KEEP THE LAMP LIT
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
KEEP THE LAMP LIT
by Adam Carroll Draper
The world seems to have grown frantic beyond the frenzy of survival. This is subjective, of course, a sense of the unknowable, but it is there nonetheless. It is close to being palpable. There are always plagues and wars and famines, but it seems like the bell is tolling. As I look around, people seem to have tacitly accepted this. It may just come from encountering impatient people recently, who express their unbearable impatience as a condescending entitlement upon my peace, but that has always been the case in my profession. No, this is more like the death knell of any semblance of ease, as if we have entered a new frenzied, raging race to nowhere.
I will not be joining this fray. As Saint John said in the Message version of his first epistle, “the world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out.” If the frenetic find themselves agitated at my failure to appreciate the enormity of their alarm, I will listen, but not yield. Beloved, we must put supreme value on living in peace. That is the Kingdom, where the Prince dwells. It’s within us.
In my meditations recently, I have repeatedly been reminded of the Lord’s parable of the ten virgins and their lamps for the coming of the groom. Five of the ten virgins brought extra oil. They all fell asleep while waiting. When the shouts of his approach went up, the sleeping virgins woke and prepared their lamps, which had burned low during the wait. The five virgins who had come prepared poured their extra oil into their lamps so they had light to celebrate the arrival. The five virgins who were not prepared had to run to buy more oil, and they missed out on the groom’s arrival and the wedding feast. The hard part to this parable is that when the five unprepared virgins got back with their lamps relit, the door to the wedding party was shut. They called out to be let in, but the Lord said, “I don’t know you” (we have no relationship).
This last part always bothered me. It ends badly for the unprepared virgins, and the point of the Lord’s story seems contrary to his good news. I mean, we are saved by grace, not works, right? This parable appears right in the middle of several other parables in which the Lord is quite pointed that we must remain vigilantly prepared for his coming, and he requires our obedience. There is no mistaking that, so he is saying something terrific (because he is what terrific is), but that happy understanding must be discovered, as in, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” Proverbs 25:2.
Mystic Rabbis teach that love is expressed in light and song in Jewish weddings. The light represents the love of the bride and groom for each other. Song not only represents the expression of that love for each other, but sung together, it represents the song we, the bride, will sing in love to God in the future. This is just another example of why it has come to be so important to me to learn the Jewish history of our faith in Yeshua HaMashiach. The Lord used these Jewish traditions inherent in his parables to reveal the deeper meaning he was teaching.
Read in the context of the meaning of light in a Jewish wedding, I am so moved by the urgency of the Lord’s parable about the ten virgins. He is saying, you can’t just love me sporadically. In the context of the other teachings in chapters 24 and 25 of St. Matthew’s gospel, the Lord is not teaching about a heavenly smackdown for disobedience as much as he is teaching us about love. It is like the Lord is urging us to stay in love, keep our relationship with him stirred up in our hearts, because his triumphant return will be so sudden and under such circumstances that we just won’t recognize it’s him if we have not remained vigilantly in love with him. Failing to do so makes us unable to take part in the wedding party. We may want to be in the party, but it is not just a party. It’s a love feast, and the attendees are in the throws of unbridled rapture. You can’t just go out and buy the extravagance of romance. You’ll just end up being offended at feeling left out, so that the only song you’ll hear is “You keep on knockin’, but you can’t come in!” The love is free, but you must actually love. No, it’s as if Jesus is singing, “Stir it up, little darlin’; stir it up!” I want to be in that number.
Love is the light we shine and the song we sing in this world while it strives and fights in unending turmoil. We can’t just choose to love. It is beyond us without the grace purchased for us on the cross. The love we have is a divine treasure. It is free and it flows freely to all of us, but we have to accept it. This is the joy and the terror of heaven – the dichotomy of the love and the fear of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but that wisdom is rooted in the trust of the lovingkindness of his grace (Chen v’Chesed).
This world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out, indeed! Dark times are coming (and may be here), but we are waiting for a party. The world is freaking out, but we are focused on love. Freely we have been given, so freely we give. It’s jubilation. We are shouting out in joy, “Come on in, the water is fine!”