Homily for Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Advent begins in three weeks time. For the next two Sundays the readings for the Liturgy will concern themselves with the apocalype, with waiting, with remaining alert and on your guard, with patience, with the end times, with the wise use of time. That is very obvious in todays gospel reading: the foolish bridesmaids lost interest in the bridegroom, let their lamps go out and fell asleep. The wise ones made provisions for the darkness, remained alert, and greeted the bridegroom on his late arrival.
This is of course the key to all these apocalyptic, waiting extracts. The first gerneration of Christians had expected the immanent arrival of the Bridegroom, the Lord. Here is Matthew writing perhaps forty years after the death of the Lord and there is still no sign of his return to take the faithful with him. This failure of the Lord to return had to be explained to the expectant community. So when was the Lord to return? The key to Matthew's answer is to be found in the last line of today's extract: "Stay awake, because you do not know either the day or the hour."
There was another realted problem: if the Lord was coming to take those who were still alive and faithful with him, what happened those who had died before that return. To that particular problem the Apsotle Paul returns in our second reading:
So the question facign the Chruch then is how to pass the time between the present and the Lord's return. And of course the same question will occupy every human being born into this world, be they believer or non-believer: how do I best spend my life, to what should I devote my energies? How do I spend my time? Time is a precious commodity. The poet said that the innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time. He was quite wrong. Time challenges all of us, irrespective of our beauty or our innocence. Like the foolish maidens of today's gospel, we risk wasting it.
There are things money cannot buy but time can achieve: One of these things is the wisdom meditated upon in today's first reading. If you take the time, the writer tells us, you will find her sitting at your very gate. Other things bought by time, not money, are another persons respect and trust, a clear conscience. We pay for each in instalments, by the way we use our time. But time isn't evenhanded. What took years to build up can be torn down in minutes. When we abuse time we risk serious damage to our happiness.
All the maidens of today's gospel were invited to the wedding feast. All had lamps. They were fully entitled to have fun until the bridegroom arrived. That was not the problem. Part of their job was to be ready, with lighted lamps, to light the path of the Bridegroom. Their time was not their own. But they acted as if it were. They were wasting their time because they were spending it on themselves alone. They were killing time, selfishly. It has been said that we die clutching in our hands only that which we have given away in our lifetime. This may be especially true of the way we use time. How we experience it as it ebbs from us will be coloured by the way we used it when there was plenty of it. Time is full of eternity. There are echoes here of what Jesus said about losing our life to find it. It is a fitting description of what he did in his own life and crucifixion.
This profound respect for time lies behind the Sabbath Law, and indeed the Jewish Sabbath law before that. It recommends that we use our hands in service as well as our hearts in prayer. We were encouraged to spend time with the neighbour, especially when the neighbour needs our time. In Ireland there was a tradition on Sundays of hospitality and visiting, of doing nothing, yet doing what really matters. Now we spend Sundays on ourselves. We starve ourselves of rounded lives when we pack our Sundays with jobs that could wait till Mondays, or even Friday.
I have often referred here to how powerful a symbol the old egg-timer can be and is: It is the most effective illustration we have of the ebb and flow of time. Time literally runs out before our eyes. But the more conscious we become of this, the more we will treasure time as a gift.