As we’ve been spending this last quarter of 2023 considering what it means to worship God, Emily has kept us oriented by keeping us focused on the Hebrew word avad, which in some places in Scripture means “to worship,” but in others means “to work” or “to serve.” This is a good thing to keep before us as we think about worship, because it counters our natural tendency (which is reinforced by our individualistic and hedonistic culture) to see our worship as ours, something which exists to serve us and our purposes. Intuitively, however, it may still feel like worship is something over here while work and service are over here and they don’t have much in common. Cue Sesame Street: one of these things is not like the others.
Now, when we study the meaning of biblical words, we generally look at the Hebrew and Greek, since they are the primary biblical languages. In this case, though, I think a bit of English word study can be helpful. You see, our English word “worship” is one of those words which used to be longer and got shortened up to make it easier to say; the original form was worthship. It’s the word “worth” plus the “-ship” ending, which we see in words like professorship—having the position and responsibilities of a professor; seamanship—referring to the skills and training needed to carry out the responsibilities of a seaman, a sailor; and friendship—having the connection and intention of being friends with another person. “Worth-ship,” then, is about someone or something having worth or being worthy. If I worthship God, it means I see God as having worth, being worthy, being important, and that I treat God accordingly.
What, then, do work, service, and worship have in common? All three are things we do because we believe they’re worth doing. I may go to work because I ascribe worth to our customers at the BMV or because I ascribe worth to the money I receive in return, but if neither were true, I would quit. If I serve others, I certainly hope I’m doing so because I believe they have intrinsic worth as human beings and deserve the best I can give them; doing my job at the BMV may be service to others, or it may . . . not. I might do the same things whether I’m worth-shipping my customers or worth-shipping my paycheck, but I won’t be doing them in the same way, or in the same spirit. The job is the same; the work is different.
If the Hebrew Bible uses one word, avad, for work and service and worship, it might just be because with all three of those things, God cares less about our outward actions than about the heart reality that powers them. Each is an answer to the same question: what or whom do we treat as worthy of our time and attention? What deserves our focus, our preparation, our effort, our commitment? Remember Jacob and Rachel: he served his uncle for seven years and felt it as no time at all because she was worth every day of it. Who do we see as worth waiting for?
Let’s keep those questions percolating in the backs of our minds as we turn to our text this morning.
I need to say one thing here before we go on, and those of y’all who’ve been around a while could probably guess what: in this message I am in debt greater than I can calculate to the work of one of my heroes of the faith, one of my two or three greatest intellectual influences, the late Rev. Dr. Kenneth E. Bailey. Dr. Bailey was a missionary, teacher, and scholar who could say of himself, “For sixty years, from 1935-1995, my home was in the Middle East.” He lived for decades among what he once called “the last generation of Jesus’ day,” and drew on that experience and on two millennia of Middle Eastern biblical translations and scholarship in teaching and interpreting the Scriptures, particularly the New Testament, and especially the parables of Jesus. My understanding of God’s word is much deeper and richer because of his work and example, and I am profoundly grateful.
That being said, let us continue. The setting for our story is a typical village in Israel on a hot, cloudless summer evening as all is being made ready for a wedding celebration. The groom and his closest friends are on their way to the home of the bride—maybe across town, maybe in one of the neighboring villages—where she is making herself ready. While he is gone, his house is full of people busily preparing the wedding feast. Even more people are gathered in the street outside, where it’s cooler and they won’t get in the way or be told to make themselves useful. All are waiting eagerly for the groom to return with his bride, for the celebration to begin.
Now, you might be wondering why the guests have gathered at the groom’s home already instead of waiting until he arrives. In part, it’s because this is where the party is, but mostly it’s because they don’t know when he’ll arrive, so they need to be ready. You see, once the groom gets to his beloved’s home, he and his friends will need to wait until she has finished preparing herself for him. Once she’s ready, they’ll seat her on the back of the donkey they’ve prepared for her, and the group will make a grand procession back to the groom’s home—and they aren’t going to rush it. In fact, they’ll take the most roundabout route possible so everyone they know has a chance to see them and cheer for them. All of which is to say, it’s going to be a long night.
Among the guests waiting for the wedding party are ten young women. Each one has a lamp, and each lamp is lit—but maybe not for the reason you would expect. As Dr. Bailey explains, “Starlight or moonlight is usually bright enough to see by in the dry, clear air of the Middle East. But women, young and old, always carry lamps. Their reputation, and in some cases their personal safety, depends on the lamps. For young unmarried women to move around in the dark without carrying lamps is unthinkable! What might they be doing in the dark and with whom? Also, with a lamp, no one can harass them unseen. I have observed that village women do not carry such lamps conveniently close to the ground (like a flashlight) so that they can see the street. Instead, they carry them directly in front of their faces so that all can witness who they are and where they are going.”
So, these ten young women are showing all due care for propriety. Unfortunately, they are not all careful in other ways. Remember, the wedding party is intentionally taking as long as possible to wind its way through the streets of the village—it could be the middle of the night before they arrive. Five of the young women have thought ahead and brought extra olive oil with them because they’ll probably need it; the other five have only what’s in their lamps.
Now, as a side note—and it’s sad that I feel the need to say this—Jesus is not saying or implying anything negative about women in this parable. Quite the contrary, as his story takes these women and their choices completely seriously. In fact, there’s good reason to believe Jesus is actively working against any sense of male superiority here. One of the great figures of the Arabic Christian tradition, the eleventh-century scholar Ibn al-Tayyib, points out that in the Gospels, the church is always feminine, as it is the bride of Christ. As such, it makes perfect sense for the membership of the church, both wise and foolish, to be represented by women. Ibn al-Tayyib also says ten men were required for a valid wedding ceremony and suggests this is why Jesus’ parable has ten young women, to equalize the gender balance. Like Paul, Jesus has often been dragooned over the years by men in the church to justify “keeping women in their place”—and as with Paul, so with Jesus, this is a profound misreading of the text.
And so, the young women wait with the other guests for the coming of the groom with his bride; but as the well-known popular theologian Gerald the Elephant has observed, waiting is not easy, and so the women grow drowsy. They set their lamps somewhere safe and fall asleep. After some time, they are awoken by the cry that the wedding party is arriving. When they rise and tend to their lamps, they realize the lamps are almost out of oil. The five young women who had had the wisdom to bring along extra olive oil take out their flasks and refill their lamps; the five who had been thoughtless realize their foolishness and panic. They try to get oil from their wiser friends—perhaps begging, perhaps demanding—and are politely but firmly told to solve their own problems. Their wiser friends brought extra oil, yes, but not that much.
And so the foolish ones hurry off to refill their lamps. If they don’t want to go all the way to their own homes to get their own oil (or to split up in the darkness of the night), it won’t be a problem to find someone who’ll be willing to sell them a little. After all, everyone knew everyone in the village, and the wedding party’s procession had doubtless kept many of them awake. The question is, can they do it quickly enough? To no one’s surprise, the answer is “no”: while they are away, the groom arrives with his bride and everyone follows them into the house. The five foolish young women return to find the door shut and locked. They bang on the door and call out to be let in, but the groom calls back through the door, “I’m sorry, but honestly, I don’t think I know you!”
With that, the parable ends; and though it may sound final to our ears, this is actually another one which Jesus leaves unresolved. As Dr. Bailey observes, “In the Middle East the word no is never an answer, rather it is a pause in the negotiations. The reader has to finish the play.” Does the groom relent and open the door? Those outside have only themselves to blame for their situation; if he refuses, no one can call him unjust or unreasonable. No doubt some inside will urge him to refuse so the foolish ones will learn their lesson. And yet, it is a celebration, and the foolish young women outside were invited; wouldn’t it dampen the mood to leave them outside begging to be let in?
As we sit with that, let me briefly note three points to consider. One, this is a “kingdom of heaven” parable, which means the kingdom has a door, and that door will close. As we just noted, that closed door may not be the final word, but it is the last word we have. The failure of the foolish will have consequences.
Two, that failure is ultimately a failure of commitment. It’s not that the foolish women didn’t have the resources they needed; olive oil was an essential staple—even the poorest of the poor didn’t run out of olive oil except in the direst straits. The foolish women have the oil they need, they just don’t bring it. They also don’t go back and get it—and those ten women were hanging out together for hours; do you really imagine the subject of oil never came up? The foolish ones seem to have thoughtlessly assumed they could get away with doing the minimum: either they wouldn’t need anything more, or they could borrow what more they needed from their friends. In essence, they were asking their wiser friends to be committed enough to see all of them through—and commitment is one thing that can’t be borrowed.
Three, to borrow from Friedrich Nietzsche via Eugene Peterson, we’re called to “a long obedience in the same direction.” This parable clearly shows Jesus’ disappointment that so many who were supposedly waiting for his coming weren’t ready for him when he came, and it challenges us to do better. We can’t do that on our own—we will need to lean on each other all the way, because there will be times for each of us when our own resources just aren’t enough—but we do need to bring the resources we do have to the table, because there are times when others will need what we have to offer.
Now, with all of that said, is this parable about worship? No; but remember where we began: worth-ship. This is a parable about the reality that staying ready is hard. It requires a lot of preparation, and a lot of energy. Some people rely on the energy of grim determination and brute-force stubbornness. Others rely on caffeine—which serves me well enough on a workday morning, but if there’s spiritual caffeine, I’ve never found it. Thing is, grim determination may get you through but it doesn’t prepare you for joy, and caffeine doesn’t actually create energy, it just borrows it from the future. We need something better.
I think we see that something better in Psalm 130:6: “My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning.” Think about that—imagine yourself there: longing for the coming of the dawn, straining your eyes in hope of seeing its first faint heralds of light. That is the energy of desire. It’s energy for the waiting, in the waiting, and through the waiting, and it’s energy that prepares the heart for the joy for which it waits. Watchmen are able to stay ready through the night because they long for the dawn, because they know the dawn is worth it.
In that light, if you will, I think we can see that Jesus’ parable about ten young women does tell us something important about worship: worship looks like being ready. “My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning”—why? Because the Lord is worth the wait. We have energy to keep ourselves ready for Jesus to come back because we believe he’s worth waiting for.
Do we falter sometimes? Do we grow weary, lose heart, start to feel the night will never end? Of course we do, because staying ready and alert is hard. This is why we do this thing together; none of us can go indefinitely without sleep, let alone keep alert 24/7/365. We need others with us to stay on watch when we can’t. Even the five wise young women slept, after all, depending on others to stay awake and alert them when the bride and groom drew near.
You know, if you think about it, the greatest folly of those five foolish young women is that they spent hours hanging out with their wiser friends and didn’t learn a thing. As I said a few minutes ago, do you really think the subject of oil never once came up in all that time? We need others around us who will tell us when we haven’t brought enough oil to make it through the night, not to judge us, but to help us figure out what to do about it. We need people who will watch with us, who will care for us when our light starts to flicker, who will stay awake and alert when we don’t have it in us, and who will let us do the same for them. Perhaps most of all, we need others to stand with us when hope is hard, when the wind is rising and cold rain is coming down in sheets, who can remind us and reassure us that the waiting is worth it—why? Because the dawn is coming. Because the bridegroom is coming. Come, Lord Jesus. May it be soon.
“Woman Holding a Lantern in the Dark,” © Orhan Pegel. Public domain.