How Prepared Are We, Really?

How Prepared Are We For Jesus?

If we look at this parable with western eyes, it may seem an unnatural and a "made-up" story. But it actually telt tells a story that could have happened at any time in a Palestinian village and which could still happen today.

A wedding was a great occasion. The whole village turned out to accompany the couple to their new home, and they went by the longest possible road, in order that they might receive the glad good wishes of as many as possible.

Everyone," runs the Jewish saying, "from six to sixty will follow the marriage drum."

The point of this story lies in a Jewish custom which is very different from anything we know.

When a couple married, they did not go away for a honeymoon; they stayed at home; for a week they kept open house; they were treated, and even addressed, as prince and princess; it was the happiest week in all their lives.

To the festivities of that week their chosen friends were admitted; and it was not only the marriage ceremony itself, it was also that joyous week that the foolish virgins missed, because they were unprepared.

The story of how they missed it all is perfectly true to life. Dr. J. Alexander Findlay tells of what he himself saw in Palestine. "When we were approaching the gates of a Galilaean town," he writes,

"I caught a sight of ten young women all dressed up and playing music, as they danced along the road in front of our car; when I asked what they were doing, they told me that they were going to keep the bride company till her bridegroom arrived.

I asked him if there was any chance of seeing the wedding, but he shook his head, saying in effect: `It might be tonight, or tomorrow night, or in a fortnight's time; nobody ever knows for certain.'

So the bridegroom comes unexpectedly, and sometimes in the middle of the night; it is true that he is required by public opinion to send a man along the street to shout:

`Behold! the bridegroom is coming!' but that may happen at any time; so the bridal party have to be ready to go out into the street at any time to meet him, whenever he chooses to come.

Other important points are that no one is allowed on the streets after dark without a lighted lamp, and also that, when the bridegroom has once arrived, and the door has been shut, late-comers to the ceremony are not admitted."

There the whole drama of Jesus' parable is re-enacted in the twentieth century. Here is no synthetic story but a slice of life from a village in Palestine.

Like so many of Jesus' parables, this one has an immediate and local meaning, and also a wider and universal meaning.

First, its immediate point was directed as a criticism against the chosen people of God; in a real sense their whole history should have been a preparation for the coming of the Son of God; They actually were waiting for the Messiah to come. This was built into their understanding of God.

And really, they ought to have been prepared for him when he came. Instead they were quite unprepared and so those who were unprepared to receive God when He came in the person of the Christ of the Messiah were shut out.

So this a very dramatic expression of the tragedy of the unpreparedness of the God’s people for the Messiah.

Now we know of course, that most of those who first heard the gospel we're in fact Jewish. There were a few Gentiles and a few Samaritan's as well, but since Jesus I've come to the lost sheep of Israel, it was in fact

people among God’s chosen, the Jews, who did respond in faith to Jesus. But of course many did not, and the Pharisees, as religious leaders, kind of represented that general of rejection the Messiah when he came.

Let’s look at the key people in the parable:

The Groom

The groom in this parable is none other than Jesus. Elsewhere in Scripture Jesus is referred to directly or indirectly as a bridegroom.

The Virgins

In the parable the virgins are waiting for the groom. Their name suggests purity. Purity of character perhaps, or at least we can say that they are focused on the bridegroom.

Their intent is to meet with the bridegroom. Throughout Christian history the 10 virgins in this story have been understood to be the church. We’re not talking about those outside the church and then those inside the church, we’re not talking church-goers vs non-church-goers.

There isn’t a sound argument to be made for that. We’re talking here about the church, those who profess to follow Christ. That makes this parable all the more compelling.