Matthew 25:1–13
The parable of the bridesmaids which we read this week always presents a challenge for me. I’m angry at the wise bridesmaids for refusing to share their oil, even at the risk of everyone running out! Wouldn’t it be better to engage in mutual aid and insist that we can only all find safety and salvation together, even if we risk somehow “failing” the expectations of an outside authority figure?
I found help this week in Aaron J. Smith’s reframing of the parable. Smith’s key conclusion is that the point of the parable — Jesus’ admonition at the end — is not about the oil at all, but is to stay awake. “Staying awake would have changed the story,” he writes. It’s because all the bridesmaids fall asleep that the crisis with the oil arises at all. Maybe, then, the point of the parable isn’t about how to hoard our own oil to have “enough” — maybe it’s about how we can stay awake to each other in order to find new ways for all to have enough.
I do think the questions raised by this parable about how to have “enough” to carry on are deeply relevant to our work for abolition. A conversation with a friend and fellow organizer this week got me thinking about how so many movement campaigns and organizations seem to be struggling or slowing right now. It feels like reactionary elements are ascendant against the abolition movement. It feels like many of us are in what Carlos Saavedra calls a “winter” season in movement work: a time to regroup and focus on our own values, and a time to “keep our lamps trimmed and burning.”
The question posed by this parable is how we get through seasons of winter, seasons when the end is not in sight and victories are few and far between. Do we see the answer in the oil, and finding ways to reserve sufficient oil for ourselves by stepping back to refocus on what brings us life? Do we see the answer in doubling down on our values, insisting that what the parable provokes is really the insistence that the bridesmaids should have shared and stayed awake in faith to see what would happen? Do we see the answer, as Smith suggests, in “staying awake,” being present to one another as we make what Andrea Ritchie calls “critical connections” in her new book on abolition and emergent strategy and wait to see where they lead?
What is it, the parable of the bridesmaids asks but (I think) does not answer, that sustains us all as we wait?
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.