Ready for His Coming

Everything in this book has been working toward one night. The steward received his seed, saw it grow, set to work, and learned that the field is mixed and will one day be weighed. But all that was never the goal; it was the preparation. For there comes an hour when the working ceases and the Bridegroom Himself appears — and the whole long age of sowing and toiling and waiting runs out into that one moment: He comes, and the feast begins.

Paint that moment for yourself. The night is at its deepest, the lamps have burned for hours, and then the stillness tears open: the Bridegroom is coming, go out to meet Him! All along the road the torches flare up, the procession forms, and the gate of the banquet hall stands wide open with the light and the laughter streaming out. This is what the prophets sang of and the generations longed for: the King who prepares a wedding for His Son, the table groaning under the abundance, those who were ready and go in with Him, the door that closes behind them with the feast inside and the night outside. There is no joy that comes near to this. For this you waited. For this was all the labor.

And precisely therefore, on the threshold of that feast, this part asks the sharpest question of the whole book: are you ready? For the two parables that now come both play out precisely on that threshold — on the one moment when the feast opens and the separation falls. The 10 virgins draw the first test: do you have oil? Not a torch — they all had that — but the quiet reserve that keeps the torch burning through the night. And the wedding garment draws the second: are you clothed? Not present — the hall was full — but wrapped in the garment that the King gives and that a guest must put on. Oil and garment: two images for the same one thing, the being-ready that on the threshold can no longer be improvised.

And here it must honestly be said what the parables themselves say without disguise, for they are the darkest images Jesus ever painted. The door bolted with five virgins before it. The man bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness. And the astounding thing is, each time, this: the judgment falls not on the openly godless, not on those who never heard of the wedding — it falls on those who were there. On the virgin who went out with her torch. On the guest who sat at the table inside. They were present, and they were not ready. There this part stands with the most dreaded warning of the book: nearness is not oil, and presence is not a garment. A name in the baptismal register is no flame in the night.

But read that warning as it is meant, for it is no verdict but a wake-up call, and the time for it is now. It is not yet midnight. The cry has not yet sounded, the door still stands open, the merchant who sells oil has not yet closed his shutters. And the garment — that is the wonder beneath this whole part — no one needs to weave himself: it is the garment the King gives, and the only thing a person has to do is put it on. The whole sharpness of these two parables has but one purpose: to drive you tonight, while it is still today, to the oil and the garment, so that later at the cry you need not flee to the shop but can go in with the rest, with burning torch, in white, on the arm of the Bridegroom.

Twice the same threshold, then, and twice the same question beneath the same glory: not whether you belonged — they all did — but whether you stand ready. Have oil in your vessel. Put on the garment that He gives you. And be watchful, for you know neither the day nor the hour, and the joy that waits for you behind that door is too great to miss for an empty jar or a refused garment.