Gabriel Hannon

Waiting for Meaning: Understanding Waiting in Three Parables of Jesus

Have you practisd so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

So Whitman promises to explain the meaning of poems to his eager listener. Yet Whitman

also crafts these poems and hides their meanings underneath his words. His promised

explanation comes only in the form of more poems, sending the reader deeper and deeper into

his writing, searching for a meaning which he does not, or cannot, clearly state.

In the same fashion, the only written records of Jesus teachings come in the form of

parables. He does not speak Gods Word to man clearly, nor does he spout doctrine. Instead he

tells stories, nebulous fables which confound his disciples. They question him always as to the

meaning of his parables, to no avail. He, like Whitman, seems to want his audience to struggle

with his meaning. He does not want to tell them. Rather, he waits for them to understand.

Only once does Jesus explicitly address the meaning of his parables. Only the parable of

the Sower, does he end by saying this is the meaning of the parable.1 Beautifully, he only

breaks form here because the parable of the Sower teaches about the meaning of parables. He

speaks to the world in parables so that, though seeing they may not see/though hearing they

may not understand.2 He gives them the parable, the seed in his own parable and the poem in

Whitmans idiom, but he leaves the meaning up to them who hear. Only when the seed falls on

good soil, the parable on open and willing ears, does it bear fruit.

1 Lk 8:11

2 Lk 8:10, in reference to Isaiah 6.9

 This parable, called the parable of parables, gives an initial understanding of this form of

teaching, which allows us to launch into an examination of individual parables. Matthew 25

contains some of the most important of these parables: those of the Ten Virgins and the Talents

along with a description of the Last Judgement, also called the parable of the Sheep and the

Goats. These three all have to do, somehow, with the arrival of God and, more significantly, the

process of waiting for that arrival. Each section will be explored individually, with special

attention to the interplay between the two modalities of waiting.

The subtleties in this approach lie in the subtlety built into the verb to wait. Webster

differentiates between the transitive form -- to stay in place in expectation of; await; more at

wake -- and the intransitive form -- to remain stationary in readiness or expectation. The former

suggests a certain active observation, while the latter indicates a lack of motion and general

passivity, especially because the intransitive form has no object. In a sense, the second form

occurs once one no longer actively waits. It is the difference between waiting to surprise

someone when he comes home on his birthday and sitting in a chair as he walks in, oblivious, or

at least unconcerned, by his arrival. The transition points between the two modalities hide within

the parables like meaning, but they do present themselves to the careful reader. The end of

waiting, in one or both of these senses, also plays a crucial role in the interpretation of this

chapter.

The parable of the ten virgins begins with an end to waiting. As the time of the wedding rapidly

approaches, they can no longer stay at home waiting for it, so they went forth to meet, or

rather, await the bridegroom.3 In preparation for their waiting, five of the virgins brought oil for

their lamps. Meanwhile the others did not prepare, and brought no oil. This detail indicates that

3 Matt 25:2
their flaw lay not in their unwillingness to wait, for they were together with the wise virgins as

they slumbered and slept, but rather in their poor execution of waiting.4 When the bridegroom

was announced, they were not ready. Their lamps had gone out, and the wise could not spare any

oil for them. When they went to buy replacement oil, they missed the bridegroom, who came

exactly at the moment which would expose their unpreparedness. A few interesting points arise

on closer examination of the parable. One lies in the decidedly un-christian way in which the

wise virgins deny oil to the others. This implies a certain selectivity to waiting: only those who

wait the right way, on their own, will enter the kingdom of heaven. The second arises from the

time at which the end to waiting will occur. The Lord rebukes them because, since theyknow

neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh, they must always be prepared for

his arrival.5 They were not prepared, as the others were, for that moment, and thus cannot enter

the kingdom of heaven. Yet, it seems that that hour is unknown even to God himself. The

bridegroom tarries, delaying the whole wedding, then later he arrives well after the cry that

announces him.6 Following the symbology of the parable, this sets God up as one who is always

late. Yet, because God is God, his lateness cannot take on the same meaning as the mundanity

and error implicit in a train that runs late. No, Gods lateness exists by design, for it reveals those

who have properly prepared for his eventual arrival. He cannot arrive on time, for he does not

exist in time. He will be late because no time exists when he can reveal himself. If he were ever

to reveal himself in time, it would destroy time, yet the time when he can arrive, i.e. after all

time, makes him late, for it is after time! Due to this, all those who wait for him to show up in

4 Matth 25:6

5 Matt 25:13

6 Matt 25:6
time, like the foolish virgins, will have prepared for the wrong thing. They await Gods temporal

revelation, which will never occur. The other virgins are prepared to wait indefinitely, because

there is no definite time when God will arrive. They accept his delay, and no longer await him.

They abstain from the active waiting, and for that, they are ready when the son of man cometh.

The second parable, that of the talents, has less to do with the preparations of waiting and more

to do with what to do while waiting. The master gives all his money to his servants, and

promptly disappears, with not a word to his eventual return. In the meantime, the two faithful

servants double the value of their share, while the wicked servant does nothing but preserve that

money. For that, the master deems the first and second good, and the third slothful and wicked.

This says an interesting thing about the nature of ones activities while waiting for God. Rather

than wait in the active sense, one must abstain from waiting, and act in other ways. Abstaining

from waiting, though passive, allows one actively to pursue life in and of itself. The slothful

servant seems to be awaiting his masters return, desperate to prove his worth by waiting and

preserving the talent which the master gave him. On the other hand, the good servants do not

await the master. They ignore the idea of his return, and instead go out and use what he gave to

each of them to make themselves an abundance, with which their master is well pleased.7 Two

further, speculative questions arise from this parable. First, what would the master do with a

servant who invested the talent like the first two, but lost it at market? Would he be praised for

his attempt, or rebuked for the loss? For his abstinence from waiting would match that of the

good servants, but his result would be worse than that of the wicked servant. Second, why does

the master reap where [he] sowed not, and gather where [he had] not strawed?8 Perhaps this

7 Matt 25:29

8 Matt 25:26
relates to the fact that, although God does not exist in time or space, he gathers up the spirits of

the good, spirits which live in the bodies of men.9 This detail does not add anything fundamental

to the story, but it does call into question the nature of the master.

The closing section of Matthew 25, the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, ranks among the

most important images in the Gospels. More a description than a parable, this story has to deal

with what occurs at the moment of Gods arrival. This moment, the Last Judgement, ends

waiting! After being late, after delaying his arrival until after time in order that he might not

destroy time, the Son of man arrives. He divides humanity into the good and the bad, the saved

and the damned, depending on whether they carried out what theologians now call the Corporal

Works of Mercy. This has minimal amounts to do with waiting, but the aftermath of this

judgement does. After waiting for Gods arrival, it happens, and the damned are sent away into

everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.10 Everlasting punishment and life

eternal both two happen outside of time -- or perhaps they encompass it. Either way, after all that

waiting for the Last Judgement, the only outcome is more waiting. Except this time, men no

longer have anything for which to wait. So perhaps there is not so great a difference between

heaven and hell, and the only difference between those places and real life could be that here

man waits for something, while there, nothing remains for which man can wait.

Both the active and passive forms of waiting appear in each of these three parables, these three

gateways into the meaning of Jesus teachings, each of which deals with a certain aspect of

waiting. The parable of the ten virgins discusses how one must prepare for Gods arrival. It

teaches that God will always be late, and his arrival at this later time, which exists out of the

9 Borrows from body/spirit dichotomy in Romans 8

10 Matt 25:46
active time during which one can await his arrival, will expose those who did not properly

prepare for him. The parable of the talents discusses what to do while waiting for God. In that

interval, man cannot actively wait for God. Rather, he must abstain from waiting so that he may

actively pursue other facets of life. Finally, the parable of the sheep and the goats shows what

will occur when waiting ends. Yet it seems that this end of waiting ushers in another eternity of

waiting, in both heaven and hell. So, while the word wait does not appear once in this

translation of Matthew 25, perhaps by understanding its manifestations between the lines we may

unlock the meaning beneath these parables. But, of course, it will be a very long time, as long as

time itself and then a little later than that, before God will reveal that meaning. Until then, we

have no choice but to wait.