July 19, 2026
Open Doors and Missed Opportunities
Matthew 25:1-13
This morning we start a new sermon series called Stories with a Twist. For the rest of the summer, we’ll look at some of Jesus’s parables with an eye for the part of each story where it stops being familiar and starts being strange.
You see, parables are supposed to work that way. They’re not simple stories. Just when you think you have it, a trap door opens and you fall into another layer of meaning and challenge.
Some parables we know so well that the twist is hard to catch. The Good Samaritan warms our hearts. A stranger shows mercy, we nod along, and go home feeling a little better about the world and about ourselves. But miss the twist.
We’re looking for the twist tucked inside these stories. Parables aren’t fables – they don’t have simple moral lesson. They are more complex than that, and they each have a turn that would have left Jesus’s listeners stunned, perplexed, or walking away shaking their heads.
Today’s parable usually shows up in Advent, surrounded by candles and countdown calendars. In that light, it looks like a story about waiting for Christmas – the baby Jesus. But hearing it here, in the middle of July, strips that away.
There’s no wreath or decoration to this. Just the bare parable, sweating in the heat and humidity along with the rest of us. And that puts it in a different light, because the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids isn’t anybody’s favorite. It’s hard.
Ten young women, attendants to a wedding party, gather up their torches and go out to wait for the groom. Five of them wisely remembered to bring extra oil for their torches in case the groom was late. Five of them foolishly didn’t bring any extra oil.
I’ve officiated at enough weddings to know these things often happen. People get nervous, and excited, and hurried and they forget things and lose things. Like wedding licenses, and rings, and patience. And if you think this story is about a wedding, the details of it seem unfair.
We feel sympathy for the bridesmaids who forgot what they needed; irritation at the ones who wouldn’t share their oil; frustration with a groom who shows up ridiculously late; and indignation when the returning bridesmaids are excluded from the feast.
If it’s about a wedding, the story is ridiculous. But Jesus isn’t talking about a wedding. Jesus borrows the image of a wedding to talk about the kingdom of God. And the story only works if we let it speak on its own terms rather than ours. That’s how we’ll find the twist. So, let’s be patient with the story.
And start with the context. This is the first of three stories closing out a long stretch of Matthew’s Gospel, all of them answering one hard question the disciples asked Jesus: when will this happen, and what will show us you’re coming? Jesus’s answer runs two full chapters and ends with three parables in a row, each pressing on a different edge of the same problem: when will Christ come, and what should disciples do in the meantime?
In the story of the bridesmaids, the crisis is readiness. In the next story, about servants entrusted with money, the crisis is accountability. In the last, the sheep and the goats, the crisis is judgment itself.
Together, these stories are Matthew’s answer to a question every generation of the church has asked in its own way: what do we do while we wait for Christ to appear, for the kingdom to come, when nobody knows how long the waiting will last?
Here’s the story of the bridesmaids.
The bridegroom is late. The attendants were waiting for him to come up the road from the bride’s home. Where was he? In the ancient custom, the groom was probably at the bride’s home negotiating the dowry, and the negotiations ran long. While they were waiting, all ten attendants started to yawn and fell asleep.
Remember that detail, because it means the difference between wise and foolish was never about who stayed awake.
At midnight, the shout goes up, “the groom is coming!” and the attendants wake. But five lamps are short of oil, and the five foolish attendants did not bring any extra, so they asked to borrow some.
Now, this is where the story twists. You would expect, being good people as you are, that when Jesus told the story, the five who had oil would share. That’s the kind and merciful thing to do. And maybe, if we were reading this story in Luke, that would happen. In Luke, mercy breaks out sideways, and grace is always showing up.
But Matthew won’t do that here. The wise don’t share their oil, and that’s where the story turns. Why wouldn’t they share?
Why are the five without oil told to go looking for a dealer in the middle of the night? What dealer is open in the middle of the night? Basically, they’re told to get lost. While they’re gone, the five with oil go into the wedding feast, while the door to the feast closes behind them.
When the five who left return, the door has been shut. They knock, but the groom calls from inside, I do not know you. They are left outside in the cold.
That’s harsh. Why would the story turn this way? Why wouldn’t Jesus tell us a story about five wise attendants who shared their oil with five foolish ones, so that everyone would have enough and be included in the party to celebrate together? That sounds like a story Jesus would tell.
But Jesus, the Jesus that Matthew wants us to hear, is not telling a story about abundance and mercy. He’s telling us a story about how to live while we’re waiting, about being ready, a warning to be prepared. Matthew keeps returning to this same point of deep life wisdom, chapter after chapter: there are two ways set before us, one that leads to life and one which leads to death. The choice is ours. We’re supposed to feel the door shut, the missed opportunity to store up oil while there was time.
You may remember in 2009, that Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger miraculously landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after a bird strike killed both engines. The world called it a stroke of genius, a miracle on the Hudson.
But when Sully later was interviewed and was asked how he managed to accomplish such a brilliant and heroic move, he gave a profound explanation that was less about miracle and more about preparation.
He said:
“One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”
So, what does the oil in this story stand for, and how is it banked away? A lot of scholarly debate has worked over that question, because it is at the heart of this parable. The consensus is that represents something like works of righteousness. That’s Matthew’s theme.
A few verses later, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, he names exactly what the kingdom of heaven looks like, and it is works of righteousness or deeds of mercy. Did you feed the hungry one, welcome the stranger, clothe the one with nothing to wear, sit with the sick, show up at the jail.
The good news about this is that oil is not a vague spiritual reserve that you either have or don’t. It’s not a state of being that some people are born into and others aren’t, a state of the soul that you achieve with enough time and enlightenment.
Oil is attainable. Oil is within reach. The oil is simply the accumulated weight of a life that is spent paying attention to the people in front of you and doing something merciful about what you see. The drops of oil are the collected work of a life spent loving God and neighbor in tangible ways.
If you do that, day by day, you’ll have oil. You’ll be ready when Christ appears, you’ll be ready when midnight comes. You see, loving God isn’t a feeling you conjure up; it is a muscle you train. You love God by loving the neighbor right in front of you.
Doing that day by day is a slow deposit into a spiritual account. That kind of steady, unglamorous preparation is just the thing we need when the unexpected happens.
Most of us will never have to land an airliner on a river. But midnight comes for all of us. Midnight is the sudden medical diagnosis. It’s the unexpected phone call from a child in trouble. It’s a marriage hitting a wall, or a sudden ethical temptation at work, or a disappointment that collapses our plans, or a failure that bursts into the open, or a crisis in the world that demands voice and action.
In those moments, you cannot run out to the store to buy a resilient character or a deep reserve of faith. Your friend can have faith for you, but your friend can’t divide their faith with you. A friend can pray for you. But you cannot borrow a prayer life from your friend.
When midnight comes, you either have the oil in your lamp, or you don’t. That’s why the wise ones in the story couldn’t share. It’s just not the kind of thing you can share.
We meet the massive, life-defining moments because we chose to do the small and boring work of faithfulness on the average Tuesdays when nothing was happening. We put some oil in the lamp, so that it’s there when we need it.
That is true for the individual life of faith. It is also true for a church in its life together.
After George Floyd was murdered in the summer of 2020, you remember that Asheville had its own unrest. Downtown as empty and hollow because of Covid, and stores were mostly boarded up. In those hot June days, protesters gathered, as they did in cities across the country. The Asheville Police met them in riot gear, and even with tear gas on the Patton Avenue bridge. Those were tense days.
For a couple of years by that time, the churches here on Church St had been meeting once a month as the Church Street Collaborative, which we started after the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. We realized then that we didn’t know each other well enough to respond if something happened in our own city. So we began meeting and kept meeting.
After a couple of years, and during Covid, there wasn’t much of an agenda. But we kept the meetings going by Zoom, because it was relationship, even on a screen.
So, when the tension rose that June in our city, we were prepared. In addition to the Church Street relationships, two of us had already spent years building friendships with Black pastors in the community. Those relationships gave us a door. Within days we pulled together a Rally for Peace and Prayer. People came out in masks, some of them for the first time in months. Civic leaders and pastors spoke on Church Street, and then we walked down to the square together and prayed.
It didn’t fix the city, but those of us who were there believe it brought the temperature down, if only a little, and showed Asheville something other than riot gear. None of it would have happened without those quiet, mostly uneventful Zoom calls, and without the years one of my colleagues had already spent building trust before anyone needed it.
There was oil in the lamp.
Matthew already told us what that oil looks like poured out. Feed the hungry one. Welcome the stranger. Clothe the one who has nothing. Sit with the sick. Show up at the jail. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a list, not a metaphor, and we could add to it.
A meal cooked for a neighbor who’s alone or had a hard time. Leaning over to a new person in the pew, and saying “would you like to come to dinner?” A visit to someone in the hospital who doesn’t get many visits. A phone placed in a pocket so you can listen to the person who needs to share. Helping a child to read, and to know that someone sees their potential. A door held open, in every sense, for the person whom no one else notices.
That’s how you gather up oil quietly, day by day.
The door that shuts and does not reopen is the hardest part of this parable, so final. But it’s a warning. And a warning that comes early enough to act is itself a mercy.
When the alarm clock goes off in time to wake you up and get you where you need to be, it’s is a good thing — even if you’d rather keep sleeping.
This parable would be false, and useless, if it told us that readiness didn’t matter. If the door was always open no matter what. If the kingdom of heaven could never be missed. If there was participation without preparation.
That’s simply not true, and that’s the warning. The kingdom of heaven can be missed. Midnight can come, and we can be found unready.
So store up some oil in reserve. Pay attention to your life, and move with mercy toward the people in front of you. We don’t know how the long wait will be. Whether you fall asleep isn’t the point. The point is to have enough oil to last until the shout comes.
The kingdom of heaven is like this. Keep ready. Christ will come, the kingdom feast will begin. Be ready.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina