Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 11, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
November 11, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as he teaches us about the yearning he wants us to have for him and his kingdom, in this world and forever.
• He does so by using an image about wedding customs that might seem a little confusing and strange to us. The details, however, would have been very well understood by his contemporaries. There were two main stages in a marriage. The first would be the exchange of vows. When this took place, the bride and groom were contractually married, but they would continue to live apart, for a year or more, while the husband worked to pay for and prepare a new home to welcome his wife and begin their common life as well as to pay for the wedding reception they would eventually host there. The second stage took place after all of that work was done. The husband would come to the bride’s house to pick her up and take her to their new abode for the wedding reception. He would send out some of his groomsmen with word that the bridegroom was coming, meaning that he could arrive within hours, days, or up to a week. He would be accompanied by all the guests from his side and meet his wife with all the guests from her side. Both groups would then process as one to their new home and when they arrived, instead of a one-day celebration and then leaving for someplace else for a honeymoon, they would celebrate the nuptials for eight days with all their friends and family.

• In order to cut down on the number of guests one would need to feed for eight days, the bridegroom sometimes would come in the middle of the night. By custom, those who weren’t ready when he came lost their spots. As soon as the bridegroom took his bride into their house, the doors 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. The drama of the parable is that the bridegroom indeed comes at night but only five of the ten bridesmaids are ready with oil in their lamps to await him; the other five were unprepared, sought to borrow some, had to go to buy some, missed the bridegroom’s arrival and then were therefore shut out of the reception.
• Jesus used this image as the background to communicate to us how we should be living for and in his kingdom, preparing for his return as 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. November is the month in which the whole Church reflects on the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell — and Jesus by this image tries to help us prepare well for the first two, so that we may experience the third and avoid the fourth. But for this to happen, we need to learn three crucial lessons from the wise virgins.
• The first lesson is vigilancefor the Bridegroom’s coming. The heralds have already gone out to announce that Jesus is coming. We need 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. 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 attentively listen to his Word in Sacred Scripture, 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 to embrace Christ when he appears without disguise.
• The second thing Jesus teaches us 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. One of my favorite authors, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, now Trappist Father Symeon 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. We can’t borrow another’s relationship with the Lord, another’s faith or hope, another’s soul or spiritual life. None of us can say for another, “Jesus, I love you, too” or “Forgive me,” or “Help me.” For those who are faithful to Christ, there’s a lesson here, too, that there are certain things we cannot lend or give even to those we love. They must assume responsibility for developing an eager, expectant, vigilant faithful love for God on their own. Those who think that they can borrow others’ relationships with the Lord when the Lord comes are indeed foolish, as Jesus says about the unwise bridesmaids.
• The third lesson is that there is a time that can be too late.Certain things cannot be obtained at the last minute. In the parable, 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 scariest in all of Sacred Scripture: “Truly, I tell you, I do not know you.” 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 our God. Many of us often put off the most important thing in the life, which is to make God first in our life. We allow the devil to deceive us by saying, “There’s always time,” to insinuate that we can live like the Good Thief, do our own thing, and that the Lord will give us the chance at the end to say one prayer so that everything will work out. Jesus tells those who would imitate the foolish bridesmaids in this way, however, that there will be a time when there will be no time left, when the door will be shut. Now is the time for us to get to know the Lord in prayer, in the sacramental life, in the moral life of love, so that he will never say, “I don’t know you.” Now is the time for us to prepare for his return. All of us have known people who have died unexpectedly, even young people. 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.
• 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. Every Mass is meant to help us with each of the three. If we’re truly ready to meet the Lord each week at Mass, 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, then we’ll never be caught off guard, whether he comes today, tomorrow, or decades years from now. Each Catholic Church proclaims every day, “The Bridegroom is here. Let us go out to meet Christ the Lord!” And the wise are those who do.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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