Sermons

Third Sunday before Advent
Sunday 6 November at 8am and 6.30pm

Simon Cowling

Readings: Readings 1 Thessalonians 4. 13-18; Matthew 25. 1-13

Last Sunday we celebrated, a little proleptically, the Feast of All Saints. In recent years the Church of England has encouraged the notion, rightly in my view, that All Saints' Day should be seen as a pivot point of the Church's year, and the period that follows it as a bridge between the end of the long Trinity Season and the start of the new Church year at Advent. A visible reminder of this shift in gear after the 1st November is the liturgical use of red that is permitted by the rubrics during this season. Another reminder is provided by the readings that we hear in these weeks of November. They begin, in some sense, to prepare us for the great theme of God's judgement that will dominate the first part of Advent. Today's readings are a good example of this. Both of them have an eschatological feel to them, that is to say that they are concerned with what will happen at the end times - often referred to by theologians using a Greek word: the eschaton. In the reading from the first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul is helping the fledgling Church to grapple with one of the most difficult and urgent questions that confronted the earliest Christians: if the second coming of Christ in glory was imminent, as was believed, why were Christians dying before the great event, and what would happen to them once Jesus did, in fact, arrive? The Gospel parable, that of the five wise and five foolish virgins, is shot through with this same feeling of urgency. Part of that sense, of course, comes from its setting in the Gospel narrative - Jerusalem just a few days before the trial and crucifixion of Jesus; but there are details within the story itself that stand out: the lateness of the hour of the bridegroom's arrival; the cry that rings out: Come and meet him!; the door closed against the five virgins whose lack of readiness had meant they had to go and search for oil in the middle of the night. It is this lack of readiness that is the key to understanding the parable; indeed there are some who take the parable to be a subtle rebuke to those in the Christian community for whom Matthew was writing, a generation after Jesus' crucifixion. Some of this community may well have been asking the same questions as the Thessalonians about his second coming. When is it going to happen, why has it apparently been delayed. Jesus' answer is quite clear: don't ask questions; just be ready.

One of the matters I raise in today's notes on the readings is the relevance of the second coming of Jesus to Christians like us who, two thousand years later, are still waiting for it. In this connection I must confess to finding Jesus' parable more helpful than St. Paul's rather careful chronology of the day of the Lord, with its shout of command, the archangel's voice and so on. The parable, on the other hand, seems to me to get to the heart of the matter. I have a verse of a well-known hymn by Bishop Thomas Ken in the back of my mind:

Thy precious time misspent, redeem,
Each present day thy last esteem,
Improve thy talent with due care;
For the great day thyself prepare.

Thomas Ken could have had any one of a number of parables in the back of his mind when he wrote that verse - including the one that follows on from today's - but for me it's the second line that resonates with the scripture we've heard today: each present day thy last esteem. If we really did choose to live our lives as though each day were our last then we would never, figuratively speaking, run out of oil. That is to say, our spiritual lives would always be sufficiently in order for us to be ready to meet our Lord with at least a measure of confidence that we had prepared ourselves for the great day.

Perhaps we could usefully spend some time in this period between All Saints and Advent thinking of what 'being ready' might mean. For me it would certainly entail reflecting deeply on the words of another verse of that hymn by Thomas Ken:

In conversation be sincere;
Keep conscience as the noontide clear;
Think how all seeing God thy ways
And all thy secret thoughts surveys.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay