Introduction
Apparently, the difference between entering the kingdom of heaven and being locked outside is remembering to bring a spare container of oil.
Go to Costco. I’m sure they sell it in bulk.
That is a little unfair to the traditional interpretation of this parable. But only a little. We often reduce this story to a familiar lesson: be prepared. Jesus is coming back, nobody knows when, and we need to be ready. Five bridesmaids plan ahead. Five do not. The prepared enter the wedding banquet, and the unprepared are left outside.
But prepared for what? And what does that preparation look like?
Those questions are important because the story gives us some strange examples to follow. The wise bridesmaids refuse to share. The bridegroom arrives late and then closes the door on people who were waiting for him. Everyone falls asleep, and Jesus concludes by telling his disciples to keep awake.
There is more going on here than a reminder to check our supplies.
And if we finish this parable convinced that Christian faithfulness means securing our own place while leaving everyone else to figure things out for themselves, I think we need to read it again.
Narrative Context
We have moved out of the temple.
Following his confrontations with the religious authorities, Jesus leaves the temple and speaks privately with his disciples on the Mount of Olives. They ask about the temple’s destruction, his coming, and the end of the age (24:1–3). Chapters 24–25 are a part of this response.
These warnings are now being addressed to the disciples. Not the religious leaders. Not a large crowd. They cannot listen as though Jesus is warning someone else.
Delay becomes a repeated feature of this section of stories. A servant decides that his master is taking too long (24:48). The bridegroom is delayed (25:5). The master in the next parable returns after a long absence (25:19). The disciples must consider what faithfulness looks like when the waiting continues.
Matthew holds that tension between delay and urgency. Jesus still speaks of an approaching judgment, and yet its timing remains beyond the disciples’ knowledge. Matthew hasn’t simply pushed the end into a comfortably distant future, it’s something that is always on the horizon.
But there is something particularly important immediately before our reading.
Jesus describes a servant whose master has placed him in charge of the household. His responsibility is to make sure the other servants receive their food at the proper time. When the master returns and finds him doing that work, Jesus calls the servant blessed (24:45–46).
It is a fairly ordinary picture of faithfulness. The household needs to eat. The servant has been entrusted with making sure that happens. He continues caring for the people whose needs do not disappear while the master is away.
But Jesus also describes what happens when the servant takes the master’s delay as an opportunity to abuse his position. He begins beating the other servants and eating and drinking with drunkards. When the master unexpectedly returns, the servant faces a severe judgment (24:48–51). The delay has exposed what he is willing to do with the authority entrusted to him.
That gives some substance to this language of readiness. The faithful servant is ready for his master’s return because he is doing the work his master gave him: feeding the household. His attention to the people around him is part of his faithfulness to the one who is absent.
And Jesus calls this servant both faithful and wise.
That word should stay with us as we turn to the wise and foolish bridesmaids. Before we hear about anyone’s oil supply, Jesus has already given us a picture of wisdom expressed through care for other people. We should carry that picture into the wedding.
Keep Awake. Everybody Take a Nap.
Ten bridesmaids go out to meet the bridegroom. Five are introduced as foolish and five as wise. The foolish bring their lamps without an additional supply of oil. The wise bring flasks along with their lamps.
Then the bridegroom is delayed, and all ten fall asleep.
All ten.
The wise do not establish a watch schedule. Nobody sets an alarm. They sleep alongside the foolish and wake at the same midnight announcement.
This does not mean that Jesus has contradicted himself. “Keep awake” can be a call to vigilance rather than a commandment against sleeping. But it does mean that the distinction between these groups cannot be their ability to remain constantly alert.
The distinction is their oil.
When the bridesmaids prepare their lamps, the foolish discover that theirs are going out. They ask the wise to share. The wise refuse, saying that there will not be enough for everyone, and recommend a trip to the dealers.
At midnight.
Apparently, this wedding has access to a twenty-four-hour oil retailer.
While the foolish are away, the bridegroom arrives. The others enter the banquet, the door closes, and the latecomers are refused entry.
We should notice that the foolish have tried to address their shortage. They followed the advice they were given. The story never tells us whether they successfully bought oil. Their attempt to become prepared takes them away from the very person they came to meet.
And the bridegroom who kept everyone waiting will not wait for them.
Now I’m not saying the preparedness theme is irrelevant. But the details of this parable make it difficult to treat this story as a straightforward celebration of good planning vs poor planning.
If the bridegroom had arrived several hours later, would the wise still have had enough? Another night? Another week?
At some point, everyone runs out of oil. A larger flask gives us a longer wait. It does not give us control over when the bridegroom arrives.
What Are We Supposed to Be Stockpiling?
I’ve been a little unfair here. The traditional reading deserves more than a caricature. Matthew has already associated Jesus with a bridegroom (9:15). The wise and foolish recall the builders at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (7:24–27). And the bridesmaids’ appeal, “Lord, lord,” followed by a refusal of recognition, recalls Jesus’ warning in 7:21–23.
Those connections give us good reasons to hear this as a warning about readiness for Christ’s coming.
But they do not settle what readiness means.
Interpreters have identified the oil with faith, good works, perseverance, or a life of discipleship that another person cannot live on our behalf. That last point has some merit. Someone else cannot do our loving, forgiving, or following for us.
Still, the text never identifies the oil.
If the oil represents good works, what do we do with the refusal to share? If it represents faith, how does sending someone away help them receive it? If it represents a life shaped by Jesus’ teaching, we need to remember what Jesus has actually taught.
In the Sermon on the Mount, the wise builder hears Jesus’ words and acts on them. Those words include generosity, mercy, love of enemies, and freedom from anxious accumulation (“Consider the lilies of the field…”).
Whatever readiness means here, it has to remain accountable to that teaching.
We cannot make “be prepared” the essential lesson and then leave the content of preparation undefined. Otherwise, the gospel becomes a warning to acquire “enough of… something” before God’s patience expires.
And we are still left wondering how much is enough.
Who Is Closing the Door?
This is where I want to return to the direction I took with this parable three years ago.
What happens if we flip this parable? Like I did the parable of the wedding banquet and the man without a wedding robe?
What happens if the church sees itself in the bridegroom who refuses to open the door?
Now, Matthew does not identify Peter as the bridegroom, and the connections of the bridegroom being Jesus are substantial. However, I am proposing that we let the closed door become a mirror for the church, reading this scene alongside the rest of Matthew’s Gospel.
Earlier, Jesus promises: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (7:7).
Here, the bridesmaids ask for help and are refused. They appeal for admission and the door remains closed.
That tension deserves our attention.
The promise in Matthew 7 concerns God’s generosity toward those who ask. It does not automatically cancel every warning about judgment later in the Gospel. But it does shape the life of the people who trust that generosity. Jesus immediately connects this teaching to treating others as we would want to be treated (7:12).
Then, in Matthew 23:13, Jesus condemns religious authorities for shutting people out of the kingdom of heaven.
We should not hear that accusation as permission for Christians to congratulate ourselves at the expense of Jewish leaders. Jesus’ disciples are about to receive their own extended warning in chapters 24 and 25. The Christian church is fully capable of exercising religious authority in ways that burden people and obstruct their welcome. Which leads us to why this parable may be a caution for the Church.
Peter has already received the keys of the kingdom (16:19). The language of binding and loosing will have also been given to the gathered disciples (18:18). Those passages concern the exercise of authority in the community. They also make the image of a closed door particularly uncomfortable.
What are we doing with the authority entrusted to us?
We proclaim God’s welcome. We also decide who receives a welcome among us. We teach forgiveness. We also make judgments about whose failures should continue to define them. We speak about grace while expecting people to arrive with their lives sufficiently organized to fit into the community we have built.
There are plenty of ways to tell someone, “You should have brought more oil.”
You should have learned this already. You should have made better decisions. You should have known how things work here. Come back when you are ready.
And while they are away trying to become the people we expect them to be, the door closes.
The Christ We Are Waiting to Meet
The end of Matthew 25 makes this even more difficult.
In the scene of the sheep and the goats, people discover that their treatment of those who were hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, or imprisoned was also their treatment of Christ. The scene makes recognition of Christ inseparable from the reception of people whose need can make them easy to dismiss.
That should trouble a church content to leave people outside.
We may be waiting for Jesus while refusing the people through whom he comes to us.
If we recognize ourselves among those who have enough, we need to consider what we do when someone else does not.
And if we imagine ourselves responsible for the door, we need to consider whom we might be refusing to receive.
Peter Will Not Be Ready Either
There is another reason to resist dividing the congregation neatly into the prepared and the unprepared.
We are about to watch the disciples fail.
In Gethsemane, Jesus asks them to remain awake with him. They fall asleep repeatedly (26:36–46). When he is arrested, the disciples desert him and flee (26:56).
Peter, who has been so confident about his faithfulness, denies knowing Jesus.
The bridegroom says, “I do not know you.”
Peter says, “I do not know the man” (26:72, 74).
Peter will need mercy after a failure he insisted would never happen.
The disciples listening to this parable will not emerge from the passion as models of adequate preparation. Their confidence will collapse. Their promises will fail.
Yet the risen Jesus gathers these failed disciples again. He entrusts them with a calling and promises his continuing presence (28:16–20).
The Gospel continues through the cross and resurrection to a renewed commission.
The church lives because Christ meets people whose faithfulness has failed.
What will the Church do with the mercy we’ve received when were are the ones charged with stewarding God’s people?
Preaching Possibility
Somebody’s Knocking
There is something satisfying about being the person who thought ahead.
We brought the extra oil. We read the instructions. We did what we were supposed to do. When someone else runs into trouble, it is tempting to regard that trouble as confirmation that we were right.
Sometimes we would rather see someone experience the consequences of a mistake than help them through it.
That satisfaction can become particularly ugly when it enters the church.
We can become more invested in explaining why someone is outside than in receiving them. We can rehearse their failures until the closed door seems entirely reasonable. They had their chance. They should have known. We cannot be expected to make up for everyone else’s poor planning.
And perhaps they really did make a mistake. Maybe there really was poor planning. The parable calls five bridesmaids foolish. We do not have to make them secretly wise before we care about what happens to them.
That is precisely where this gets uncomfortable.
Mercy concerns people who need it, including people whose choices have contributed to their need. If our welcome depends on someone demonstrating that they have never been foolish, our churches will be remarkably empty.
Peter certainly will not be there.
But we should also be careful that we don’t turn this into another test of preparedness: this time, make sure you have performed enough hospitality to secure your place. We can turn even a sermon about grace into instructions for preparing better next time.
The promise from which we begin is that the crucified and risen Jesus comes back to disciples who failed him. He gathers them, gives them work to do, and promises to remain with them.
We are among the people who need that mercy.
That gives the church a reason to answer the door without first establishing that the person outside deserves what we have received. Because we have all been on the outside of the door before. We have all had our light diminish. We’ve all run out of oil.
We can help someone who has run out. We can stay beside someone whose plans have fallen apart. We can welcome someone who arrives with questions, regrets, and very little to offer.
The Christ who entrusts us with this calling knows the failures of the people he calls. His promise to remain with us reaches beyond the confidence we begin with and sustains us when that confidence fails.
We do not have to keep the banquet safe from people like us.
Somebody’s knocking. By the mercy of the Christ who has gathered us, we can open the door.
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