Through the Flaming Sword

In the Bible study that I facilitate on Thursday afternoons on Zoom, we’ve been studying Jesus’s parables, and we recently looked at the parable of the bridesmaids, Matthew 25:1–13.

Strong correspondences connect this parable with Jesus’s agonized praying in Gethsemane, and, at an angle, with the story of the transfiguration. His command to “keep watch” at the end of that parable corresponds to his command to Peter, James, and John to keep watch in Gethsemane.

What is Jesus commanding his followers to keep watch for in these stories?

All three of the parables in Matthew 25 are kingdom parables, by which I mean that they prophesy a coming new age, a time of judgment, and his listeners will not know the hour of its coming. Presumably he is referring to the coming of the kingdom on earth for which Jesus prays in the Lord’s prayer. Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. A krisis (judgment) is also coming, he proclaims—keep watch!

In the story of Jesus’s agony in Gethsemane, he likewise commands Peter, James, and John to keep watch, using the same word as in the parable, meaning to be vigilant, stay awake, keep watch. And like the bridesmaids who didn’t bring enough oil, Peter, James, and John fail—they fall asleep. But what where they supposed to keep watch for?

You could imagine that he meant to watch out for the police. But the way he’s taken them with him to a secret place separate from the other disciples echoes the transfiguration. And the correspondences with the parables of Matthew 25 suggest that the object of their vigilance is the same: the coming of God’s kingdom, just as Moses and Elijah came in the transfiguration.

Jesus was obviously hoping for something to happen in Gethsemane that would obviate the need for the suffering that was his alternative. What would that be? What was he praying for? I think that he may have been praying: Father, let thy kingdom come, but thy will be done, not mine.

The place where this story takes place reinforces this reading—the Mount of Olives. In one of Ezekiel’s visions, he sees Yahweh’s presence leaving the temple back in Jerusalem (Ezekiel was with the exiles in Babylon) and coming to the people in Babylon. He is reassuring the exiles: you may have left God behind, but God has not left you behind. On the way from Jerusalem to “Chaldea,” God sets down momentarily on the Mount of Olives, which Ezekiel calls “the mountain east of the city”. Then, when God returns to Jerusalem in his vision, “the glory of the Lord was coming from the east,” from over the Mount of Olives, and enters the city through the east gate.

The prophet Zechariah is more explicit about the itinerary of the return. In Zechariah 14:3–4, his vision reads as follows: “Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as when he fights on a day of battle. On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives shall be split into two from east to west by a very wide valley . . .” One is reminded of Mark 11:23: “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.”

The milieu which the parable of the bridesmaids invokes is an impending wedding in a peasant village. In that real-world situation, the role of the bridesmaids was to guide the wedding party through the night to the wedding banquet with their light.

In the metaphoric language of the parable, their oil is the light by which the faithful will find their way to the messianic banquet, the final realization of the reign of God on earth as it is in heaven. Their oil, that light, is, presumably, the truth of the gospel and faith in the gospel and in Jesus’s prophecies.

In the parable, the foolish bridesmaids failed to nurture that gospel truth and faith. In the garden, the disciples also fail to stay awake and keep watch. In the “realized eschatology” so favored by Friends, in which the reign of God is coming in our time in our hearts, we are to keep watch. We do not know when our hour of visitation may come.

(Jesus tells several other parables about a banquet as a figure of God’s new age to come and they also include a judgment of those who fail to heed the call: Matthew 22:1–14, Luke 12:35–40, 14:7–14, 14:15–24.)