Come, Blessed of My Father

Ten lamps and a reserve of oil (25:1–13)

A village wedding in the ancient world happened at night. The bridegroom came for his bride after dark, and the walk back to his house was a torchlit procession; anyone in the street without a light was taken for a gatecrasher and turned away.

Matthew 25 is the second half of the Olivet Discourse, the last of the five great discourses in Matthew's Gospel, and it is three parables and a throne. In the first half, on the same hillside, Jesus had told his friends that the temple would fall, that the age would be long and full of deception, and that nobody — not the angels, not even the Son — knows the day of his coming. Then he said: watch. All four scenes here answer that. The Master is coming and nobody knows when. What will he find?

And the bridegroom in this story is Jesus. He had used the figure of himself once already, when he was asked why his disciples did not fast: the wedding guests do not mourn "as long as the bridegroom is with them" (9:15). So the voice behind the shut door at the end of the parable is his, and the wedding the five walk into is the one Revelation calls the marriage feast of the Lamb.

Ten young women go out with lamps to meet him. Five of them are called phronimoi. It is the same word Matthew gave the man who built on rock (7:24) and the servant set over the household (24:45), and it is not a word about intelligence. It is the word for someone who thinks about tomorrow while it is still today. Henry reads the two groups straight through to the two kinds of churchgoer: "Sincere Christians are the wise virgins, and hypocrites the foolish ones, as in another parable they are represented by wise and foolish builders."^*

And the whole difference between the two groups is settled before the story starts moving. D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is one of the standard works, puts it as flatly as it can be put: "The sole distinction between the two groups is this: the wise bring not only oil in their lamps but an extra supply in separate jars, while the foolish bring no oil."^* Not more zeal. Not better lamps. A reserve.

Then comes the line that should slow us down. "Now while the bridegroom delayed, they all slumbered and slept." All ten. The wise sleep too, and nobody is blamed for it — worth saying plainly, because the parable gets preached as though drowsiness were the sin.

Here two of the church's best readers go looking for meaning in the detail, and Carson thinks they should not. John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, took the sleeping to stand for ordinary life: forgetfulness of God's kingdom should never steal over a believer, "yet the distracting influence of the occupations of this world is not inappropriately compared to sleep." John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, read the lamps as purity and the oil as mercy to the poor, and he had a reason — in the parable right after this one the servants are judged on what they did with what they held, "but as to the virgins, he speaketh particularly of mercifulness in alms, and more strongly than in the former parable."

Carson says no to both, and his objection is not pedantry. "There is no point in seeing hidden meanings in the oil or sleep." The oil will not stretch to "good works" or to the Holy Spirit; it is a detail in a story about being caught short by a delay, and "no praise or blame attaches to either group for this" sleeping.^* The parable is not asking whether we can stay awake. It is asking what we did before the waiting began. In Carson's summary, "it is the bridegroom's delay that distinguishes the wise from the foolish virgins."

It is worth saying that Carson is in the minority here across the history of reading this parable, and that the older readers were not being careless. Chrysostom's instinct about mercy is vindicated twenty verses later, where the King does judge by exactly that; and Calvin's point about the occupations of this world is pastoral rather than allegorical, written to stop frightened people reading their ordinary lives as apostasy. Carson's own case is that the parable has a single engine and that mining its furniture dulls it. All three are worth holding. What none of them disputes is the story's own point, which is simpler and harder: whatever the oil is, a life either stored it or did not.

At midnight the cry goes up and everything becomes visible at once. The foolish ask to borrow. It is the most natural request in the story and the only one that cannot be granted. "What if there isn't enough for us and you?" sounds cold until we see that it is not stinginess but physics. Carson has the sentence for it: "Preparedness can be neither transferred nor shared."^* A friend's faith will not light our lamp. Neither will a mother's prayers, a church's reputation, or a childhood of Sunday mornings. All real, all good, none of them lendable at midnight.

Even "go rather to those who sell" is not a doctrine of purchase. Calvin caught the irony, and pointed to Isaiah 55, where "the Lord, while he invites us to buy, demands no price, but informs us, that he has wine and milk in abundance, to be gratuitously bestowed."^* The shut door does not mean grace is expensive. It means grace is not available on any schedule but now.

Matthew Henry, the English Puritan commentator, says what the shut door exposes, and it is the hardest line in the section: "Those will see their need of grace hereafter, when it should save them, who will not see their need of grace now, when it should sanctify and rule them."^*

And the door closes on a sentence we have heard before: "I don't know you." Matthew has been holding that line since the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5–7), where people say "Lord, Lord" with a résumé of miracles and hear "I never knew you" (7:22–23). The first discourse and the fifth end with the same words.

One guard before we move on, because the shut door is easy to use cruelly. Carson insists the refusal "must not be construed as calloused rejection of their lifelong desire to enter the kingdom. Far from it; it is the rejection of those who, despite appearances, never made preparation for the coming of the kingdom."^* And the closing command is not about wakefulness at all. Carson again: "'Keep watch' does not mean 'keep awake,' as if an ability to fight off sleep were relevant to the story."

A fortune in the ground (25:14–30)

The second parable has been quietly ruined for us by our own language. In English a talent is a knack — singing, numbers, a good ear — and the parable becomes a lecture on using our gifts.

But talanton was a unit of exchange, not an aptitude. Carson works through why the sums are so hard to price: a talent could be gold, silver or copper, it was first a weight and then a coinage, and metal prices date a book within a few years. The useful measure is earning power. If a talent ran to six thousand denarii, and a denarius was a day's wage, then one talent is about twenty years of a laborer's life — and Carson adds, with some feeling, that "On any reckoning, the NIV's footnote ('more than a thousand dollars') is much too low."^*

The third servant is not handed crumbs. He is handed a fortune, and he buries it.

Carson also blocks the move most sermons on this parable make. Trying to identify the talents with spiritual gifts, or the law, or natural endowments, or the gospel narrows the parable in a way Jesus would not have been comfortable with; the coin is chosen for its range, not for a code.^* The amounts are unequal and the assignment is careful: "to each according to his own ability." The Master fits the weight to the shoulder, which means that at the reckoning nobody can plead that too much was asked.

Then the two who traded come in, and Matthew does something we could easily read past. The commendations are identical — word for word, the five-talent man and the two-talent man hear the same sentence. "Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things, I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord."

The reward is not indexed to the yield. And what is offered is not a larger estate but the Master's own gladness: chara, the same word for joy that John's Gospel uses when Jesus speaks of his joy being in us (John 15:11). Carson warns against flattening that into a promotion. The setting is the end of the world, and a promise of joy like that bursts the natural limits of the story.^*

That is a strange wage, and it tells us what kind of Master we are dealing with — which is exactly what the third servant never worked out.

Because his defense is not laziness. It is a theology. "I knew you that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow." He did not fail first at work. He failed first at knowing whom he served, and the failure at work followed.

Calvin cut off any attempt to build a doctrine of God out of the accusation: the harshness "has nothing to do with the substance of the parable." What Christ means, and only means, is "that there will be no excuse for the indolence of those who both conceal the gifts of God, and waste their time in idleness."^*

Carson says it in five words: "Only the wicked slave blames his master." And he passes on a line from Henry Alford, the Victorian dean and hymn-writer, that sets the two parables side by side better than anything else written on them: "There, the foolish virgins failed from thinking their part too easy—here, the wicked servant [fails] from thinking his too hard."

And see how the Master answers — on the servant's own terms. "You knew that I reap where I didn't sow… You ought therefore to have deposited my money with the bankers." Even by your own account of me, you should have done something. Carson's note is that the master "condemns the slave on the basis of the slave's own words, which prove his guilt."

Fear that produces nothing is not reverence. It is a slander with a shovel in its hand, and it has an old pedigree. The serpent's opening move in the garden was not an argument about fruit but an insinuation about the character of the Giver (Genesis 3:1–5). We bury what we have been given for the same reason. Somewhere underneath, we have decided that God is stingy, and that the safest thing to do with his gifts is to hand them back untouched.

The word for what the servant becomes is oknēros — shrinking, hanging back, slothful; at the end he is achreios, useless, good for nothing. Sloth is the least frightening of the deadly sins and possibly the most efficient. It never announces itself, and it calls keeping its head down prudence. What the Master calls it is wicked. Chrysostom will not let the sentence be softened either: for the slothful man "not to this is the penalty limited," and what follows is "intolerable" and comes with an accusation.^*

Two guardrails, both Carson's, keep this parable from being misused. The first: it is about slaves and a master, and it "no more condones slavery than comparing Jesus' coming to that of a thief (24:42–44) condones theft." The second, against every reading that aims this at somebody else: "The parable applies widely and cannot be restricted to Christian leaders or Jews who fail to recognize their Messiah."^*

And there is a word here for anyone who has been handed less than the people around them. Carson: "Grace never condones irresponsibility; even those given less are obligated to use and develop what they have."^*

The King on the throne (25:31–46)

Then the pictures stop. "But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory."

What Jesus had been saying in parables he now says plainly, and Daniel 7 walks into the room — one like a son of man, all the nations gathered, a throne. Zechariah had seen the Lord coming with all his holy ones (Zechariah 14:5), and Carson notes what Matthew does with that: the office of final Judge passes from the Lord to Jesus without a word of explanation or apology.^*

Then Matthew does something quiet and enormous. "Then the King will tell those on his right hand." It is the only place in this Gospel where Jesus, speaking of himself, simply says the King. The book opened with a genealogy arguing that this child is David's son, and it has been building the case for twenty-five chapters. Here the case rests and the King sits down. Everything Herod feared in chapter 2 turns out to be true.

Alford caught the thing about this scene that is easiest to forget and hardest to shake: "It will heighten our estimation of the wonderful sublimity of this description, when we recollect that it was spoken by the Lord only three days before his sufferings."^*

The image for the sorting is not a courtroom but a hillside. Sheep and goats grazed together through the day and were separated at evening, because goats need herding together for warmth and sheep do not. The shepherd does not agonize. He simply knows which is which. Ezekiel had already used the picture — "I judge between sheep and sheep" — and promised a Davidic shepherd who would do it (Ezekiel 34:17, 23). Henry draws the line forward: Christ "now feeds his flock like a shepherd, and will shortly distinguish between those that are his, and those that are not."^*

Then the criterion, given four times over. Matthew does not usually repeat himself like this. Hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, in prison: six ordinary catastrophes, none of them religious, all of them the kind of thing that happens down the street.

And then the surprise, which is where this chapter has to be read carefully, because it is easy to get backwards. Both sides are astonished. "Lord, when did we see you hungry?" Carson's observation is precise and it corrects a reading we used to carry here. Neither group is surprised at the verdict. They are surprised at the reason given for it — that they are received or excluded on the basis of how they treated Jesus. So there is no need to imagine that the goats expected a welcome or that the sheep expected to be turned away.^*

That precision matters, because it is what keeps the scene from becoming a scale. The righteous kept no ledger, because there was no ledger to keep. They were not being modest and they were not being canny; they simply did not know whom they were feeding. Calvin saw the beauty in that: by answering them as he does, the King "acknowledges those acts of kindness which have been performed gratuitously, and without any expectation of a reward." Carson draws the conclusion and it is the most important sentence in the chapter for anyone frightened by it: "The reason for admission to the kingdom in this parable is more evidential than causative." The deeds are not the price. They are the evidence.

And he adds why Jesus would frame judgment this way at all: "The parable, therefore, presents a test eliminating the possibility of hypocrisy." If the sheep had known that this was the examination, they would have studied for it. The condemned, for their part, are perfectly sincere. They would certainly have helped, had they known it was him. That is the sentence that convicts. They were ready to serve a King they could recognize. What they could not do was love a man they could not.

Timothy Keller, the Manhattan pastor, put the same evidential logic in the bluntest terms, preaching on Isaiah 58 rather than on this chapter: "You say you have a relationship with me, a living viral relationship with me but if you don't care about the oppressed and the needy you actually don't have that relationship with me."^*

Who are the least of these?

And that leaves the crux, which we should not pretend away: who are "the least of these my brothers"?

Two readings have run side by side through the whole history of the church. The wider one takes the six needs as the controlling clue. Elachistoi is the superlative of mikroi, low-status language in a status-obsessed world, and hunger, thirst, nakedness and prison are categories of destitution rather than of doctrine. The narrower one takes the phrase at full length — my brothers — and notes that Matthew's Jesus uses that word of his disciples (12:48–50; 28:10), that "these little ones" are his followers everywhere else in this Gospel (10:42; 18:6), and that 10:40–42 has already said almost this sentence.

Carson surveys five readings of it and comes down without hedging: "By far the best interpretation is that Jesus' 'brothers' are his disciples."^* His grounds are Matthew's own usage, and his answer to the obvious objection is the point about the surprise above. The narrower reading does not kill the astonishment, because the astonishment was never about the verdict; and in a scene with the nations gathered, the King pronouncing sentence could simply gesture at the brothers standing there.

Carson's is the better reading of Matthew's own words, and this chapter follows it. But two things keep it from shrinking anybody's duty.

The first is that Carson himself refuses that inference. "We must not think that the Bible is unconcerned for the poor and the oppressed" — Deuteronomy 15:11, Galatians 6:10, Isaiah 58 and a dozen other places settle that; his point is only that it is not what this particular passage is about.^*

The second is Calvin, who read the phrase of believers and still would not let it narrow: "by calling them brethren, he confers on them inestimable honor," and he commends them to us expressly, "not that he bids us altogether despise others."^* A command to serve Christ's poorest brothers has never once in church history made anyone less generous to the stranger. It made hospitals.

Chrysostom took the passage exactly that way and refused to let it stay at the altar. Preaching elsewhere in this Gospel, he turned it on a congregation that had money for silver communion vessels: "Wouldest thou do honor to Christ's body? Neglect Him not when naked; do not while here thou honorest Him with silken garments, neglect Him perishing without of cold and nakedness." And then his proof, which is simply this chapter: the one who said "This is my body" is the same one who said "Ye saw me an hungered, and fed me not."^*

Inherit the kingdom (25:34, 41, 46)

Two things guard this chapter from becoming a scale, and both are in the text rather than imported to soften it.

The first is the verb in 25:34. The sheep are not paid. They klēronomeō — they inherit — and the kingdom was "prepared for you from the foundation of the world," ready before any of them had fed anybody. Carson notes that the word for "blessed" here is not the makarioi of the Beatitudes but eulogēmenoi, the word of benediction, and that an inheritance presupposes a relationship with the Father before it presupposes anything else.

Calvin, who had no interest in shrinking this passage's demand, put the order exactly where the text puts it. The kingdom "depends on no uncertain event, but was prepared for us by God before we were born." And then the sentence that should be read aloud whenever this chapter frightens someone: "we do not deny that a reward is promised to good works, but maintain that it is a reward of grace, because it depends on adoption."^* The good works are not the price of the inheritance. They are the evidence that the adoption took.

The second guard is an asymmetry easy to miss out loud. To the right hand: "Come, blessed of my Father." To the left: "Depart from me, you cursed" — and of my Father is simply not there. And the fire is "prepared for the devil and his angels," never for people. The kingdom was built for us before the world was; the fire was not, and Carson is careful not to turn that into a comfort it cannot bear — the fire prepared for the devil now also serves as the doom of those who would not show compassion to the King through his brothers.^*

Judgment here is real. Carson notes that the same word stands on both sides of 25:46: the same adjective "(aiōnion, GK 173), modifies 'punishment' as modifies 'life.'" That one observation is where a long argument sits. Some Christians have read the adjective as naming the age to come rather than unending duration, and have argued that the punishment is final in its outcome without being endless in its experience. Carson grants that the word can be limited by the thing it describes, and holds that in a judgment scene lived in God's presence it means everlasting. The grammar does not settle it by itself; what the grammar does settle is that the two halves of the sentence stand or fall together, so a reader who softens the punishment has to soften the life. But judgment is the intruder in this story. Grace is the older thing.

And there is one more thing, which Matthew is about to do rather than say. The King who says I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a stranger, I was naked, I was in prison is two chapters from being bound and handed over (27:2), abandoned by every friend he had (26:56), stripped of his clothing (27:28, 35), and given gall when he was thirsty (27:34). He is not reading out a policy from a safe distance. He is reading out his own itinerary.

He can say that what we did to the least of these we did to him because he went and stood in that place himself. Keller, in the same sermon on Isaiah 58 rather than on this chapter, named what that does to a person who has understood it: "It is knowing that you did not receive your just desserts, but on the cross Jesus Christ received them for you."^*

The throne in 25:31 is occupied by the one who was, first, the man at the door.