The parable of the ten virgins has always bothered me, and I think it's worth being honest about why before offering a reading that finally gave me peace with it. My original trouble was this: the New Testament Jesus leaves the oil undefined. He doesn't say here is the five step program for keeping your lamp full. He just tells the story and lets it sit there. Which produced in me not comfort but anxiety and something close to resentment. If the oil has no clear meaning then the parable is essentially saying you might be foolish without knowing it and there is nothing definitive you can do about that. Some days you have it and some days you don't and the door closes regardless. The parable as threat. Grace with a hard limit and no clear instructions for staying on the right side of it.
What I've come to understand is that I was misreading who the foolish virgins actually are. And the misreading starts with what they were doing while they waited.
They were present without being oriented toward the arrival. They had positioned themselves at the event without actually being in a state of expectation or hope or joyful fear. The lamps were carried but the waiting wasn't real — it was attendance, not anticipation. They were there the way you can sit in sacrament meeting for years without actually expecting anything to happen. When the bridegroom delayed and midnight came and the whole enterprise started feeling genuinely absurd they had no interior resource to draw on because they had never actually been waiting in the first place. They had been attending.
The oil is what waiting actually costs. The sustained interior act of genuine expectation when nothing is confirming it. That's expensive. It burns something real. And if you were never actually doing it you have nothing in reserve when the delay becomes serious.
Which means the foolish virgins' mistake wasn't a single bad decision. It was the slow substitution of attendance for anticipation over the whole preceding period. By the time midnight came the pattern was already established. They had been at the wedding without waiting for the bridegroom for so long that when he actually came they had nothing left to meet him with. That's the most convicting version of the parable. Not that you might make a mistake. But that you might have already been making it so gradually you couldn't feel it happening.
This is why the oil cannot be borrowed or purchased at midnight. What the wise virgins had wasn't a commodity that could be transferred. It was the accumulated cost of having actually waited — of having stayed in genuine expectation through the long ordinary hours when nothing was happening and a more reasonable arrangement was always available. You cannot acquire at midnight what has to be cultivated across the long ordinary days.
The wise virgins are not more virtuous. They are simply still there. Still holding the lamp. Still inside what I want to call the scandal of expectation — the genuinely absurd posture of believing the bridegroom is actually coming when it is midnight and nothing is confirming it and every reasonable voice is suggesting you find oil somewhere more practical. Kierkegaard understood that offense is not incidental to faith but constitutive of it. You cannot reason your way past the scandal into comfortable acceptance. The discomfort is the point. The wise virgins are the ones who stayed in the discomfort long enough for it to become something else. Not certainty. Just presence. Orientation. Oil still in the lamp.
Which brings us to the sacrament table.
The ordinance we perform every week was never designed as a compliance checkpoint. It was not instituted so that we could demonstrate continued membership in good standing, renew a contract, or satisfy the requirements of a covenant ledger. Jesus took bread and broke it and said this is my body and the disciples who heard him were scandalized — this is a hard saying, who can hear it — and many of them left. The ones who stayed didn't stay because they understood. They stayed because they had nowhere else to go and something in them couldn't release the thing he was pointing at.
The sacrament is supposed to be that moment every week. Not a performance of faithfulness. Not a ritual confirmation that your lamp is the right shape and your wick is properly trimmed. But an actual encounter with the bridegroom. A genuine asking of the only question that matters:
Is there still oil in my lamp?
Not assuming there is because you showed up. Not assuming there isn't because the week was hard and you feel unworthy. Actually stopping. Actually making contact. Actually letting the bread and water do what they were meant to do — reconnect you to the living reality underneath the form, the thing worth waiting for, the thing the whole midnight vigil is about.
The institutional danger is that you can run a perfectly functional church on empty lamps for a very long time. The meetings continue. The ordinances are performed. The compliance boxes get checked. Nobody necessarily knows — least of all the person carrying the lamp — until the moment of truth arrives and exposes what is actually there. The pandemic revealed something of this. When the buildings closed and the forms were suspended, what remained? Who came back when the doors reopened, and who quietly discovered that the habit and the social structure had been doing more work than the oil? The closed churches were their own kind of midnight hour, the bridegroom delayed, the long wait made suddenly visible.
I know what it is to come to the sacrament table with nothing to offer but presence. After loss that doesn't resolve into a faith promoting ending, after the numbness that follows a long vigil, there are Sundays when you cannot perform belief or gratitude or spiritual insight. You can only show up and hold the lamp and hope the bread and water can reach whatever is still alive in you. That too is oil. Perhaps the most honest kind.
The wise virgin takes the sacrament as someone who knows she is not permanently safe. The good season is real but the plains are still out there and winter still comes. The lamp needs tending precisely when everything seems fine — when the drift is quiet and incremental and the oil drains without announcement. Spiritual discipline built before the hard times is the only kind that holds during them. You do not learn to fast when you are starving. You do not learn to pray when you are desperate. The capacity has to be woven into the ordinary days so that when the midnight hour comes the lamp is already lit.
And here is the thing about attending sacrament meeting with real intent. It is not about being in the right mood or bringing sufficient spiritual preparation or having resolved your doubts sufficiently to feel worthy of the table. It is about showing up still oriented toward the arrival. Still genuinely expecting something. Still willing to be in the scandal of anticipation rather than the comfort of mere attendance.
The foolish virgins were at the right place with the right equipment at the right time. What they lacked was not effort or orthodoxy but genuine expectation. They had attended without waiting for so long that when the bridegroom came there was nothing left to meet him with.
The sacrament asks us every week to be people who are actually waiting. Not performing the posture of waiting. Not attending the ritual of waiting. But genuinely, at some cost, holding the lamp lit in the expectation that the bread and water will make contact with something real — that the bridegroom is not a metaphor, that the feast is not a symbol, that the midnight vigil is not wasted.
The foolish virgins didn't fail because they were wicked. They failed because the waiting became routine before the bridegroom arrived.
We take the sacrament so that the waiting doesn't.
