The early church expected that Jesus would return pretty soon, if not next week then next month or certainly next year. The sense of excitement and urgency in the period immediately following Jesus’ death and resurrection is hardly surprising, but we see even during Paul’s lifetime a major shift in these expectations. At the time he was writing to the church in Thessaloniki in the letter we read today, it seems he expected Jesus to return within his own lifetime. Towards the end of his life this was obviously less likely.
We of course start in a very different place. Any idea of the “second coming” is so remote and abstract that it really doesn’t have any meaning for us at all – ok, we believe it will happen, sometime, but it can’t affect anything in our immediate lives.
So does this mean that Jesus’ admonition to stay awake also doesn’t really have much impact for us? After all, staying awake for over 2000 years seems a bit of a stretch by any standard.
If we’re inclined to dismiss something in scripture as really not relevant to us, this is often a strong clue that we need to look again and see what we might have missed. As we poke around this story about the wise and foolish virgins we can note that all the virgins fell asleep – so it doesn’t seem like nodding off is actually the problem. The point is that the wise virgins were ready and “on duty”, as it were, when they needed to be.
Not surprisingly we tend to focus on the first part of Jesus’ command “Stay awake” because it comes first. But he goes on to say “for you know neither the day nor the hour”. That may be the more important point he is making. We don’t know when “it” is going to happen. And the “it” doesn’t have to be the end of the world.
If we look at this passage of Matthew’s gospel in context we see it follows a sequence of stories which are clearly about the end of the world. So it’s natural to read this one in a similar context. However the setup that Matthew gives us is the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven – and that is NOT the Second Coming or the end of the world. Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven is unambiguously about something happening to us now, not in the future, even less at the end of time.
God makes Himself known to us at all sorts of times in all sorts of ways. The Book of Wisdom, with a female personification of God, tells us “She hastens to make herself known in anticipation of their desire; whoever watches for her at dawn shall not be disappointed”. God might be there for us at any time, even before we know we need or want Her. So be prepared.
Despite the understandable excitement and confused expectations of the early church, which has also been played out at other times in the church’s history, the key to Jesus’s command is that we don’t know what is going to happen in the future. So we have to be prepared at all times. The call is not to act like a never-sleeping sentry on duty, but rather to remain open, to remain aware of all possibilities, to watch for the arrival of Wisdom in all her many forms, at dawn or at any other time.
The call to recognize we don’t know the answers, we don’t know when, where or how Wisdom will come to us, is a call to a humble openness to the unknown. It’s harder than staying awake, endlessly peering into the dark for something we think we know to expect, but much more rewarding.