Archbishop's Message

Among the eschatological parables uttered by the Son our Lord Jesus Christ as presented to us by St. Matthew in his gospel account of Jesus, the parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins is a particularly intriguing one. The parable expresses the condition of the baptized population in our Lord’s Catholic Church at the time He returns ‘to judge the living and the dead,’ and take all those who have definitively demonstrated their covenantal belongingness to His Eternal Father in the Holy Spirit, clothed forever in the holiness and immortality of His divine Sonship in their individual spirit, soul and human bodies to enjoy eternal life with Himself as His Eternal Father’s adopted children in Christ as a world that will never end. The five wise virgins in the parable signify that portion of the baptized people who successfully join the Son our Lord Jesus Christ in Hs Holy Spirit in the unspeakable blessedness of this everlasting world, and the five foolish virgins represent that portion of the baptised population of the Church at the time of Christ’s return who not only fail in doing so, but are also miserably shut out of this everlasting world of God the Father by the Lord’s own eschatological verdict on them: “I do not know you!”

Why will that portion of the Church’s baptised at the time of Christ’s return, as signified by the five foolish virgins in the parable, fail to enter this blessed world of the Eternal Father’s adopted children at the moment of Christ’s return? They will fail to do so because like the five foolish virgins they have been going about their baptized lives in the Church without carrying with them ‘the flasks of oil’ necessary to keep their baptismal life in the Holy Spirit alive and fruitful until the moment of Christ’s return. The intriguing point about the parable is this: what does taking ‘the flask of oil’ with oneself in the parable, signify or point to, in the actual post baptismal lives of the baptised persons in the Church? It is, firstly, one’s personal goal and knowledge that the eschatological finality of one being sacramentally baptized ‘into Christ’ is to obtain for one’s own human body from the Son our Lord Jesus Christ on the day of His return, the very same divine immortality and divine glory that God’s own Son obtained for His own bodily human nature (spirit, soul and body) from His Eternal Father through its bodily resurrection from the dead in the Holy Spirit ‘on the third day after its death and burial, as he or she was explicitly told when he or she received the lighted candle from the Church in the baptismal rite: ‘you have been enlightened by Christ. Keep the flame of faith alive in your heart. When the Lord comes , may you go out to meet him with all the saints in the heavenly kingdom.’ Secondly, it is one’s persevering obedience of faith to the Eternal Father until the moment of one’s death (or of Christ’s return) in doing the very same work God’s Son Himself did with His human body to obtain His divine immortality for it, namely to reject Satan and his empty promises and its worldly glamour and fulfil the will of the Father as it was made known to Him every day until His death on the Cross, as he or she agreed to do at the time of baptism: “Do you renounce Satan? I do’ etc. ‘Not to carry flask of oil’ necessary to keep the baptismal flame in one’s spiritual soul alive means to live one’s post baptismal life totally ignorant of these two pieces of knowledge and being immersed in the delight of riches and the cares of this world with the rest of the world until the moment he or she is unexpectedly surprised by the sudden visitation of death and termination of his or her earthly life only to be disowned by God at the judgement seat of His Christ! Therefore we, the baptized, are interiorly admonished everyday by the Holy Spirit ‘to work out our salvation with fear and trembling’ until the Lord’s visitation to take us to enjoy eternal life with Him in spirit, soul and body, forever, in the home of His Eternal Father.