Is There Oil in Your Lamp?

 

Deacon David Previtali · Is There oil in YOur Lamp?

Homily for the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Nov. 8, 2020. Gospel of St. Matthew 25:1-13. Theme: Is There Oil in Your Lamp? 

As the Church Year draws near to its close and the liturgical calendar comes to its end in a couple of weeks, the liturgy begins to draw our attention to the fact that our mortal lives, too, will come to an end on planet Earth. Whether this is due to the Second Coming of Christ or to our own personal death, we need to be ready, to be prepared, because we don’t know the day nor the hour for either of these events. But the one thing we DO know for sure is that both things will indeed happen! 

Today’s gospel parable about getting caught by surprise in the dark makes me think of the short notice blackouts we’ve had in the recent past. We were forewarned but not all of us actually believed that PG&E would really shut us down. Then when it happened I found myself fumbling through a closet in the dark, looking for the emergency radio, lanterns and power sources that I had packed away for just such a situation. And when I found them I realized that I had never bothered to check the batteries or charge the power-pack! They were all totally useless. I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t ready. 

I think that’s what Jesus is warning each one of us about in today’s Gospel. We all know that death is coming for each one of us, and not necessarily only when we are very old or terminally ill. We each know what we need to do to get our life in order and put right with God. We each know what we need to work on to become more loving and considerate with those around us. So, through today’s parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, Jesus is asking each of us: have you done it? Are you prepared? Are you ready to go at a moment’s notice? 

We may not use lamps with oil like the bridesmaids but that really doesn’t matter for us to get the moral of the parable. If we want to modernize it we could substitute a flashlight case for the lamp and batteries for the oil and we would still have the same lesson that Christ wants to teach us. Ancient Christian writers tell us that the parable’s lamps and oil can be interpreted as symbols for the body and the soul. The foolish bridesmaids may have had beautiful ornate bridal lamps but they were empty and fundamentally useless. They did not have the one thing necessary: a flask full of oil. In contemporary language, they did not have good batteries in their flashlights! 

In the same way, we can have great lamps, that is, attractive bodies that are in excellent physical condition from good nutrition and healthy exercise. But at the same time, we can also be running on empty when it comes to the oil that fuels our pathway to eternal life. I think this is where Jesus’ parable touches our lives in the here and now. He doesn’t want us to be caught with an empty flash when he arrives to take us into eternity. 

You see, in both Scripture and in the Liturgy, oil is often a symbol of grace, of faith, of the active presence and power of the Holy Spirit. The grace of the Holy Spirit is the oil that lights up our way to Heaven. It is the oil that enables us to speak with God from the heart in prayer. It’s the oil that enables us to maintain Christian charity and our human dignity no matter what people do or say to us. It’s the oil that empowers us to remain faithful to Christ rather than be manipulated by the popular secular culture around us or to be swayed by politics to close our ears to the cries of the Unborn and the misery of the poor. If our lamps are not always kept filled with this oil we run the risk of ending up in the same sorry condition as those 5 foolish bridesmaids! Do we sense that we are running low on or have actually run out of the oil of the Spirit in our lives? 

If so, we need to get busy filling up our flasks because there are some things that we just cannot borrow from others and a life-giving, life-changing relationship with Christ is one of these things. I think this is one thing that the parable may have meant when it told us that the 5 wise bridesmaids would not lend any of their oil to the foolish ones. We can’t borrow someone else’s faith. We can’t borrow someone else’s grace. We can’t borrow someone else’s spiritual life. We alone are responsible before God for what we have done with the relationship that he first began with us in baptism. We can blame others or society or whatever for some things that happen to us, but we cannot blame anyone else but ourselves for the condition of our souls. 

We don’t want to be like the 5 foolish bridesmaids who waited until it was too late to try and fill up with oil. We need to keep filling our lamps up by praying from the heart every day, by reading and applying the Word of God to our lives, by confessing our sins on a regular basis, and by receiving Jesus in the Eucharist with mindfulness and devotion. We also fill our flasks by being compassionate and merciful with others, loving and treating them as we would do to ourselves. This is how we can assure that we are ready whenever it is that the Lord of the Eternal Wedding should come to take us with him into the feast!

                                     The 5 Foolish Bridesmaids        The 5 Wise Bridesmaids