With everything else going on, it's been hard to put together a reflection on this week's readings. But the theme that really emerges this week is that of wisdom. Despite being in the Old Testament, the Book of Wisdom was not written in Hebrew. It was written in koine Greek, the same language as the New Testament. As I suppose almost everyone knows, the Greek word for wisdom is sophia.
Philosophy means "love of wisdom." In a very real sense, to love wisdom is to love God. Towards the beginning of his underappreciated one-volume systematic theology, Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its Future among Religions, recently deceased Irish theologian James P. Mackey wrote beautifully about the figure of Sophia.
Sophia, Mackey notes, "is like a twin to Logos" (Christianity and Creation, 42). They're twins, he asserts, because both connote "a rational construction of knowledge or truth that is then operative in the execution of creation" (Ibid). Sophia is "the personified agency... through whom God creates the world" (Ibid). This personified agency who is operative in God's on-going act of creation is feminine.
Today's Gospel is about the end, is it not? But if wisdom is the beginning, it is also the end for which we are made. What does it mean to keep your lamp trimmed and burning? In the first instance, it means being wise. What is the way of wisdom? Well, let's not forget all those very challenging teachings we've heard week-after-week for the past few months.
To live in the way Jesus taught iss what it means to be live wisely. In other words, how we wait wisely is to live as if God's kingdom- about which Jesus constantly speaks in Matthew's Gospel, including in today's Gospel- is already fully established.
Expounding on the metaphor found in our Gospel, the ten wise virgins can't give the ten foolish virgins any oil. In other words, they're not being stingy. It's simply too late. You see, it's the difference between what Francis of Assisi is said to have answered when, while he worked in the garden, he was asked what he would do if the Lord were to return at that moment, and how we might answer.
Francis said that if the Lord was to return right then he would simply keep tending his garden. Whereas, a common answer we might expect is "I would hurry and go to confession" or, if there was some time, perhaps "I'd shape up and start living right." But the point is now is the time to live right! You don't know the length of your own life and you certainly don't know when the Lord might return.
Your lamp is to be lit and kept burning. This is how you become the light of the world Jesus calls you to be (Matthew 5:14). This is the way of wisdom.
It is the hope we have because Jesus died and rose that enables us to follow the way of wisdom, which is the way of love. Later in this same chapter of Matthew Jesus gives the criteria for judgment (Matthew 25:31-46). Essentially, it boils down to the Corporal Works of Mercy: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison. To coin a few phrases, this amounts to loving your neighbor as you love yourself or doing unto others as you would have them to do you.
Love of neighbor is the oil that allows you to keep your lamp lit in anticipation of that day when God will be "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).
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