04.01 The divine advent

I. THE DIVINE ADVENT THE parable of the Ten Virgins is one of the most beautiful and yet one of the most searching and solemn of all the parables. Deep as the meanings may be which underlie its details, its main lesson stands out with impressive simplicity, and as we read it experience and conscience are the best interpreters. The setting of the story is the picturesque ceremonial of a Hebrew wedding. When night has fallen, the bridegroom, attended by his friends, proceeds to the home of the bride, claims her, leads her forth with her own maidens to his house or to the place selected for the marriage feast. On the way the procession is joined by other maidens, who are waiting for it, and these all, with lamps or torches in their hands, often with music and singing, pass into the place of banquet. Our Lord speaks, as it were, from the heart of His own people, but the lessons He teaches are for all times. Let us try to learn some of them as we follow the story step by step. The Ten Virgins go forth to meet the bridegroom and await his coming, as he leads his bride, the prize of his love, with him. We take the Virgins to represent simply our human nature awaiting its true consummation. The universe itself is a traveller, journeying towards the fulfilment of a destiny, yet to be revealed. “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”

Science calls this strange and toilsome journey “evolution,” and can tell us the story of its stages; religion calls it the slowly unfolding Purpose of God. Within this universal movement and expectancy man has his own place he marches at its head. He is conscious in himself, in body, in mind, and spirit, of his incompleteness, and in that very knowledge he finds the token and pledge of a completeness still awaiting him. However darkened by sin, deluded by mistakes, thwarted by manifold imperfections, he cannot silence that imperious “Forward” which he takes to be the voice of his destiny.

“Ay, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?”. Can we at all foreshadow that “Divine event,” that completion of man and of the world, that “heaven” in store? To this question science of itself can give no answer: It can speak only of the present and the past. Philosophy essays to answer, and its answer has rich meaning for those who are capable of understanding its modes of thought and speech. But religion gives an answer definite and intelligible to all. It is that the great consummation is the passing, the return, of v all things into God, or the union of man, and through man of the world, with God. And the Christian Faith, for vindication of its hope, points baek to a Divine Revelation in which the final truth was shown forth. In Christ, the perfect union between the world and man, God was revealed. His spirit is in man and in the world, realizing age by age the union thus revealed. In a word, the great unfolding Purpose of God is, in “the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ.” The fulfilment of all that the Incarnation meant is the great consummation. This is, in the language of the New Testament, the coming of the Bridegroom for which the world is waiting.

Again, as in the movement of all things towards the great completion humanity is in the van of the world, so necessarily the Church must be in the van of humanity. For the Church is the “body” in which the Spirit of the Christ dwells, through which as His “organ” (you will remember our thoughts about this in a previous paper) He carries out His great work of gathering all this movement into Himself. The Church is meant to be alas! that it should so constantly fail in realizing its true meaning! that section of humanity which is ever bringing all that is true in life and thought and feeling, “the glory and the honour of the nations,” into union with God in Christ. Thus, in the parable the Bride is specially the Church, and the Ten Virgins, the friends of the Bride, are specially the men and women who, as the members of the Church, inspired by its Faith and sustained by its life, are ever working and waiting for the fulfilment of its purpose. The whole meaning of their life is that they have “gone forth to meet the Bridegroom.” Do you complain that these thoughts are too high? that we cannot attain unto them? that they seem indeed not thoughts at all but mere vague high-sounding words? Certainly they represent ways of thinking and speaking very unfamiliar to most of us. But, after all, they are the thoughts and words of the New Testament, especially of S. Paul.

They were very rich and inspiring once, in the great days, for example, of the Church of Alexandria. Our modern Christianity loses enormously in depth and power because our religious perspective is so narrow and meagre. Yet it ought not to be difficult to translate such high themes into the terms of our experience. Do we not all know what it is, in quietly watching some sunset, to feel a strange yearning, almost a pain of yearning, for some Beauty which lies beyond? Well, there we had a momentary insight into the incompleteness of a World which has not yet realized its destiny. We felt “Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Falling from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.” But more simply still do we not all feel that there is a void in our life, which not all our interests and cares, all our loves and friendships can wholly fill? That the energies of our being are still desultory and uncertain, wanting clearness and decisiveness of purpose, that its deepest needs are still unsatisfied? And, if we are Christians at all, do we not know that somehow all this sense of incompleteness, this vague desire, shapes itself more and more distinctly, into the one single aspiration, “Christ”?

Then, if this be so, we realize what our life is waiting for: we are likened unto the Ten Virgins who went forth to meet the Bridegroom.

TAGS: [Parables]