Our Desire for Christ, 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), November 12, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
November 12, 2023
Wis 6:12-16, Ps 63, 1 Thess 4:13-18, Mt 25:1-13

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here:

The following text guided the homily: 

• What are our greatest desires? What do we want the most? Youth and young adulthood is a time in which we try to clarify what our deepest desires are, what they ought to be, and how we can best order our life in accordance with them. Today’s readings help us to do that within the context of the Last Things on which the Church meditates every November. They help us to see whether we really desire God and order our life to that desire.
• The first reading helps us to look at the pursuit of truth, which ought always to be at the heart of any university. It describes how anyone who seeks and loves true wisdom, the way God has made and sees reality, will perceive and find it. It urges us to seek wisdom with vigil at night and vigil before dawn. But then it says that this desire is met by another. Wisdom, it says, “hastens to make herself known in anticipation of their desire,” and “makes her own rounds, seeking those worthy of her,” “graciously appears to them in the street,” sits at the gate waiting to be discovered and “meets them with all solicitude.” God who is Wisdom seeks us even before we seek him. His desire is to enrich us with his wisdom even before we find ourselves hungry for that gift.
• In the Psalm, we build on the reality of the desire God has placed within us for him, which is at the deepest root of the search for truth and the desire for love and beauty. We pray out of this desire: “O God, you are my God whom I seek; for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water.” Like a thirsty man in the desert we thirst for God and, as the Psalm continues, we seek to find him in the sanctuary, through prayer in ordinary life, even as we sit upon our couch at night.
• The second reading, from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, builds on this, giving us the consoling word that God’s eternal plans for us are that we will always be with him, if only we desire it, if only we seek the Lord.
• And in the Gospel, with the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids, Jesus gives us a very powerful parable about our desire and how it should influence our entire life. The story that he tells about the practices involving a wedding might seem a little strange, but the details would have been very well understood by his contemporaries and by many of those still living in Palestine. There were two main stages in a marriage. The first would be the exchange of vows. When this took place, the couple was married, but the spouses would continue to live apart for a while, up to a year or more, while the husband earned the money and prepared everything to welcome his new wife into his home and underwrite the wedding reception. 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 and others, who would be waiting for him along the way. 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 not only common sense but prevented any ambushes, etc. People who knew both bride and groom 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 the 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 uses this image as the background to communicate to us about our desire for him in this world and in anticipation of his second coming. Jesus contrasts five wise bridesmaids versus five foolish ones, wanting us to imitate the lessons we see in the five wise ones. We learn three crucial lessons about desires from the wise virgins.
• The first lesson is vigilance for the Bridegroom’s coming. Our desire is meant to be shown in waiting and in anticipation. The heralds have already gone out to announce not just that Jesus is coming but is here. He is already married to his bride the Church, he regularly invites her to come with him each day, but he’s also awaiting the time in which he will be able to celebrate with her 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”). 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 the home he has prepared where 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. Because Christian death is the return of the Bridegroom and the entrance of one who deeply longs for his return into the eternal nuptial banquet, Christians, St. Paul tells us in the second reading, should “not grieve as those who have no hope” after the death of loved ones. We always have hope, not just for them if they lived in expectation of the Lord’s return, but we have hope ourselves that one day he will come for us. 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 faintest 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 desire in the image of the ten bridesmaids is that we cannot borrow it from others. 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, love or desire. We need to have our own, otherwise we’ll be caught unready and be left outside. This lesson is particularly important for the people of our age. One of my favorite authors, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, now Trappist Father Simeon of Spencer Abbey, describes in his classic commentary on St. Matthew’s Gospel, Fire of Mercy, that the “foolish virgins are foolish not only because they neglected to bring their own supply of oil with them to the momentous encounter with the Bridegroom, but also because they possess a naïve and perhaps even subtly manipulative and self-indulgent view of the society to which they belong. They are spiritual freeloaders. They simply assume that they do not have to work for their own oil, that in a pinch, anyone’s oil will burn just as nicely in their own lamps, that they should not strain themselves too much because there are many others … who will gladly do their work for them and that they, therefore, can relax in an attitude of entitlement and allow others to fill in the gap for them.” In other words, they fail in their own responsibility, to prioritize their own personal relationship with the Bridegroom. I can’t count how many times people who aren’t faithful to the practice of the faith say when I am trying to cajole them into greater fidelity, “I don’t come to Mass, father, but my wife comes all the time.” On other occasions, people who are ineligible for a sponsor certificate to become a godparent because they don’t practice the faith, have said, “But my grandmother is one of the most active parishioners in the parish.” Sometimes they will try to name-drop to obtain one, by saying, “But my great uncle is a monsignor.” To all of them, I explain to them that there are certain things we cannot borrow, and one of them is another’s relationship with the Lord. We can’t borrow another’s soul or spiritual life. And for those who are faithful to Christ, there’s a lesson here, too, that there are certain things we cannot lend. While Jesus wants us to give of ourselves to others, to share with others freely the gifts He has so lavishly shared with us, there are certain things that we cannot give even to those we love. There are certain things that they must do for themselves. Each one is called to develop this eager, expectant, vigilant, faithful, loving relationship with the Lord. Those who think that they can borrow other’s relationships with the Lord when the Lord comes are indeed foolish, as Jesus says about the unwise bridesmaids.
• There is something in the parable we shouldn’t miss. All ten virgins have some desire to encounter the Bridegroom. They all show up. They all have lamps. They all have some oil in the lamps. They are all tired and fall asleep. But what distinguishes the wise virgins is that they have brought extra flasks. They were prudent precisely in their having brought more. The oil represents, we could say, the unique thing each one of the bridesmaids has to offer the Bridegroom. Each one’s oil is the gift of oneself, an all-inclusive personal act of pure love. The unwise have not committed in the same way. There is some self-giving, but not to overflowing. There’s a partial commitment, but a partial commitment to love is not enough. There’s some desire, but not an all-consuming one. The Lord wants us to have flasks of desire.
• The third lesson is that there is a time that can be too late. We can’t put off stoking our desire because 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 hearts are hollow like the emptied lamps they carry. God is looking for one thing in us, the unique flame that can flare up only if we have allowed our heart and soul to catch the fire of his love. For the Lord to know us, for us to be on time for the wedding banquet, we have to spend our time here getting to know him intimately, as a friend, as a savior, as God. Many can put off this most important thing in life, which is to make God number one in our lives. We can allow the devil to deceive us by saying, “There’s always time.” We can allow him to insinuate that we can behave like the Good Thief, commit our sins, do our own thing in this life, and that the Lord Jesus will give us the chance at the end to say one prayer and everything we will work out. If we were to think that, though, we would be as foolish as the foolish virgins in the parable. 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. The lesson of the parable is that 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. Now is the time to desire him. All of us have known people who have died unexpectedly, even young people. Even the healthiest person is this chapel could die today. 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 him.
• The Eucharistic procession we had today across the Columbia campus features many of the elements of what Jesus describes today. He is the Bridegroom who comes to meet us, the Church his Bride, in the Eucharist. Then he seeks to lead us on pilgrimage all the way to the place he has gone to prepare for us, heaven. He wants us to hunger for him, to be like a tabernacle lamp or one of these altar candles, burning as a sign of our desire. He wants to reinforce that it’s not enough for someone else we know to follow Jesus in his Eucharistic journey in every place and time, but we ourselves need to make the choice to join. And he really wants to get know us intimately through his Eucharistic presence, by means of prayer, adoration and especially through the mind-blowing reality of receiving the eternal Son of God within in Holy Communion. Opportunities like the Eucharistic Procession we just had are opportunities for us to manifest what is the state of our longing. Not everyone is, of course, able to come because of other unbreakable commitments, but those who love the Lord will strive to come and take part. And then as we do things like that together, we begin to identify much more with the Bridegroom as he seeks, every time we receive him in Holy Communion, to make of us a monstrance for a Corpus Christi procession wherever we go, just like Mary, after the Annunciation, took Jesus within her to her cousins Elizabeth and Zachariah and to their infant son, John the Baptist.
• So we have today three lessons: an eager, expectant waiting for the Lord’s coming in all his ways; a recognition that we can’t borrow what we’re going to need to meet the Lord when we comes; and a loving admonition from the Lord not to procrastinate on our preparations until it’s too late. This Mass is meant to help us with each of the three. If we’re truly ready to meet the Lord here, with our souls clean from serious sins, with our hearts hungering for Him, with the Lord himself, the Light of the World, burning inside of us fueled by the oil of love, we’ll never be caught off guard, whether he comes today, tomorrow, or several decades from now. Our reaction to today’s word of the Lord, and to the tremendous gift that is the Eucharist, will therefore determine whether in the final analysis we’re actualy wise. Is our soul thirsting for the living God more than a desert pants for water? Are we keeping perpetual vigil seeking Wisdom incarnate? Have we come asking the Lord to fill not just our lamps but our flasks so that we can make a total self offering? The Lord who knows us, desires to give us all these gifts. Let’s meet his desire for us with our desire. The Bridegroom, the long-desired of the nations, indeed is here. Let us go out with joy to meet Christ the Lord and follow him all the way to the Father’s house!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Reading 2 1 THES 4:13-18

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters,
about those who have fallen asleep,
so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.
For if we believe that Jesus died and rose,
so too will God, through Jesus,
bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord,
that we who are alive,
who are left until the coming of the Lord,
will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.
For the Lord himself, with a word of command,
with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God,
will come down from heaven,
and the dead in Christ will rise first.
Then we who are alive, who are left,
will be caught up together with them in the clouds
to meet the Lord in the air.
Thus we shall always be with the Lord.
Therefore, console one another with these words.

Alleluia MT 24:42A, 44

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Stay awake and be ready!
For you do not know on what day your Lord will come.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

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