Matthew 26, Jesus will go to the Garden of Gethsemane with his disciples and ask them to stay awake while he prays; they’ll fall asleep, he’ll wake them up, and then they’ll fall asleep again. He’ll be arrested, and Peter will deny he ever knew him. And then Jesus will hand himself over to death; he’ll offer his own life to save precisely those disciples who cannot “keep awake,” even for one hour.
On the next two Sundays, we’ll read the other two parables Jesus tells before all that: the parable of the talents, about what we do with the things that God has entrusted to us; and the parable of the sheep and the goats, in which Jesus tells us that when we give food to someone who’s hungry or clothes to someone who needs clothes, when we visit someone who’s sick or in prison or we welcome someone who’s a stranger, we do those things to him. This is not exactly oil-hoarding behavior.
So those five selfish bridesmaids may be “wise” in the eyes of the world. But, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:20, 25)
Sometimes we think we know what’s wise, and what’s foolish; and sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we believe that if we “keep awake,” and pay attention, then it will have some real effect on what happens to us; many people woke up Wednesday morning quite tired, as a result. Sometimes we think that if we can make a checklist big enough of all the details we need to know, if we can prepare for every eventuality down to extra oil in the flask, then we can ensure that things will go our way.
But in the parable, it doesn’t actually matter whether the bridesmaids stayed awake. It doesn’t matter whether they had oil in their lamps. It doesn’t matter how long the bridegroom delayed—or even how late the so-called “foolish” bridesmaids were. What matters, in the end, is whether the bridegroom “knew” them or not. (Matt. 25:12) Whether the bridegroom chose to open the door when they knocked.
And maybe that’s an alarming thought. It means there’s nothing we can really do to prepare. It means we have to trust that God will open the door when we knock. But over the days to come, Jesus would show those first disciples that he knew them better than they knew themselves; and that he loved them more than they could ever deserve. That however they failed or betrayed him, he would never let them down. That Jesus knows them—Jesus knows us—however wise or foolish we may be.
