1 Thess. 4:13-18
Resources
1. James Alison, Raising Abel, ch. 6, on "The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Delayed Parousia." One of Alison's overall theses is that Jesus subverted the apocalyptic imagination from within. The latter was an improvement over the pagan notion of an eternal return (Nietzche?) but remained stuck within the notion of a violent God. So, says Alison,
It seems to me that what we have with Jesus is precisely and deliberately the subversion from within of the apocalyptic imagination. What I have called the eschatological imagination is nothing other than the subversion from within of the apocalyptic imagination. That is, Jesus used the language and the imagery which he found around him to say something rather different. (p. 125)The next step, in the light of the Resurrection, was for the apostolic witness to have the apocalyptic imagination of their Jewish heritage transformed into an eschatological imagination. They had to go back and recover the insight that Jesus himself brought to the notion of Judgment Day. But it did not happen overnight. The NT texts reflect the process of transformation, especially one in which all violence only gradually becomes purged from their view of God and the Judgment Day. 1 Thess is considered one of the earliest writings in the NT and is still closer to the apocalyptic imagination in some respects.
2. Ibid. Alison also takes on the popular modern thesis that Jesus might have had the timing of the Parousia wrong, that he preached an imminent Parousia. Then, as the thesis goes, when it was delayed, the early church created its own theology to deal with it. Alison suggests that the entire duality between this age and the next is proper to the apocalyptic imagination not to Jesus' eschatological imagination. And so Jesus' understanding of the Parousia was also transformed:
...where the heavenly reality of the crucified and risen victim is already present to the apostolic group, allowing the beginnings of a human life and sociality which are not marked by death, but whose members are free to live a life of self-giving in imitation of Jesus thanks to their faith in the death-less nature of God, then a continuity is already coming about between this age and the next. Human time itself, an unalienable dimension of the physical creatureliness of the human being, has begun to become capable of sharing in life without end. (p. 127)So Alison says of 1 Thess:
If we take the notion of the 'end' understood as vengeance, just as it is found in 1 Thessalonians, it is a vengeful end which depends exactly on there being insiders and outsiders, so that the afflicted are vindicated, and the persecutors punished. But in the degree to which the perception of God changes, becoming, as we have seen, shorn of violence, two realities are altered simultaneously: the separation between goodies and baddies, insiders and outsiders, enters into a process of continuous collapse and subversion, and at the same time the 'end' cannot remain as a vengeance if there is no longer any clarity about who's an insider and who an outsider, and under these circumstances the notion of the end itself changes towards what we see in 2 Peter: it becomes a principle of revelation of what had really been going on during the time that has been left for the changing of hearts... In this way the End, rather than being a vengeful conclusion to time, comes to be a principle, operative in time, by means of which we may live out the arrival of the Son of Man, the being alert for the thief in the night, the whole time. (p. 127)What 1 Thess (5:2) does have correct is the image of the "thief in the night," which gospel references (Mt. 24:42-44, Lk. 12:39-40) would seem to indicate comes from Jesus himself. Alison anchors his argument with an image or illustration that lends the book its title. Imagine if Abel was resurrected to confront his brother Abel like a thief in the night. But instead came to forgive him. Again, I'll let Alison speak for himself:
What I wanted to suggest is that, in this, very exactly, does the Christian faith consist: in the return of Abel as forgiveness for Cain, and the return of Abel not only as a decree of forgiveness for Cain, but as an insistent presence which gives Cain time to recover his story, and, with the years which remain to him, which may only be days, who knows, to begin to construct another story... However the story is to finish, between this arrival of his brother like a thief in the night, and the end of his days, Cain will be hard at work in the construction of the story of one who can look into his brother's eyes neither with pride nor with shame. He will look instead with the gratitude of a man who has received himself back at the hands of the one he himself killed, killed so as to fill the vacuum of the feeling that, before that other, he, Cain, had no 'himself' to give, no 'himself' with whom to love. This is the story of which we are talking when we speak of the human story in its working out starting from the resurrection. It is what I call the time of Abel. (p. 134)So the time of Abel is prompted by the sudden appearance of the brother slain, who has already come like the thief in the night; the 'delay' in his return is a time of grace that allows the slayers a time to rewrite their stories.
3. In 2008 the work of N. T. Wright is more a part of my view of "apocalyptic." Wright also challenges the view of the Parousia which has held sway since Bultmann, for exegetical reasons that may be of support to Alison's theological and anthropological reasons. The sources from Wright on 1 Thessalonians and eschatology are: The Resurrection of the Son of God, pp. 213-219; Paul: In Fresh Perspective, pp. 54-56; Surprised by Hope, pp. ; Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians, pp. 122ff.
Reflections and Questions
1. There are commentaries (Ernest Best's, for example) which speak of NT "mythologies" of the Parousia that we might not want to accept as modern people. Mimetic theory sheds light on what constitutes a mythology; and I think that Alison helps us to steer through the mess of modern scholarship with a refreshing view.
2. This rather isolated passage addresses such a particular question of the Thessalonians regrading the Parousia, I think it would be difficult to preach it. Debates about the Parousia generally are not helpful, either. The best route might be to use it with the gospel to talk in terms of Alison's "time of Abel."
Matt. 25:1-13
Exegetical Notes
1. Many commentators point to the importance of the end of the Sermon on the Mount to the central images of this parable:
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?' Then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.' Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell -- and great was its fall!" (Matthew 7:21-27)The bridesmaids are categorized as wise and foolish, as are the two builders of houses; and they call out "Lord, Lord" when shut out, as Jesus talks about in 7:21-23. The response here is the same as in the parable, "I did not know you."
2. The change in audience might be crucial here. The lectionary parables of recent weeks followed Matthew 21:23:
When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?"Jesus is responding to the elders of the people in the previous parables. Beginning in Matthew 24:1, we have a change of setting and audience:
As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, "You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"Jesus is now speaking "privately" to his disciples. He is speaking to us, his followers. Does that make a difference in hearing the warning of these next three parables?
3. The word for "bridesmaid," parthenos, is used only one other time in Matthew, in 1:23, a quote of Isaiah:
"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."Remember that Matthew's Gospel begins with seventeen verses of genealogy, mostly a list of father's names, with only five mothers picked out: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, "the wife of Uriah," and Mary. All of these conceptions were under questionable circumstances involving women who may have been considered outsiders for various reasons. 1:18 immediately gives us Mary's situation: she is found to be with child while only engaged and not even living with her betrothed. She is, somewhat ironically, the "virgin" of the Isaiah quote in Matthew 1:23. Other than in this parable of the ten bridesmaids, parthenos is used in the four Gospels only to twice refer to Mary, in Matthew 1:23 and Luke 1:27.
Resources
1. See above on second lesson; the Parable of the Ten Maidens includes the notion of the delay of the bridegroom, or the delayed Parousia, which Alison addresses.
2. James Alison, Raising Abel, on Matthew 24-25, pp. 152-158. Alison thinks it important to take the last three parables of Jesus in Matthew together: the Ten Maidens, the Talents, and the Sheep and the Goats. They speak to how to live in the present in the time of Abel. His conclusion is:
So, with Matthew, apocalyptic language and all, we see that his three final parables have to do strictly with how to live in the time of Abel: first, being alert means preparing yourself patiently for the duration; secondly, the patient construction of the kingdom means having your imagination fixed on the abundant generosity of the One Who empowers and gives growth; and thirdly, what is demanded is a non-scandalized living out which is flexible enough to be able to recognize those whom the world is throwing out, and then a stretching out of the hand so as to create with them the kingdom of heaven. All of this is a making explicit of the eschatological imagination through the subversion from within of the apocalyptic imagination.More specifically to the Parable of the Ten Maidens, he makes a helpful connection between the wise and foolish maidens and the wise man who builds on a rock and the foolish man who builds on sand in Matt. 7:24-27. (One might also point to another connection to the Sermon on the Mount: "Let your lights so shine before others..."; Mt. 5:16. The latter is a traditional part of many baptismal liturgies; the time of Abel is the time of our living in our baptisms as forgiven people who are graciously given the opportunity to live a new way that takes solidarity with the victims, rather than the persecutors, and to let our lights so shine.)
3. James Alison, Knowing Jesus, makes the connection between the Beatitudes (see comments on the Gospel of All Saints A, generally two weeks previous to this lection) and the final parable in Matthew:
The key feature of blessedness is that it involves living a deliberately chosen and cultivated sort of life which is not involved in the power and violence of the world, and which because of this fact, makes the ones living it immensely vulnerable to being turned into victims. That is the center of the ethic as taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. If we then turn to the end of Jesus' last discourse before his passion [Matt. 25:31-46] -- the mirror image of this, the first of his discourses -- we find the same intelligence at work. In the famous passage of the last judgement, the judgement is defined not in terms of belonging to this or that group, or believing this or that dogma. The judgement is presented in terms of the human relationships towards victims. Those who hunger, thirst, are naked, sick, or imprisoned. Those who have understood, whether or not they know anything about Jesus, are those who have seen their way out of the self-deception of the world which is blind to its victims, and have reached out to help them. Again, the intelligence of the victim [link to webpage on Alison's use of this phrase "the intelligence of the victim"]: it is the crucified and risen victim who is the judge of the world, and the world is judged in the light of its relationship to the crucified and risen victim.As indicated above in #2, Alison treats the three parables in Matthew 25 as a sort of triptych. Being prepared for the coming of the bridegroom is to live life in relationship to the world's victims.
4. The art connected with this parable is rather interesting. Jenee Woodard, at her "The Text This Week" website, provides Links to images of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Robert Widdowson, on the GIRARD Ecunet meeting, offered another link to art which seems to be from the perspective of the foolish virgins who are shut-out: the liberation perspective of Cerezo Barredo's drawing of the five foolish virgins.
Reflections and Questions
1. Andrew Marr, on the GIRARD Ecunet meeting, offered the following insightful comments regarding this parable:
Only human beings expel themselves. In the case of this parable, the problem with the five "foolish" bridesmaids is that they didn't trust the bridegroom and just join the party. They ran off to get oil because THEY thought they weren't good enough to get in without the oil. This approach can give us much the same deal with the parable of the talents as told in Matthew. Again, it is the one who has the least who thinks he or she really has nothing and feels inadequate to the kingdom and so won't join the party.See the comments for next week's Gospel Lesson, the Parable of the Talents, in order to see the consistency of a 'Girardian' reading here. The third servant in that parable views his master as a "harsh man," and thus is judged accordingly. Here, Marr is suggesting a similar reading: the five foolish virgins think they will get left out if they don't have oil in their lamps, so they foolishly run off to find some; when they return, they find themselves left out as they expected. They did not trust the groom to include them regardless of not having lit lamps.
In keeping with Alison's triptych reading (see resource #3 above), Marr comments:
This parable does put an emphasis on readiness, which is not the same thing as "works righteousness." The image of oil for the lamps can be (andLink to a sermon using this reading of the parable, entitled "Faith in a Welcoming Bridegroom."
has been) interpreted as an inner disposition that makes one alert for the presence of the kingdom when that presence occurs. It can be seen as a
disposition for empathy for the victim that makes one alert to the presence and needs of the victims and leads to responses that further the kingdom.
2. My 1990 sermon (pre-Girard days) on these texts was what Lutherans call “Law and Gospel” preaching. I set up the Gospel with the Law, primarily based on the Old Testament text assigned in the former Lutheran lectionary, Amos 5:18-24. Here are the concluding paragraphs:
Depressing, isn't it? When do I get to the uplifting part, where I tell us what we need to do to get ready for the Lord's coming? When do I challenge and encourage us with flowery words about justice and righteous flowing in our lives? But, you see, I'm not sure I can. It didn't work for Amos. There's something missing yet from his message. In fact, the parable from Matthew this morning suffers from the same kind of deficiency. For me, that's the wisdom of the catholic mass, the regular partaking of the sacrament. That's the wisdom of never wrestling with the word without the guarantee of the new covenant that comes with celebrating the Eucharist. For what is missing from our lessons this morning is the message of the cross. I could get pumped up with all kinds of words of great prophecy, like Amos, but still run the danger of leaving out the cross. But sharing our Lord's Supper softens that risk, because our Lord has promised that it always carries with it the power of that message of the cross.Only the cross bears the good news. For the cross essentially tells us that there really is nothing that you and I can do to get ready for the Lord's coming. But, you see, that's just it: the Lord has already come. The day of the Lord has arrived. And, yes, Amos was right about several things. The day of the Lord was darkness for we who lived in the shelter of our own security. The day of the Lord did bring judgement on all who fall short of the righteousness of God. But Amos was also fundamentally wrong about one important thing: it was not God's judgment which brought death to all the offenders. Rather, the horror and darkness of the day of Lord consists in that the offenders brought death to God. Amos never would have suspected that on the Day of the Lord it would be us who kill God. That it was Jesus Christ, in obedience to his Father, who leaped in and took the bite of the serpent for us. The good news is that God raises him up to extend new life to all.
In fact, the good news goes even further than that. Unlike the lessons from Amos and Matthew, which by themselves are on the side of the law, our lesson from St. Paul gives us a glimpse of that good news. Underneath all the apocalyptic language about Christ returning, Paul makes one thing perfectly clear: the end result is that we will live with Christ forever. And the basis for that hope is the fact that Christ died and rose. For St. Paul the words "with Christ" are almost a technical term. In Romans chapter 6 we learn that life with Christ begins at baptism, when we are baptized into the power of Christ's dying and rising again. Thus, Amos' challenge to let justice flow takes on a different light. It is not a matter of something I have to do, or we have to do, that justice will begin to flow. Rather, God's justice and righteous flows from the cross, and in our baptisms it becomes a cascade of water that washes us clean. God's justice becomes an everflowing stream through the days of our lives. It is when I know God's righteousness as a sheer gift of grace that I can then hear Amos' words as a gift, too, as guidance to my efforts of what it means to live in justice each day. And I can hear the commandments of Matthew to be ready with a new ending: when the bridegroom comes, he brings with him enough oil for everyone, so that, as we will say a bit later this morning, we can "let our lights so shine before others that they may see our good works and glorify our Father who is heaven." Let your lights so shine! Amen
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