Open a bible, and place an unlit candle beside it.

Then pray the prayer below and light the candle.

LEADER: Risen Jesus, you are the morning star.ALL: You shine at dawn as through the night.

LEADER: You are the light of the world.ALL: Be a lamp to my feet.

LEADER: Be vision to my eyes.ALL: Be wisdom for my heart. Amen.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton along with 26 other

women wrote and published The Women’s Bible in 1895 and 1898. It is a commentary on the women’s stories in scripture, including Sunday’s gospel, the parable of wise and foolish virgins. As part of the first wave of the feminist movement, Cady Stanton interprets the oil needed to keep the girls’ lamps burning as self- improvement, especially education. Below are excerpts of her thoughts:

The parable describes the two classes which help to make up society in general. The ones who, like the foolish virgins, have never learned the first important duty of

cultivating their own individual powers, using the talents given to them, and keeping their own lamps trimmed and burning. The idea of being a helpmeet to somebody else has been so sedulously drilled into most women that an individual life, aim, purpose, and ambition are never taken into consideration…

In their ignorance, women sacrifice themselves to educate the

men of their households, and to make of themselves ladders by which their husbands, brothers and sons climb up into the kingdom of knowledge, while they themselves are shut out from all intellectual companionship, even with those they love best; such are

indeed like the foolish virgins. They have not kept their own lamps trimmed and burning; they have no oil in their vessels, no resources in themselves; they bring no light to their households nor to the circle in which they move…

The wise virgins are they who keep their lamps trimmed, who burn oil in their vessels for their own use, who have improved every advantage for their education, secured a healthy,

happy, complete development, and entered all the profitable avenues of labor, for self-support, so that when the opportunities and the responsibilities of life come, they may be fitted fully to enjoy the one and ably to discharge the other.

Such is the triumph of the wise virgins over the folly, the ignorance, and the degradation of the past as in grand procession they enter the temple of knowledge, and the door is no longer shut.

l What seems wise and foolish for women today?

November 12, 2017, 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Vol. 27, No. 7

by Joan Mitchell, CSJ

Sunday Readings: Wisdom 6.12-16 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18 Matthew 25.1-13

by SUNDAY

from this period fit in the hand and hold an amount of oil that burns roughly overnight. For people who used lamps all the time, taking no extra oil when one went out at night seems as foolish as not packing a lunch when one’s workplace has no food service or driving too fast on icy roads.

The youth of the girls suggests a reason five foolishly forgot extra oil. Perhaps their mothers always filled the lamps at home, so they didn’t know how long a full lamp would burn.

l What do you find as necessary to your spiritual life as oil is to lamps or gas to cars? What keeps your spirit alive?

The parable of the ten girls repeats the marriage theme of the

wedding banquet parable four Sundays ago. Again, some guests attend the wedding feast and some do not. However, the plot of Sunday’s parable focuses on the bridegroom’s delay in bringing home his bride and starting the feast.

Parable scholar Joachim Jeremias suggests that having to settle marriage gifts with the bride’s family is what makes the bridegroom’s coming unpredictable. Perhaps in Jesus’ time most people with any experience of dowry negotiations knew that wedding feasts begin on “bridegroom time,” that is, whenever the haggling is done. The delay is key in the plot.

For us who live in the age of electricity, Sunday’s parable doesn’t make its point

as easily as it did when Matthew wrote. We have lights in every room, on every street, and along vast stretches of highway. Our only experience of contending

with darkness happens when the power goes out.

In the first century, nightfall on moonless nights brought black-outs. People used lamps in their homes and carried lamps or torches to find their way on the road. An oil lamp, like a candle, lights one’s way only a few steps ahead.

The small Herodian lamps that archaeologists have found

How do wise Christians live?

A common lamp in Jesus’ time. Oil was poured into the large opening: the wick protruded from the small opening.

NARRATOR: Jesus told this parable to his disciples.

JESUS: The reign of God can be likened to ten young women who took their lamps and went out to welcome a bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five wise. The foolish girls took their lamps but brought no oil along. The wise girls brought flasks of oil along with their lamps. The bridegroom delayed his coming. The young women all began to nod and then fall asleep. At midnight someone shouted.

VOICE: The groom is here! Come out and greet him!

JESUS: At the shout all the young women woke up and got their lamps ready.

FOOLISH GIRLS: Give us some of your oil. Our lamps are going out.

WISE GIRLS: No, there may not be enough for you and us. You

had better go to the dealers and buy yourselves some.

JESUS: While the five foolish girls went off to buy more oil, the bridegroom arrived, and the girls who were ready went into the wedding with him. Then the door was barred. Later the foolish girls came back.

FOOLISH GIRLS: Open the door for us.

GROOM: I don’t know who you are.

JESUS: The moral is: Keep your eyes open, for you know not the day or the hour. Matthew 25.1-13

You do not know the hour.

l Access The Women’s Bible online to read Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s entire reflection on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.

l Visit RESULTS.org to learn advocacy and explore what their Global Partnership for Education does.

C HA R I T Y

Sunday’s second reading adds context to what this delay meant in the first

century. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, written around A.D. 50, Paul describes Jesus’ second coming vividly. He assures Christians that the living will have no advantage over those who have died when Jesus comes again.

The Lord Jesus will come down from heaven at the sound of God’s trumpet, the dead will rise, and the living will be caught up in the air to meet the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4.16-17). This description tells us that Paul and many other Christians expected Jesus’ return soon, even in their lifetimes.

When Matthew writes his gospel 30 years later, Christians no longer expect Jesus’ imminent return. Instead, they are reflecting on how to live wisely and faithfully during the indeterminate delay before his second coming.

The three parables in Matthew 25 have judgment and Jesus’ second coming in mind. The parable of the ten girls tells us what the reign of God will be like. No one knows when the bridegroom will come. We do recognize the wisdom of having oil in our lamps for the long

night. In our faith journeys we need to explore what fuels lamp and lights the path of Christian living for us.

The oil may be time alone in solitude, retreats, meditation, spiritual reading. The oil may also involve interacting in groups with others, sharing faith and insights, transforming and affirming one another’s spiritual experience. The oil may be Eucharist and the community of people who gather to remember what Jesus asked on the night before he died.

For Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin his work as a paleontologist digging up the past developed into a vision of evolution culminating in Christ. All of us join in co-creating with God what the world of which we are a part will become. Christ is the omega point.

Omega is the final letter in the Greek alphabet. In this view God comes to us not only from the past in creation and in Jesus Christ but from the future in the

lure to become all love and compassion can create.

l To what do you liken the reign of God?

l How does God come to us from the future?

l What is one small way the world is a better place because of you?

In its final twist the parable equates the lighted lamps with recognition. The

bridegroom knows the five girls with lighted lamps who join the feast but doesn’t know those who knock at the door later. Matthew loves to wag a finger of warning that no one knows the day or hour.

The delay in Jesus’ coming now extends two millennia. For New Testament scholar Sandra Schneiders, IHM, what keeps the lamps of the wise burning are faith and hope. St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, invited her to give the Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality in A.D 2000. She chose Sunday’s gospel as her theme.

“Every generation faces the temptation to drop out, to despair of a too distant ideal,” Sister Sandra suggests. “Perhaps we are meant to realize that not filling their lamps, not doing the little that they could do, was an implicit surrender by the other five to despair of Christ’s project.” The wise do what little lies in their power to cooperate with Jesus’ great work.*

l What wisdom have you learned from the women’s movements?

l What action in your life has proved wisest and keeps your light burning?

l Access The Women’s Bible online to read Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s entire reflection on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.

l Visit RESULTS.org to learn advocacy and explore what their Global Partnership for Education does.

C HA R I T Y

J U S T I C E

*Sandra M. Schneiders, With Oil in Their Lamps: Faith, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Paulist Press, 2000) 123-124.

Take a quick personal inventory by writing down some of the wise and faithful activities that always surface when you take time to reflect. For example:

I want to walk each day.I want to get out in nature.I must take time with those I love.I want to volunteer.I’m going to keep a journal.I want to read more or fish more. I’m going to schedule fewer activities.

LEADER: Let us make a silent pledge to do one of our wise and faithful activities this week. Blow out the candle.

Wisdom is everywhere to be found. Wisdom seeks those who seek her. She is radiant and unfading;Wisdom is easily discernedby those who love her andis found by those who seek her.She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.One who rises early to seek herwill have no difficulty, for shewill be found sitting at the gate.To fix one’s thought on heris perfect understanding; and onewho is vigilant on her accountwill soon be free from carebecause she goes about seekingthose worthy of her,and she graciously appearsto them in their paths,and meets them in every thought. Wisdom 6.12-16

l What in the created world has caused you to feel awe and amazement?

l What were your feelings at the birth of your own children or the birth of nephews, nieces, or grandchildren?

l What do you regard as a wise attitude toward creation, a faithful attitude toward the Creator?

Old Testament writers personify wisdom as a radiant, unfadingly

beautiful woman, who is both supremely desirable and easy to find for any who seek her. By imagining wisdom as a woman, the writer of Sunday’s first reading transforms the search for God in the created world into a courting relationship.

Like a courting, the search for wisdom is two-sided. Wisdom seeks those who seek her. The awesomeness of creation reveals God to us and draws us into relation with the Creator.

Because Wisdom personifies God’s creation, wisdom is everywhere, always underfoot—in every crashing wave, in every setting sun, in every newborn child, in every family member, in every human interaction.

Wisdom is always looking for a home in the world. Wisdom finds a home in Israel, the people who recognize that both creation and their salvation comes from God. Wisdom finds a home in people who experience awe and wonder at all God has made and at all God had done in human history.

Awe is the foundational experience in which wisdom begins. Awe readies us to believe in God and praise God’s creation. The wise attitude toward God is praise and appreciation.

Joan Mitchell, CSJ, editor of Sunday by Sunday, holds a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in New Testament from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN.

The first humans make a choice.

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