Ten girls wait in the dark with lamps, and five of them run dry. When they ask the others to share, the answer is no. That refusal has bothered readers for centuries, because it sounds ungenerous and we expect a Gospel where sharing is the whole lesson. The wise virgins are telling the truth about a certain kind of possession. Some things can’t be handed across at the door, because they were never portable to begin with.

Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of Saint Augustine, who spent 34 years as bishop of a North African port city and who read this parable with an unsettling eye. He thought the foolish girls had been running their lamps on the applause of other people. When they cry “give us some of your oil,” Augustine hears them asking for a share of somebody else’s good reputation. And that is a strange thing to want at midnight, with the bridegroom already on the road. It’s also, if we’re honest, the thing most of us have spent real money on.

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:17-25

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

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 Word Of The Cross

Paul is writing to a church that has broken into fan clubs. In the verses just before today’s reading, the Corinthians have sorted themselves by preacher: I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos, I belong to Cephas. Paul’s answer to that whole mess is to march them down to the foot of the cross and leave them standing there.^[1]

There’s a piece of Paul’s own history behind this. Before he reached Corinth, he had been in Athens, and Luke gives us the scene on the Areopagus (Acts 17:22-34). Paul opened with the best of Greek culture, worked toward the resurrection, and got polite laughter and a handful of converts. The cultured elite of that city collected novelties the way other people collect coins (Acts 17:21), and Paul had walked in offering them one more. He came to Corinth having decided to lead with the thing nobody could enjoy as entertainment, and he says so plainly a few verses later: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

His phrase for it, “the word of the cross,” appears nowhere else in the New Testament.^[2] Paul has other ways of naming the gospel. Here he names it by the instrument of execution, and he means the offense to land. Crucifixion in the Roman world was reserved mostly for slaves and for criminals the state wanted to humiliate in public. Cicero called it the most extreme form of punishment. Victims were stripped, nailed up in view of anyone walking past, and often left without a burial. For the Jews at Corinth, there was a further problem in Deuteronomy 21:23, where a man hung on a tree is under God’s curse. In the second century, Justin Martyr’s Jewish interlocutor Trypho puts the objection about as clearly as it can be put: he grants that the Scriptures foretell a suffering Christ, and still cannot get past a Messiah cursed by the law.

Notice what Paul does with Isaiah. “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart” comes from Isaiah 29:14, and the original setting matters. Judah is facing Assyria, and the king’s counselors have advised an alliance with Egypt. Egypt: the house of slavery their grandfathers were glad to walk out of! God promises to demolish the wisdom of the men who thought that was clever policy.^[3] Paul takes a text about advisors who were smart in the direction of disaster and applies it to any wisdom sealed inside its own horizon.

Then come three rhetorical questions, and they aren’t decorative. “Where is the wise man?” is aimed at the Greek. “Where is the scribe?” is aimed at the Jew. “Where is the debater of this age?” catches both. The Greek word behind “debater,” syzetetes, describes a man who argues more for the art of arguing than for anything he might actually find, and the word even sounds like chatter.^[4] Every culture produces the type. We have him on cable news and in comment threads.

Paul is careful, though, and Catholic readers should be careful with him. He is not writing off human reason. Even before the gospel, God’s plan was that the created world would carry enough light for men to find him, which is why Romans says the pagans “are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). Sin bent that. Saint Thomas Aquinas puts the divine response beautifully: God acts “like that of a teacher who, realizing that his meaning is not being grasped by his hearers, strives to use other words to explain what he has in his heart.”^[5] On the cross God changes his words. Reason enlightened by faith keeps a permanent place in the Church, which is exactly why she goes on producing men like Augustine and Thomas. What Paul attacks is reason that has appointed itself the ceiling.

One detail carries real pastoral weight. “Those who are perishing” and “we who are being saved” are both present participles, both ongoing.^[6] Neither road has arrived. That cuts two ways at once: nobody gets to be smug about a salvation still in progress, and nobody gets to write off the man on the other road, because grace can turn him around this afternoon.

The Lamps And The Oil

The Gospel drops us into a first-century Palestinian wedding, and a few customs make it legible. A couple was betrothed first, legally married but living apart, sometimes for a year. The wedding proper began after sunset, when the groom went to the bride’s house, settled the last of the arrangements with her father, and led her home in a torchlit procession to the feast. Neighbors came out of their houses to cheer as the party passed. Young women with torches guided the way, and the celebration that followed could run a week or more.

Those “lamps” were most likely torches, cloth soaked in oil and bound to the end of a stick.^[7] The small clay lamps we’ve dug up from Roman Palestine throw too little light to escort anyone anywhere at night. So the oil in those flasks decides everything. With it you’re part of the procession. Without it, you’re standing in the road holding a stick.

Who is the bridegroom? In the Old Testament that title belongs to God: “your Maker is your husband” (Isaiah 54:5), “I was their husband, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:32), “you will call me, My husband” (Hosea 2:16). In Matthew, Jesus takes it for himself without a word of explanation: “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?” (Matthew 9:15). A name the Hebrew Scriptures reserved for God is now worn by a man from Nazareth, and the parable assumes you’ve noticed.^[8]

So what is the oil? Aquinas, gathering the Fathers, lists four answers but doesn’t rank them, because they overlap. Jerome reads the oil as good works, since faith is the light in the lamp and works are what keep it burning. Chrysostom reads it as mercy, pointing to the Samaritan who poured wine and oil into a stranger’s wounds (Luke 10:34), the wine standing for severity and the oil for mercy; James is blunt about the stakes, “judgment without mercy to him who has not done mercy” (James 2:13). A third reading takes the oil as interior joy, the gladness of a clean conscience, and Aquinas draws the line sharply here: “There are many who abstain exteriorly, and seek joy within, namely the joy of conscience, and they have oil with them there. But others do not seek the joy of conscience, but the glory of men, and these do not have oil.” Origen reads the oil as sound doctrine.^[9] Take all four, and you have a fair description of an interior life: works, mercy, a clear conscience, true teaching.

The lamp itself, on Hilary’s reading, is the soul lit by the light of faith received in baptism. Aquinas then says the obvious thing in the plainest possible way: “he would be a fool who thought to keep light in the lamp, and did not put in oil.”^[10] All ten girls have lamps. All ten are baptized, if you follow the figure. Five of them assumed the flame would take care of itself.

Which brings us back to Augustine. On his reading, the foolish girls had been living on external assurance, on what other people said about them, and the request “give us some of your oil” means “give us some of your praise.” He answers with Romans 2:15, “their conscience bearing witness to them,” and with Job, “behold my witness is in heaven” (Job 16:19). They put their confidence in human favor, which cannot profit them at midnight.^[11] So the refusal is a statement of fact about how these things work. Paul says it in a line: “every one will bear his own burden” (Galatians 6:5). A reputation is held by other people. It stays with them.

And the advice to go buy some, Aquinas notes, lands as a rebuke, closer in tone to “you should have gone.”^[12] Then the door. Matthew’s ominous line, “and the door was shut,” draws a line between those inside the kingdom and those outside. The bridegroom’s reply, “I do not know you,” is the same sentence Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount to those who cry “Lord, Lord” without doing the Father’s will (Matthew 7:21-23). He is disowning a relationship that was never really there, like an artisan disowning work he never made.^[13] The door stands open now. Aquinas points to the Psalm, “lift up your gates, O princes” (Psalm 24:7), and to John’s vision, “a door was opened in heaven” (Revelation 4:1). Open today. Shut then.

Put the two readings side by side, and the seam shows. The wisdom of the world, in Paul’s sense, is the settled appetite to be found impressive by other people. The cross is the one thing that appetite can never be satisfied with, which is why God chose it. And the oil that the foolish girls forgot to buy is everything that gets built when nobody is applauding.

Daily Application

Here is the honest question this Gospel puts to a Catholic on a Friday morning: how much of my religion would survive if nobody ever found out about it?

That isn’t a trick or an accusation. Most of us have a public faith and a private one, and they’re rarely the same size. The public one runs on real fuel. People notice when you’re at Mass, when you volunteer, when you say the hard true thing at work. That noticing is pleasant, and God is not offended by it. Jesus himself tells us to let our light shine so others may see our good works and glorify the Father (Matthew 5:16). The trouble starts when the noticing becomes the fuel, because then a private hour with no audience feels like a waste, and we quietly stop showing up for those hours. That’s how a lamp goes out slowly, without anyone deciding.

So the movement this parable asks for is a transfer of accounts. Move your confidence off the ledger other people keep about you and onto the one your conscience keeps before God. Aquinas named the two options exactly: the joy of a clean conscience, or the glory of men. Only one of them travels.

Augustine knew this ground better than most saints, because he made his living on the wrong side of it. Before his conversion, he was a professional rhetorician, a man paid to be admired for how well he talked, which is very close to Paul’s “debater of this age.” He walked away from that career and spent the rest of his life pouring oil into a lamp, in a provincial African port, mostly out of anyone’s sight, until he died in Hippo on this day in the year 430 with the city under siege. Franciscan Media puts his legacy this way: he is a prophet for today, trumpeting the need to scrap escapisms and stand face-to-face with personal responsibility and dignity. That’s the man to keep company with when you’d rather be admired than converted.

Two concrete things, then. First, do one work of mercy today that nobody will ever hear about. Pay for something anonymously. Take the shift nobody wants. Say the prayer for the person who hurt you, by name, with the door shut. Chrysostom said the oil was mercy, and mercy that goes unrecorded is the purest kind you’ll ever manage.

Second, get to Confession. There is no faster way to move your accounting from human opinions to God’s than to kneel down and tell the truth about yourself to a priest who has no stake in your reputation. The foolish girls tried to borrow at midnight what they could have bought cheaply for months. You have the months. The door is open now, and the shops are still trading.

Buy your oil today.

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Notes

1. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 43. ↩
2. Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 91, 101. ↩
3. Montague, First Corinthians, 45; Collins, First Corinthians, 96, 103. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 45; Collins, First Corinthians, 104. ↩
5. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 55, quoted in Montague, First Corinthians, 46. ↩
6. Montague, First Corinthians, 45. ↩
7. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 319; on first-century wedding customs, 319 and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 349. ↩
8. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, 350. ↩
9. Saint 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), no. 2017, 324. ↩
10. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, nos. 2013 and 2016, 323–24. ↩
11. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, no. 2024, 326. ↩
12. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, no. 2026, 327. ↩
13. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 320. ↩

Books Cited

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• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic)