Oil You Cannot Borrow

A lot of us are living on someone else’s faith and haven’t noticed it yet. Grandma prays the Rosary every night, so the family feels covered by her acts of piety. Our spouse drags the entire family to Mass on Sunday. The parish runs a food pantry, and we drop a can or two of food in the bin at Thanksgiving. It feels like enough, and most weeks nobody asks for more from us. But underneath sits a bet we’d never put into words. We assume there will always be time in the future for us to get serious about our faith: after the kids are grown, after the promotion, after this busy season, which never seems to end. God is patient, we tell ourselves, and the bridegroom always seems to be running late. So the lamp stays lit on borrowed oil, and we tell ourselves we’ll stock up on oil tomorrow.

Today’s readings take that bet apart from two sides. The Book of Wisdom says wisdom is easy to find: “she is easily discerned by those who love her,” and “he who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty, for he will find her sitting at his gates.” In the Gospel, ten maidens wait at night for a bridegroom who is late. All ten fall asleep. Five wake up with oil and five without, and when the foolish ask to borrow, they’re told to go and buy their own. While they are gone, the bridegroom comes, “and the door was shut.”

Franciscan Media remembers Blessed John Duns Scotus today, the Franciscan who argued that our freedom is real and that love is its whole point. So these readings put a question to you and me on this Sunday: whose oil is keeping our lamp lit?

The Readings

First Reading: Wisdom 6:12-16

Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her. He who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty, for he will find her sitting at his gates. To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding, and he who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care, because she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought.

Gospel: Matthew 25:1-13

“Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘Perhaps there will not be enough for us and for you; go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast; and the door was shut. Afterward the other maidens came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

Scriptural Analysis

The Book of Wisdom was written in Greek, probably in Alexandria not long before Christ, and its author speaks in the voice of King Solomon to the rulers of the earth. Our passage praises wisdom and personifies her as a woman. The Navarre Bible admits that “it is not easy to work out when the sacred writer is referring to divine Wisdom and when he means the wisdom of which man partakes,” and both are in play here. What stands out is how eager she is. She “hastens to make herself known,” she “goes about seeking” those worthy of her, she waits at the gate before anyone is awake. Navarre draws the conclusion: “Although it is she who takes the initiative, people need to desire her and do what they can to make her theirs.”¹

“He will find her sitting at his gates.” The Greek word is paredros (PAH-reh-dros), one who sits beside, and the same book uses it three chapters later when Solomon prays for “the wisdom that sits by thy throne” (Wisdom 9:4). The Wisdom who sits beside God’s throne also sits beside your front door. A sermon once attributed to Saint Augustine, and now counted as the work of an unknown preacher, tells us: “Love her greatly, and she will care for you.” Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, preaching to candidates for baptism, interprets verse 16 as making a reference to the Holy Spirit, who comes looking for us: “Let us open the door that he would come to meet us, ‘seeking those who are worthy of him’ and desiring to give us his gifts.”² Hold on to that door. It comes back in the Gospel.

We turn now to the Gospel. Jesus has just told his disciples, “Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42), and Daniel Harrington, in the Sacra Pagina commentary, notes that the parable of the ten maidens illustrates that very saying. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, describe the scene about which Jesus speaks. A Jewish marriage happened in two stages: the betrothal, and then, perhaps a year later, the wedding feast, which “began after sunset when the groom went to the home of his bride and led her in a celebratory procession” to the couple’s new home. The procession “was guided by maiden torchbearers,” and the feast “could last an entire week or more.”³

Mitch and Sri think the “lamps,” lampades (LAHM-pah-des), were probably torches, “strips of cloth soaked in oil and tied to the end of a sturdy stick,” and that the flasks were earthen jars for dipping them. Harrington notes that the Greek for “maidens” is parthenoi (par-THEH-noy), the word Matthew uses for Mary (Matthew 1:23). The foolish are mōrai (moh-RAI), the word behind our “moron,” and the wise are phronimoi (FROH-nee-moy), the same word Jesus uses for the “wise man who built his house upon the rock” (Matthew 7:24) and for the “faithful and wise servant” (Matthew 24:45). And the bridegroom “was delayed,” chronizontos (khroh-NEED-zon-tos), the verb Jesus used a few verses earlier for the wicked servant who says, “My master is delayed” (Matthew 24:48).⁴

“They all slumbered and slept.” All ten, wise and foolish alike. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that according to all the expositors, this sleep means death, and he gives the reason it can be called sleep: “This is owing to the hope of the resurrection.” So the parable doesn’t fault anyone for sleeping. Harrington says where the fault lies: “The foolishness of some consisted in their failure to foresee and provide for their needs.”⁵

So what is the oil? Aquinas starts with common sense: “he would be a fool who thought to keep light in the lamp, and did not put in oil.” Then he gathers four answers from the Fathers. For Saint Jerome the oil is good works, because “faith is nourished by good works.” For Saint John Chrysostom it is mercy. For others it is “interior joy,” the joy of a clean conscience. For Origen it is holy teaching. Mitch and Sri read Matthew’s Gospel as a whole and settle on good works, since Jesus has already told his disciples to let their light “shine before men, that they may see your good works” (Matthew 5:16), and has warned that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom (Matthew 7:21-23).⁶ Saint Augustine, in the Catena Aurea (kah-TAY-nah OW-ray-ah) of Saint Thomas, presses the point about joy: “He then whose joy springs not from this that he is inwardly pleasing to God, has no oil with him.” All ten had lamps. All ten looked the same from the road.⁷

We now come to the request of the unprepared: “Give us some of your oil.” We also read of a refusal, which bothers a lot of readers. Mitch and Sri answer that objection directly: “Some consider this a harsh response, but this is to miss the point.” Chrysostom, in the Catena, draws the lesson that matters: in that day none of us “shall be able … to stand forth as patron of those who are betrayed by their own works, not because he will not, but because he cannot.” Jerome says it in a sentence: “The virtues of one cannot atone for the vices of another in the day of judgment.”⁸ Oil is the one thing in the story that can’t be lent. You have to acquire your own through your own good works.

“Go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.” Aquinas thinks this is said “rather in the manner of a rebuke than in the manner of a counsel; as though to say: you should have gone.” But the Fathers found a second meaning in the dealers. Saint Hilary of Poitiers says, “They that sell are the poor,” and Chrysostom adds, “You see then how great merchants the poor are to us; but the poor are not there, but here, and therefore we must store up oil here.”⁹ The shop is open now. It closes at midnight.

“And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast; and the door was shut.” Aquinas reads the shut door with great care: “it will never afterwards be opened. But it is open at the present time; hence, lift up your gates, O princes (Ps 23:7).” The same door that Cyril told us to open for the Spirit stands open today, and it won’t stand open forever.¹⁰

“Lord, lord, open to us.” “Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.” Mitch and Sri explain that this “is not a declaration of ignorance, as though he failed to recognize the young women outside in the shadows; it is rather a claim of disassociation, of renouncing his former ties with them.” Harrington adds a chilling detail: Peter uses the same formula about Jesus on the night of the Passion (Matthew 26:74). Aquinas gives the reason with an image from the workshop. The Lord “knows who are his” (2 Timothy 2:19), “as an artisan does not know a work which is not in harmony with his art.”¹¹

Put the two readings side by side, and they describe the same encounter from two directions. Wisdom comes looking for us early and waits at our gate. The bridegroom comes late and finds some of us ready. In both readings the meeting depends on a desire that has been kept alive over time: the person who rises early, the maiden who thought ahead to bring a flask. The Catechism calls our present age “a time of waiting and watching,” and it reads today’s parable as a call “to watch constantly so that, when the single course of our earthly life is completed, we may merit to enter with him into the marriage feast.”¹²

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is to stop borrowing faith from others and start storing our own faith. Borrowed faith works fine on an ordinary Tuesday. It fails at midnight, in the hospital waiting room, at the graveside, in the hour when your own soul has to answer for itself. Nobody can hand you their oil then, however much they love you. That’s the dignity of being a person: your love has to be your own.

The good news is in the first reading: wisdom is easy to find for anyone who actually looks. “He who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty.” So rise early, even ten minutes early, and spend them with God before the phone gets you. Read the Gospel for the day. Say the Our Father slowly. Oil gets stored a drop at a time, and ten minutes a morning adds up to more than sixty hours of prayer in a year.

Then buy oil from the dealers the Fathers named. Find one person in need this week: a neighbor who just lost a husband, the parish meal for the homeless, the coworker going through chemo, and spend something real on them: an afternoon, a casserole, a phone call you’ve been avoiding. Chrysostom’s line is worth taping inside a kitchen cabinet: “the poor are not there, but here.” We are called to serve in this life: to spread the Gospel as we take care of our fellow man.

And check the flask. If it’s been a long time since your last confession, today’s Gospel is a kind warning, delivered while the door is still open. You’re at Mass today. Go into the week with a lamp that’s burning on your own oil.

Blessed John Duns Scotus knew that nobody can choose for us. Franciscan Media tells how, in an age when some philosophers argued that free will was an illusion, Scotus answered with a classroom illustration: if he started beating someone who denied free will, the man would tell him to stop at once, “But if Scotus didn’t really have a free will, how could he stop?” Franciscan Media’s reflection quotes the scholar Father Charles Balic: “The whole of Scotus’s theology is dominated by the notion of love. The characteristic note of this love is its absolute freedom.”¹³ Oil is love freely chosen, again and again, until the bridegroom comes.

Keep your lamp burning today. Rise early, seek wisdom, buy oil from the poor, and be ready when the cry goes up at midnight.

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Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible, North American ed., commentary on Wisdom 6:12-21 (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2004), 326-327.
2. ↑ Pseudo-Augustine, Sermon 391.5, and Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 16.19, in Sever J. Voicu, ed., Apocrypha, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture 15 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 84-85.
3. ↑ Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 348-349; Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 319.
4. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 319-320; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 347-348.
5. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), chap. 25, lect. 1, no. 2018, 325; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 348.
6. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 25, lect. 1, nos. 2016-2017, 324; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 321.
7. ↑ Saint Augustine, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matthew 25:1-13.
8. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 320; Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Jerome, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matthew 25:1-13.
9. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 25, lect. 1, no. 2026, 327; Saint Hilary of Poitiers and Saint John Chrysostom, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matthew 25:1-13.
10. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 25, lect. 1, no. 2029, 328.
11. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 320; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 348; Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 25, lect. 1, no. 2030, 328.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 672, 1036.
13. ↑ “Blessed John Duns Scotus,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed November 3, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.

Books Cited

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• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Wisdom Books (Scepter Publishers)
• Sever J. Voicu, ed., Apocrypha, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture 15 (InterVarsity Press, 2010)
• Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (The Aquinas Institute, 2013)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels (Baronius Press)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed.