Yesterday Paul thanked Theos that the Corinthians were enriched in all logos and all gnōsis. Today he takes both apart. The proximate cause is the party spiritnamed in 1 Corinthians 1:12 — I belong to Paul, I to Apollos, I to Cephas — which is a fight about teachers, and therefore a fight about eloquence.
What happens
"Messiah did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with wisdom of word, lest the cross of Messiah be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are beingrescued it is the power of Theos." He quotes Isaiah 29:14: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart." Then the challenge: "Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?" And the summary: "Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Messiah crucified — a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Messiah the power of Theos and the wisdom of Theos."
What to notice
Mōria is not a gentle word. It gives us "moron," and Paul chooses it over the milder options available to him. He is not saying the message is counterintuitive or paradoxical. He is saying that to an educated Greek ear the sentence a crucified man is the wisdom of Theos sounds like a category error made by someone who has not been listening. And skandalon, the word for the Jewish reaction, is a trap's trigger-stick — the piece that springs. It is also, as it happens, the word Jesus will use of Peter in Sunday's Gospel. Note too the precision of estaurōmenon: "Messiah, having been crucified," a perfect participle marking a completed act whose state persists. Not "Messiah who died," not "who was executed," but a condition that has not ended. Paul preaches a man who is still, in the grammar, crucified.
A hymn of twenty-two verses — the number of letters in the alphabet, though it is not an acrostic — praisingYahweh as creator and as the one who sees the whole field. Its middle section is a sustained argument that military strength is not what it appears to be: "a king is not saved by a great army; a horse is a vain hope for victory" (Psalm 33:16–17).
The selected verses
Psalm 33:1–2."Rejoice in Yahweh, you righteous; praise from the upright is fitting. Give thanks to Yahweh on the lyre; on the ten-stringed harp play for him." Psalm 33:4–5."For the word of Yahweh is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He lovesjustice and right judgment; the earth is full of the hesed of Yahweh." Psalm 33:10–11."Yahweh brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he thwarts the plans of the peoples. But the counsel of Yahweh stands forever, the plans of his heart through all generations."
What to notice
Psalm 33:10 uses hefir — he breaks, annuls, frustrates — of atzat goyim, the counsel of the nations. The lectionary has set this beside "where is the debater of this age?" on purpose: the psalm supplies the Hebrew original of Paul's move. And etzah, counsel, is a deliberation word, the noun for a plan arrived at by taking advice. What Yahweh annuls is not ignorance. It is a considered decision, reached by competent people, in committee.
Immediately after yesterday's faithful and wicked servants, and made of the same material: a master who is late, a household waiting, a reckoning at an unannounced hour. Matthew has three such parables in a row; this is the second.
What happens
Ten young women take their lamps and go out to meet the bridegroom. Five are phronimoi, prudent, and take flasks of oil with their lamps; five are mōrai, foolish, and take lamps with no reserve. "The bridegroom was delayed, and they all became drowsy and slept." At midnight: "Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him." The foolish ones find their lamps going out and ask for oil; the prudent refuse — "there may not be enough for us and for you; go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves." While they are gone the bridegroom arrives, those who were ready go in to the wedding feast, and the door is locked. The others come and call, "Master, master, open for us," and hear: "Amen, I say to you, I do not know you."
What to notice
Two honest observations, neither comfortable. First: all ten of them slept. The parable is explicit — "they all became drowsy and slept" — and no one is criticized for it. Whatever separates the five from the five, it is not wakefulness. It is what they brought. Second: given that, the closing moral ("stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour") does not quite fit the story it concludes. This is a known seam. The likeliest reading is that Matthew has attached a floating saying about vigilance to a parable about provision, and the seam shows because the parable's actual lesson is stranger and harder to slogan: some things cannot be borrowed at midnight. The oil is not shared, and the refusal is not presented as a failure of charity. It is presented as a fact about the kind of thing oil is.
How They Fit Together
Two kinds of foolishness, judged by two different rubrics
Five mōrai who thought a lamp was the same thing as a supply of oil
The day hands us the same Greek root twice, from opposite ends. Matthew's five foolish women are mōrai. Paul's message is mōria. Yesterday's prudent servant and today's prudent women are phronimoi. So the lectionary sets up an ordinary, sensible scale — prudence good, folly bad — and then puts Paul's sentence next to it, which detonates the scale:"the foolishness of Theos is wiser than human wisdom."
Both are true, and the reconciliation has to be exact. The five mōrai are not foolish because they lack sophistication; they are foolish because they made a planning error about a delay everyone had been warned about. Paul's mōria is not a planning error at all — it is a message that fails by the standards of an audience whose standards are the thing under judgment. Matthew's fool misjudged the wait. Paul's "fool" is judged by a rubric that Psalm 33:10 says gets annulled. The scale that calls the cross moronic is the etzah of the nations. The scale that calls five women foolish is the bridegroom's.
Then notice what the two readings agree about, which is the only part that is immediately practical. Something has to be carried in advance and cannot be produced at the door. For Matthew it is oil, and the point of the parable is that at midnight it is not for sale from your neighbor. For Paul it is a conviction that looks ridiculous in daylight and is dynamis theou to those beingrescued. Neither can be borrowed at the moment of need. The five foolish women were not short of belief in the bridegroom — they had gone out to meet him like everyone else. They were short of the boring part.
A Question to Sit With
The five foolish women were not skeptics or slackers. They got up, took their lamps, and went out to meet the bridegroom exactly like the others; the only difference was a small flask nobody would have noticed them carrying. Almost everything that has ever failed me at midnight failed because of that flask — the reserve I did not build when building it was boring and no emergency made it feel urgent. What is the unglamorous supply I am currently running without, on the assumption that the door will not be locked before I get around to it?