They say timing is everything.
Henry Nicholas John Gunther was probably the last soldier killed in the First World War, at 10.59am at a German roadblock in a village in France, one minute before the Armistice took effect. The peculiar thing about this was that everyone knew it was coming: the agreement had been signed six hours prior, and the news had trickled down the chains of command. It’s not clear why Gunther broke cover and charged against the armed roadblock. His platoon sergeant had ordered him to stop; the German soldiers tried to wave him off: they only opened fire when he did—they were unharmed, he was killed, twenty-three years old, having only been drafted fourteen months prior, of which only four were spent anywhere near the Western Front. He was survived by his fiancée Olga. They had postponed their wedding when he was drafted.
Kokura was an ancient castle town, and is now the hub and heart of Kitakyushu, itself the second biggest city on Kyushu Island. It is not a household name now in the anglophone world, but it could easily have been. After Hiroshima on August 6th, Kokura’s massive weapons manufacturing complex was next on the list, for August 9th. At 8am, the Enola Gay weather plane reported that Kokura’s conditions were suitable. The Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber carrying the 21 kiloton atomic bomb was half an hour late, arriving only at 9.44am—by which time the weather had gotten worse. They made three attempts to line up a bombing run, which took a further 45 minutes; and then they gave up on Kokura. Half an hour later 40,000 people were dead in Nagasaki.
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The Bridegroom is late, the wedding is thus being delayed by events and circumstances whose details are left to our imaginations. The virgins—bridesmaids of sorts, who make up the procession to the wedding banquet—have all fallen asleep. Their lamps had, one assumes, been burning as they were waiting, and perhaps they forgot to extinguish them before falling asleep. Half of the crew had thought to bring extra oil; the other had not. When they awoke, this latter half asked the former to share their oil, but were told instead to head to the shops, lest they run out too.
This is where the timing comes in. The Bridegroom arrives like a long-awaited parcel, exactly when the women were out—and, when they showed up late, lamps presumably lit but for no ceremonial purpose as they’d missed the procession, they were refused entry. And the Bridegroom is struck by sudden amnesia or prosopagnosia: he knew them not, and so excluded them from the party.
If the gloss at the end of the pericope is intended to help us make sense of the story, it does a poor job job. Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. The premise that the Lord’s timing is inscrutable is fine—life is full of contingent coincidences, life is itself a contingent coincidence. You and I could easily not have been, had not the right people met at the right time; had not the right molecules co-occurred in the right situation. But it is the watching part that seems to come from nowhere. After all, the sleeping wasn’t the problem: it is reasonable enough, and left uncriticised in the parable. The issue is with the oil. The mistake isn’t a failure of vigilance, but one of preparedness: they didn’t bring extra, just in case. This is, in a way, a lack of pessimism: they presumed, as it turns out, wrongly, that the Bridegroom would be on time. And that he wouldn’t mind their tardiness, which after all, was the result of an attempt to make things right.
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We might attempt to work out exactly where these maidens went awry, so as to deserve their castigation. That is what most people do, when confronted with this story; encouraged by the evangelist himself, whose Jesus labels the women foolish. And if we did that, we would, I am sure, find some worthy moral lesson, which might inspire us to be better Christians in our personal journeys of faith. But the Christian life is not just a personal journey of faith, and individualised endeavour towards holiness and beatitude. It is, rather, a corporate act, baptised as we are into a Body; salvation itself indeed being the incorporation into the Body of the One who was raised.
The wise women have something to answer for here too. Those women, who refused to share their oil, lest they themselves run out. Or indeed, share their lamps: clearly, not all ten lamps needed lighting for the procession, as they ended up making do with five anyway. Nor is it clear why the five had to go at the same time, when surely one could’ve helped to buy oil for all, rather than everyone just fending for themselves. There is here a deficit, not only of fuel, but also of cooperative spirits. These women, in their various ways, violated that most basic Law of the Playground, that Sharing is Caring”. Jesus himself has a lot to say about sharing, and even making sacrifices to do so.
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Not everything is a collective action problem, but a lot of our most serious problems are. Climate change obviously is; the overextraction of natural resources too; antimicrobial resistance is perhaps less front-of-mind, though we are now well into flu season. In each case, the individually rational thing to do turns out to be potentially disastrous for everyone. The quest for economic growth that propels our people out of poverty into prosperity risks accelerating climate catastrophes that will cost us all. The race to catch fish or fell timber or pump oil before everyone else leads to market gluts and price crashes due to oversupply, and even to wastage as there is too much to sell. War, of course, is a classic. Everyone wants to live in peace, but no one trusts anyone else enough to guarantee it: and so we reach for our most ancient tool, and out of our insecurity, we aggress to make peace by force, and don’t know how or when to stop hitting and hitting back.
It is not all a matter of timing. Numerologically appealing as it is, there was nothing magical about the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. We know this even from the Second World War, which ended in stages. We know it even better now, in our post-9/11 age of forever wars against terror. Just a few weeks ago, U.S. troops left Iraq, after twenty-three years; but Operation Inherent Resolve persists—seems more inherent than resolved. This seems to be the new normal when it comes to major armed conflict. The War in Ukraine, now twelve years old, more longevous than both World Wars combined, is in fact the baby of the bunch. The Sahel has been at war since 2002. Somalia since 1978. The Holy Land since 1948.
It is easy to suppose that what is happening in foreign theatres of war is not our problem, especially if it making it our problem will cost us in taxes or diplomatic relations. But if we cannot think about our problems—the world’s problems—as our problems, one another’s problems; if we guard our own jealously, lest we run out; if we demand that we all just fend for ourselves; then it will be much more than a wedding party we will miss. We—who are together the Body of Christ—must grow wiser than that.