32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Matthew 25:1-13

Fr. Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF
Claretian Missionaries

There is a moment in every life when borrowed things fail. A borrowed faith. A borrowed conviction. A borrowed prayer. It carries us for a while. It lights the darkness. But there comes a night when the flame begins to flicker. And the oil we did not gather is not there. And no one can give us theirs. Because the oil is not a possession. The oil is the life we have lived.

The parable is about ten bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom. And notice something we often miss. This is not the story of one bride waiting for her husband. It is the story of a community. Ten young women together. A shared task and a shared expectation. And the most disturbing detail is this. The foolish ones were not one or two. They were five. Half the community. A whole group lost their oil together. This is not a story about individual failure. This is a story about a community that built its faith on the wrong foundation.

The foolish bridesmaids had lamps. They had the outward form. They had the practices. They had the routines. They had the observance. What they did not have was the reserve. They had the performance but not the substance. They had the appearance but not the interior disposition. And when the bridegroom was delayed, they discovered that a lamp without oil is just a piece of clay. A faith without interior life is just a set of habits. A religion without the deep self is just a performance waiting for an audience that never comes.

This is the warning to every church and every community. A community can teach its members to sing, to pray, to fast, to serve, to attend. It can fill the calendar with devotions and the sanctuary with rituals. It can produce people who look faithful on the outside. But it cannot manufacture oil. It cannot give anyone an interior life. It cannot force the deep self to grow. It cannot replace personal conversion with communal activity. And when the long night comes—when the crisis arrives, when the persecution begins, when the supports are stripped away—the community cannot save those who never gathered oil for themselves. They all go out together. And half of them discover they have nothing left to burn.

So what is this oil? The lamp is the visible form of faith—the practices, the routines, the outward observance. The oil is what keeps the lamp burning. The oil is the interior substance of the soul. It is the hidden life of prayer no one sees. It is the love practiced in secret. It is the forgiveness offered when it cost something. It is the mercy shown to the unworthy. The oil is not what you know about God. It is what you have become in God. It is your character. The slow accumulation of grace received and grace given. The lamp can be lit in a moment. The oil is gathered over a lifetime.

The long night is not simply a delay. The long night is when life grows difficult. It is illness. It is loss. It is persecution. It is the season when every external support is taken away. And in that night, the only thing that keeps the lamp burning is the oil of values that have been personalized. The martyrs understood this. In the camps and prisons, they had no way to practice their external faith. No Mass. No rosary. No community. No sacraments. Everything visible was stripped from them. And yet their witness continued. Because the faith had become values. They had internalized the values of forgiveness, of hope, of love, of truth, of fidelity. And these values burned in them when nothing else remained. They had gathered oil in the years of light. And when the long night came, they had a reserve. Their determination to go on came not from external practice but from the values on which they had built the foundations of their faith.

How then do we gather this oil while there is still light? The light is the ordinary time of our lives. The oil is gathered through daily prayer—not the prayer of performance, but the prayer of presence. Through silence and solitude. Through forgiveness. Through the works of mercy. Every act of mercy is a repetition. Every repetition strengthens the habit. Every habit becomes character. Through suffering accepted with trust. Through examination of conscience. Through the sacraments. And yes, through community. But the community is the workshop, not the substitute. The community can give you a lamp. Only you can fill it.

How often I have lived on borrowed oil. How often I have coasted on the momentum of my community. How often I have kept the lamp and neglected the reserve. And I hear the cry: The bridegroom is coming. Go out to meet him. The moment is now. The oil must be gathered now. While there is still light. While there is still time.

I need to ask myself: What oil am I gathering? What values am I internalizing? What faith am I living? Am I doing the quiet work, or am I coasting on borrowed faith? The answer is uncomfortable. But the answer is the path. The path of the wise. The path of the reserve. The path of the oil that lasts.

The door will be closed. The moment will come. And the only oil that will matter is the oil you have gathered. The time is now. Gather the oil while it is still day.