Virgins and Oil
I decided I would read each of the Greek Orthodox Holy Week services this year in place of my morning meditation. This morning, I read the Monday night service, which centered around the parable of the 10 virgins who wait for the bridegroom to show up to take them to the wedding feast. Half of them run out of oil while waiting, and of course the bridegroom comes at exactly the moment when they have gone looking for more oil. Because they aren’t there when he arrives, they are locked out of the wedding feast.
The parable is part Boy Scout motto, part Mean Girls. (Did I mention that when the “unprepared” virgins ask the other ones to share some of their oil, they are refused?) It’s always been more than a little troubling. It reaffirms already problematic stereotypes about women. It positions God as a man-to-be-desired, one who takes his time, who deserves to be waited for, one with the power to turn people away. In the story, there are no second chances, no rewards for the women who took the initiative to DO something when the oil ran out and their friends didn’t want to help. In fact, it’s the selfish women who are rewarded instead. Those holier-than-thou bitches who primly refused to give their friends a bit of their oil get to go to the wedding. The others are turned away.
I’m much more comfortable with the Jesus who preached the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the parable of the Prodigal Son. I love the Jesus who took on the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites, who cleaned the temple of the money changers, who said that the greatest commandments in the law were about love. I’ll even take the Jesus who told us that a rich man was less likely to get into heaven than a camel was to get through the eye of a needle (though I remember asking my Sunday School teacher when I was about seven, “But what about the nice rich people?”) Jesus was a person of conscience who was not afraid to speak out against the powerful, to turn the dominant paradigm on its head. And that’s why I claim the term “Christian”—because I want to follow that Jesus, to live with conviction, to speak truth to power, to create social change, to challenge the status quo. Usually I fail miserably at doing these things in any given day, but I aim to do them, and I do what I can to center all of my life’s work on these goals.
The thing is, though, that this Holy Monday service isn’t about the virgins or the oil exactly. In fact, the actual gospel readings read during the service are readings of conscience and passion, stories of Jesus’ righteous anger and heartbreaking grief. Jesus argues logically and thoughtfully with the Pharisees about everything from the purpose of money to the most important commandment. He cleans out the temple. He weeps for the Jerusalem that couldn’t hear the truth, that turned him away.
The virgin thing, well, it’s in the service mainly, it seems, because of its many metaphoric possibilities. We pray to be ready when Jesus comes back, dressed in our best, spotless outfits, our faces warm and lit with abundant oil. We pray that we will never forget that the fellowship of oil is what will lead us to God’s forgiveness and love. (What fellowship? my head says. The virgins didn’t show any sense of fellowship. But my heart is caught up in the metaphor of our souls as vessels filled with the fellowship of oil, forgiven, connected, loved). We ask God to help us recognize the blessings in our lives, to shore up the oil we need to light our own paths to righteousness. These are paraphrases, to be sure—the metaphors in Greek are much more startling and beautiful than what I’m writing here—but you get the idea. It’s as if the writer of this service was trying to reclaim the story in a way that was not so troubling, not quite so wrought with the problematic social context of Jesus’ day. Tonight’s service, which I'll read tomorrow morning, is the only one in the Greek Orthodox church that was written by a woman—I’ll be looking for some similar reversal or reclaiming.
You don’t get to choose the Jesus you want to believe in, one of my friends once said to me, but of course that’s not true. We are all choosing what to see all the time. There is little consistency from gospel to gospel about what Jesus said or did or why he said or did it. No consistency about how much he knew about his suffering or death. No consistency about how much he understood his power to heal or how central that healing was to his ministry. And, even within the gospels, even among the stories that are consistent, there is no consistency about his message. Was he a loving man who ate with the loners and outsiders, or a man who preached a harsh, horrible fate for anyone who didn’t believe he was the Son of God?
But would we want a Jesus without contradictions? Wouldn’t such a Jesus be a little too divine to be the human-divine dual-natured Son of God? And would we want only one account of who he was and how he lived? Would we want only one perspective, one memory, of what he did or said?
I gave up long ago the notion that there are people wiser than me who have interpreted the gospels as they are meant to be interpreted, that I don’t get to be a part of that tradition. Anyone who has ever studied textual analysis knows that while some interpretations might be more “right” than others because of the readers’ particular knowledge of history or language or something else, there are always multiple ways to read any text.
When I sat down to write this, I knew I’d be writing about the Holy Monday service, but I didn’t want to get caught up in translation or to start quoting from the text—I don’t have that kind of time tonight. Like the writers of the gospel, everything I’m putting down now comes from my memory of what I read this morning and also my memory of what I felt or thought about while reading it. Of course I am remaking my own understanding as I type it now, deepening in some places, holding back in others, thinking about who might read this, what they might think. That is the nature of writing (even more so, to be sure, when one is recounting events from years before rather than hours before the writing). It is also the nature of living.
Jesus wasn’t talking to us when he preached his sermons or told his parables or talked to his disciples. In each case, he knew his audience, knew what they needed to hear or see him do. This doesn’t mean he was a fake, but rather that he was a thoughtful, versatile preacher and advocate for justice, one who chose his words carefully and lovingly.
At UMM, where I teach, this week is Pride Week. Today I went to part of a training—in between my creative writing class and a student leadership recognition dinner—sponsored by Outfront Minnesota. The training focused on advocacy around the anti-marriage amendment that has been introduced and re-introduced in the state legislature. We talked about the importance of telling the kinds of authentic stories our audiences would understand, that kinds of stories that might move them to act justly. Jesus is, at least for me, the best example for how to do this. He didn’t talk in statistics or facts—he told stories. (That’s not to say that for some audiences, stats might work better than stories—but one has to pick her audience). He didn’t try to hide his own agenda—it was always front-and-center, transparent.
Who knows how the stories we tell our legislators, our neighbors, our families, our friends, will be written and rewritten by those listeners? Who knows how our stories will change the societies in which we live? But stories are powerful. Words are powerful. We just have to have a little faith.
The friend who long ago told me I couldn’t choose the Jesus I wanted also told me this: that I had to get over my pessimism, my depression, had to have some faith that things would get better later, in another time and place. I said, Why? So that I can extricate myself from my responsibility to create positive change in the world? No, she said, rolling her eyes. So that you’ll have the strength you need to do that work.
About this, she was certainly right. I have mixed feelings about the “other time and place” part—I don’t have a clear idea of what the afterlife, if there is one, will hold for me or anybody else. But without faith that things will get better—that someday all loving couples will be able to marry, that someday Pride Week or Women’s Week or Black History Month won’t be contested or belittled on college campuses, that someday the “oil of fellowship” will ensure that no women or children (or men) or people of color or immigrants are victims of direct or indirect violence—without that kind of faith, that vision, where would we find our strength?
The parable is part Boy Scout motto, part Mean Girls. (Did I mention that when the “unprepared” virgins ask the other ones to share some of their oil, they are refused?) It’s always been more than a little troubling. It reaffirms already problematic stereotypes about women. It positions God as a man-to-be-desired, one who takes his time, who deserves to be waited for, one with the power to turn people away. In the story, there are no second chances, no rewards for the women who took the initiative to DO something when the oil ran out and their friends didn’t want to help. In fact, it’s the selfish women who are rewarded instead. Those holier-than-thou bitches who primly refused to give their friends a bit of their oil get to go to the wedding. The others are turned away.
I’m much more comfortable with the Jesus who preached the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the parable of the Prodigal Son. I love the Jesus who took on the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites, who cleaned the temple of the money changers, who said that the greatest commandments in the law were about love. I’ll even take the Jesus who told us that a rich man was less likely to get into heaven than a camel was to get through the eye of a needle (though I remember asking my Sunday School teacher when I was about seven, “But what about the nice rich people?”) Jesus was a person of conscience who was not afraid to speak out against the powerful, to turn the dominant paradigm on its head. And that’s why I claim the term “Christian”—because I want to follow that Jesus, to live with conviction, to speak truth to power, to create social change, to challenge the status quo. Usually I fail miserably at doing these things in any given day, but I aim to do them, and I do what I can to center all of my life’s work on these goals.
The thing is, though, that this Holy Monday service isn’t about the virgins or the oil exactly. In fact, the actual gospel readings read during the service are readings of conscience and passion, stories of Jesus’ righteous anger and heartbreaking grief. Jesus argues logically and thoughtfully with the Pharisees about everything from the purpose of money to the most important commandment. He cleans out the temple. He weeps for the Jerusalem that couldn’t hear the truth, that turned him away.
The virgin thing, well, it’s in the service mainly, it seems, because of its many metaphoric possibilities. We pray to be ready when Jesus comes back, dressed in our best, spotless outfits, our faces warm and lit with abundant oil. We pray that we will never forget that the fellowship of oil is what will lead us to God’s forgiveness and love. (What fellowship? my head says. The virgins didn’t show any sense of fellowship. But my heart is caught up in the metaphor of our souls as vessels filled with the fellowship of oil, forgiven, connected, loved). We ask God to help us recognize the blessings in our lives, to shore up the oil we need to light our own paths to righteousness. These are paraphrases, to be sure—the metaphors in Greek are much more startling and beautiful than what I’m writing here—but you get the idea. It’s as if the writer of this service was trying to reclaim the story in a way that was not so troubling, not quite so wrought with the problematic social context of Jesus’ day. Tonight’s service, which I'll read tomorrow morning, is the only one in the Greek Orthodox church that was written by a woman—I’ll be looking for some similar reversal or reclaiming.
You don’t get to choose the Jesus you want to believe in, one of my friends once said to me, but of course that’s not true. We are all choosing what to see all the time. There is little consistency from gospel to gospel about what Jesus said or did or why he said or did it. No consistency about how much he knew about his suffering or death. No consistency about how much he understood his power to heal or how central that healing was to his ministry. And, even within the gospels, even among the stories that are consistent, there is no consistency about his message. Was he a loving man who ate with the loners and outsiders, or a man who preached a harsh, horrible fate for anyone who didn’t believe he was the Son of God?
But would we want a Jesus without contradictions? Wouldn’t such a Jesus be a little too divine to be the human-divine dual-natured Son of God? And would we want only one account of who he was and how he lived? Would we want only one perspective, one memory, of what he did or said?
I gave up long ago the notion that there are people wiser than me who have interpreted the gospels as they are meant to be interpreted, that I don’t get to be a part of that tradition. Anyone who has ever studied textual analysis knows that while some interpretations might be more “right” than others because of the readers’ particular knowledge of history or language or something else, there are always multiple ways to read any text.
When I sat down to write this, I knew I’d be writing about the Holy Monday service, but I didn’t want to get caught up in translation or to start quoting from the text—I don’t have that kind of time tonight. Like the writers of the gospel, everything I’m putting down now comes from my memory of what I read this morning and also my memory of what I felt or thought about while reading it. Of course I am remaking my own understanding as I type it now, deepening in some places, holding back in others, thinking about who might read this, what they might think. That is the nature of writing (even more so, to be sure, when one is recounting events from years before rather than hours before the writing). It is also the nature of living.
Jesus wasn’t talking to us when he preached his sermons or told his parables or talked to his disciples. In each case, he knew his audience, knew what they needed to hear or see him do. This doesn’t mean he was a fake, but rather that he was a thoughtful, versatile preacher and advocate for justice, one who chose his words carefully and lovingly.
At UMM, where I teach, this week is Pride Week. Today I went to part of a training—in between my creative writing class and a student leadership recognition dinner—sponsored by Outfront Minnesota. The training focused on advocacy around the anti-marriage amendment that has been introduced and re-introduced in the state legislature. We talked about the importance of telling the kinds of authentic stories our audiences would understand, that kinds of stories that might move them to act justly. Jesus is, at least for me, the best example for how to do this. He didn’t talk in statistics or facts—he told stories. (That’s not to say that for some audiences, stats might work better than stories—but one has to pick her audience). He didn’t try to hide his own agenda—it was always front-and-center, transparent.
Who knows how the stories we tell our legislators, our neighbors, our families, our friends, will be written and rewritten by those listeners? Who knows how our stories will change the societies in which we live? But stories are powerful. Words are powerful. We just have to have a little faith.
The friend who long ago told me I couldn’t choose the Jesus I wanted also told me this: that I had to get over my pessimism, my depression, had to have some faith that things would get better later, in another time and place. I said, Why? So that I can extricate myself from my responsibility to create positive change in the world? No, she said, rolling her eyes. So that you’ll have the strength you need to do that work.
About this, she was certainly right. I have mixed feelings about the “other time and place” part—I don’t have a clear idea of what the afterlife, if there is one, will hold for me or anybody else. But without faith that things will get better—that someday all loving couples will be able to marry, that someday Pride Week or Women’s Week or Black History Month won’t be contested or belittled on college campuses, that someday the “oil of fellowship” will ensure that no women or children (or men) or people of color or immigrants are victims of direct or indirect violence—without that kind of faith, that vision, where would we find our strength?
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