Folly and Wisdom with Regard to a Crucified Bridgegroom, 21st Friday (II), August 30, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Holy Cross
August 30, 2024
1 Cor 1:17-25, Ps 33, Mt 25:1-13

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s readings, as we prepare for the beginning of a new semester, there is a huge contrast between wisdom and foolishness.  In the Gospel, Jesus focuses on the wise and foolish virgins, with the hope that we will learn to imitate the wise and learn from the mistakes of the foolish. In the first reading, St. Paul speaks about how God will destroy the “wisdom of the wise and the learning of the learned,” how he has “made the wisdom of the world foolish” and established the Cross, which is a “scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” as the “power and the wisdom of God,” establishing this “foolishness of God” as “wiser than human wisdom.” Wisdom is more and greater than intelligence or knowledge, and foolishness is worse than dullness or ignorance. Wisdom means to look at the world with God’s perspective. It means seeing and live in the “real, real world” where God is present and, despite appearances to the contrary, King and Lord. Foolishness is really a blindness to the ultimate reality of things in such a way that far less important things are prioritized and even sometimes promoted to absolutes or to divine status. It’s so important that at a university like Columbia, students, teachers and everyone learn become not just smarter about various subject matters, but truly wise. Columbia’s motto points to this wisdom: in lumine tuo, videbimus lumen (Ps 36:10), “In your light [O God,] we will see light.” The litmus test as to how this university reveals its wisdom or its foolishness is, at every time, by how serious it takes and lives that motto.
• Let’s turn to what today’s readings reveal about wisdom and foolishness. To understand the wisdom and folly Jesus is describing in the Gospel, we first need to understand the ancient practice of a Jewish wedding. There were two main stages in a marriage. The first would be the exchange of vows. When this took place, the man and woman were married, but they would continue to live apart for a while, even up to a year, while the husband prepared everything to welcome his new wife into his home. It was during this time, for example, that the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary; she was already wedded to Joseph but they had not started to live under the same roof. The second stage was when the bridegroom, the husband, would come to the house of the bride to pick her up and take her to his home. He would be accompanied by all the guests from his side as he went to her home. There he would meet her and all the guests from her side — her bridesmaids, family members, friends and neighbors —  who would be waiting for him. Both groups would process back together to his home and when they arrived, they would celebrate the nuptials for eight days with all their friends and family (something they would consider far more enjoyable than leaving all of them behind for a honeymoon!) The bridegroom could come at any time to pick up his bride and so people needed to be ready. Before he would come, he would send out a herald who would announce along the path, “Behold the Bridegroom is coming,” but the husband himself could come within hours, days, up to a week. He could come in the middle of the night. There was a law that said that if one were out at night, one had to have a lamp, which was common sense to prevent any ambushes and retard burglaries, etc. People could either wait with the bride or accompany the bridegroom — but most would prefer the former because it was less walking! As soon as the Bridegroom took his Bride into his house, the doors really would be shut, to prevent latecomers crashing their party. This wedding tradition, which was universal at Jesus’ time, is still found today in certain parts of the Holy Land and Middle East.
• Jesus used that image as the background to communicate to us how we should wisely be living our life in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom, at the end of our life or at the end of the world, whichever comes first. Jesus contrasts five wise bridesmaids versus five foolish ones, wanting us to imitate the lessons we see in the five wise ones. We can focus on three lessons.
  • The first is vigilance for the Bridegroom’s coming. The heralds have already gone out to announce that Jesus is coming. He is already married to his Bride the Church, but he’s awaiting the time in which he will be able to celebrate with the wedding banquet that will last not just eight twenty-four hour periods, but be an eternal eighth day (the day of resurrection, the new and eternal “first day of the week”). All of us have been given invitations and are members of the wedding party. Jesus wants us there. But we have to be ready to go with him whenever he arrives. Death, for a Christian, is not meant to be a scary thing. It’s the time when Jesus the Bridegroom comes for us to take us to His home when we will celebrate with him forever. We’re called to await him with eager longing, with great expectation. He wants the lamps of our hearts burning for him, full of the oil of love. For certain, the best way for us to stay alert for the return of the Bridegroom is for us to be ready, with hearts burning with love, for the presence of the Bridegroom now. The more we long for Jesus in the Eucharist, the more we will long to share eternal communion with him. The more we attentively listen to his Word in Sacred Scripture, the more prepared we will be to hear even the softest footsteps of his advent. The more we seek to recognize him in the persons and events of each day, and love and embrace them as we would love and embrace Christ, the more ready we will be ready to embrace Christ when he appears without disguise.
  • The second thing Jesus teaches us about wisdom in the image of the ten bridesmaids is that there are certain things we cannot borrow. Just as the unwise virgins didn’t have enough oil for their own lamps — and oil stands for expectant love for the Lord — so we can’t borrow anyone else’s faith, hope or love. We need to have our own, otherwise we’ll be caught unready and be left outside. All ten virgins have the desire to encounter the Bridegroom, they all show up. Their fidelity is taken for granted. The wise bridesmaids have no inherent natural qualities that automatically put the foolish virgins at a disadvantage. They are all tired and fall asleep. They all have lamps. They all have some oil in the lamps. But the wise virgins have brought extra flasks. St. Augustine in his commentary on this parable said that virginity shows their abstention from sin, their lamps shows their good works, but the oil manifests their love for God in abstaining from sin and doing their good works, rather than to win the praise of others. Each one’s oil, in other words, is the gift of each one’s virginity, the first gift of one’s self, the integrity of the person, the purity of heart that longs to see the Bridegroom face to face. The person becomes the gift, the self-offering, this all-inclusive personal act of self-giving in pure love. The unwise have not committed their lives to the extreme; there is some self giving but not to overflowing.
  • The third lesson is that there is a time that can be too late. Certain things cannot be obtained at the last minute. The unwise virgins were caught off guard. They couldn’t borrow oil, so they had to try to obtain some on their own, but they missed the bridegroom and were locked out. They knocked on the door saying, “Lord, lord, open to us.” But then he replied with the words that I think are the saddest and most frightening in all of Sacred Scripture: “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” The Bridegroom cannot know them because the would-be brides are offering only a borrowed facsimile of love that is not flowing from their heart. Their souls are like the empty lamps they are carrying. For the Lord to know us, for us to be on time for the wedding banquet, we have to spend our time getting to know him intimately, as a friend we love, as a savior, as the bridegroom of our souls, as God. Many of us often put off the most important thing in the life, which is to make God number one in our lives. Jesus tells us that there will be a time when there will be no time left. There will be a time when the door will be shut. Now is the time for us to get to know the Lord so that the Lord may never say, “I don’t know you.” Now is the time for us to prepare for his return. The Lord in today’s Gospel tells us that the wise among us will always be prepared. The moral he gives at the end of today’s parable is crystal clear: “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” To be awake means never to be asleep to God, but always to be alert, full of love, waiting for his return. It means to be living not according to the wisdom of the world but according to God’s power and glory.
• St. Paul at the beginning of his first Letter to the Christians in Corinth applies all of these lessons to how we relate to Christ crucified. The Bridegroom we and the Church await has wounds, lots of them, out of love for us. Our Crucified and Risen Savior turns to us with a glorious scarred hand and bids us to come, follow him. To follow Jesus means to follow someone who was crucified, who was ignominiously murdered in a conspiracy between religious and civil leaders, and one who told us that if we should wish to be his disciples, we would need to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow him all the way, even to crucifixion should it be needed. But he does so because he knows that the Cross is not simply a symbol of torture and death but of the love for others that makes even that much suffering and death bearable. St. Paul wants us to have our lamps filled to overflowing with the oil of grateful love for our crucified Bridegroom and for all those he loved enough to give his life. It’s through the love he manifested for us on the Cross that we really come to know Jesus. The door he opens for us is the wound of his Sacred Heart, where he helps us to enter and abide. This is what St. Paul is describing in today’s first reading. He did not seek to preach “with the wisdom of human eloquence,” because then the raw power of the “cross of Christ [might be] emptied of its meaning.” He noted that the Cross — that being publicly executed out of love — is “foolishness to those who are perishing,” to the worldly, to Greeks who thought that the greatest wisdom was self-preservation. God came to “destroy the wisdom of the wise” according to the world and did so on Calvary when he crucified it. There “God made the wisdom of the world foolish.” But, he said, while Christ crucified is a scandal to the Jews and folly to Greeks and Gentiles, for Christians he is the “power and the wisdom of God”: we know the power of the Cross was to raise the dead and make salvation possible; we know the wisdom was to reveal that no one has greater love than to lay down one’s life to save theirs. Christ crucified is the incarnate wisdom and power of God, whose “foolishness … is wiser than human wisdom.” At the beginning of this new academic year, it’s a grace for us to have to confront the Cross and to ask whether we’re going to seek true wisdom or any a cheap facsimile of knowledge. If we’re going to strive to become truly wise, the Crucified Christ will be our teacher and the Cross will be our school. St. Paul is hoping that we will be able to say, as he did and wrote to the Galatians, that “I have been crucified with Christ and the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave his life up for me” and “May I boast of nothing except the Cross of Christ through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world” (Gal 2:20, 6:14).
• Today we seek to Mass to be crucified with Christ, to enter into his passion, death and resurrection. We come like wise virgins awaiting the Bridegroom. He pours himself out on the Cross in self-giving love and calls us to do this in his memory, to model our life on the mystery of the Cross, to experience its true power of redemptive love and the wisdom of God’s saving ways. Let us, like St. Paul, embrace Jesus in all his power, wisdom and glory, and, with passion, filled with mercy, let us live not for ourselves but for him who died for us, and go out to help people come to embrace the Crucified bridegroom with lamps and flasks full of the oil of love Jesus pours out here.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download