Linkathon!

Michael says:

Even more obviously than the previous one, this story is rooted in the Jewish tradition of contrasting wisdom and folly—being sensible or being silly. The writer of Proverbs treats Wisdom and Folly as two women, and describes them calling out to men going by, and offering them their respective lifestyles.

Now, in this story, Lady Wisdom and Mistress Folly have each become five young girls, and the story invites its hearers to decide which they’d rather be. Obviously, wisdom in this case means being ready with the oil for the lamp, and folly means not thinking about it until it’s too late.

It’s probably wrong to try to guess what the oil in the story ‘stands for’ (some have suggested that it means good works; others faith, or love, or almost any of the Christian virtues). It isn’t that kind of story. Within the world of the story itself, it simply means being ready for the key moment. You can’t squash all these parables together and make the details fit with each other; all the girls in this parable, including the ‘wise’ ones, go to sleep in verse 5, whereas in verse 13 Jesus tells his followers to stay awake. Again, that kind of detailed question misses the point. What matters is being ready; being prepared; being wise; thinking ahead, realizing that a crisis is coming sooner or later and that if you don’t make preparations now, and keep them in good shape in the meantime, you’ll wish you had.

There is one other aspect to this particular story which has roots deep in the Jewish context and has given rise to a tradition of hymn-writing about the coming of the bridegroom. Already in Matthew’s gospel Jesus has referred to himself as the bridegroom (9:15). In a previous parable Jesus spoke of the kingdom as being like a king making a marriage feast for his son (22:2). Mention of a bridegroom hints again at Jesus’ messiahship, which was of course a central issue in the previous chapters, ever since Jesus arrived in Jerusalem.

This highlights the fact that the parable isn’t just about the very end of time, the great and terrible day for which the world and the church still wait. Throughout his ministry, Jesus was coming as Messiah to his people, Israel. They were the ones invited to the wedding feast. They, in this story, are divided between the wise, who know Jesus and make sure they keep alert for his ‘coming’, and the foolish, to whom at the end Jesus will say ‘I don’t know you’ (verse 12, echoing 7:23). Just as the Sermon on the Mount summarizes, not Jesus’ teaching to the subsequent church, but Jesus’ challenge to the Israel of his own day, so these parables, towards the close of the final great discourse in Matthew’s gospel, should probably be read in the same way, at least in their most basic meaning.

It is tempting to move away from this conclusion, because saying that parts of Jesus’ teaching related particularly to a unique situation in his own time might make it look as though they are irrelevant for every other time. But that’s not so. It is because what Jesus did was unique and decisive, changing for ever the way the world is and how God relates to it, that we have entered a new era in which his sovereign rule is to be brought to bear on the world. And in this new era, no less than in the unique time of Jesus and his first followers, we need as much as ever the warning that it’s easy to go slack on the job, to stop paying attention to God’s work and its demands, to be unprepared when the moment suddenly arrives.

Wright, T. (2004). Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28 (pp. 133–135). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Michael says:

Four things emerge very clearly from this. First, Paul is not backing down on what he has said in chapters 9 and 10. Those Jews who have not believed the gospel really are ‘cut out of the tree’. That is why he has been so heartbroken over them (9:1–5), and so eager in prayer and hope to see them come back (10:1). But the way to come back has already been outlined in 10:5–13, and there is no other. That is why he says here, in verse 23, that they can be grafted back ‘if they do not remain in unbelief’. He is not for a moment suggesting, as many of his modern readers have wished he might, that the broken branches could be offered a way back which did not involve believing in Jesus as Messiah and Lord.\

Second, Paul really does see the people of God as a single family, the children of Abraham now redefined around Jesus the Messiah and marked out by faith in him. This has been clear from at least chapter 4 onwards. The ‘church’ (though Paul doesn’t use this word here) remains an essentially Jewish family into which non-Jews have been welcomed.

Third, Paul is insisting that just for this reason it makes good sense, and good theology, to believe that God can and will bring more Jews into this renewed family, which is after all their own true people. Insofar as it makes any sense to talk of things being easy or hard for God, Paul seems to be indicating in verse 24 that it’s much easier for God to graft Jews back into the tree to which they belonged in the first place than to graft Gentiles in from the outside. God has done and is doing the harder thing, and the Gentile Christians in Rome are living proof of it. How much easier will it be for God to bring Jews back in as well.

Fourth—and this seems to be the real thrust of this passage—Paul is issuing a serious warning to the Gentile Christians. They must not suppose for a moment that they have ‘replaced’ Jews in God’s plan, that the church is now a ‘Gentiles-only’ family, or (worse) that God has chosen them precisely because they are Gentiles. That would be to make the same mistake in reverse as the Jews had made earlier, namely, to imagine that God’s grace was tied to a particular ethnic group. And if they make that mistake—relying on ethnic identity as the badge of membership in God’s people, instead of faith alone—they can expect God to react the same way he had done with unbelieving Israel. There are no promises of salvation for those who think it’s their birthright.

Wright, T. (2004). Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part 2: Chapters 9-16 (pp. 54–56). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.