“And they that were ready went in with him to the marriage; and the door was shut.”

(Matthew 25:10)

Next Sunday we shall celebrate Palm Sunday, the first day of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life.  The gospels tell us that as Jesus drew nearer to the end of his life, while his enemies grew bolder and the dangers about him loomed larger, he began to tell a series of crisis parables.  The message of each one of these little stories could be summed up in the phrase: “It may be too late.”

This was certainly the message of His story of the ten bridesmaids who went out to meet the bridegroom and bring him to the wedding. Five of them ran out of oil for their lamps and while they were making hasty purchases the bridegroom came and the party entered the wedding hall.  At last the foolish five came beating on the door, but it was shut.  They came too late to enter the wedding joy.

The same theme – “It may be too late” – appears in Jesus’ acted out parable of the barren fig tree.  When Jesus came to the tree expecting to find figs, he found it without any fruit, so he blasted it.  The time comes when it is too late for the ever-postponed production of the fruit naturally expected from a fig tree.

This is also Jesus’ message in the parable of the king who made a feast and invited his noble friends.  When they all sent flimsy excuses and said they could not come, the king sent his servants to invite the poor and the socially outcast to his banquet and compelled them to come in.  The time comes when it is too late for those first invited to change their minds and come.

“It may be too late.  It may be too late.” This is the message Jesus kept sounding as he went down to the gates of death.

But the surprising thing about Jesus’ preoccupation with crisis stories on the theme, “It may be too late,” as he moved consciously toward his death, is that he is not talking about its being too late for him to turn from his collision course with his enemies and his rendezvous with death, but rather that it may to too late for those who have rejected his call to repentance, too late to accept the gracious goodness of a forgiving God, too late to avert the just judgments of a righteous ruler of the universe, too late to return to their covenant relationship with the Good Shepherd of Israel.

Jesus is saying in all these stories and others: “It is the last hour for you.  God’s gracious rule has come.  But the deluge is still at the door; the axe lies at the root of the barren fig tree.  But, God, marvelously suspending the fulfillment of His holy will, has allowed one more respite for repentance. . . But there is no going beyond the respite God has granted.  His patience is exhausted when the last day for repentance passes unheeded.  When that time has run out no human power can prolong it.  Then the door of the festal hall will be shut and the word will be – ‘too late.’”  (Hoachim Jeremias – Discovering the Parables)

But all Jesus’ harping on the theme of “too late, too late,” emphasizes the human side of time run out.  Jesus does not proclaim a statute of limitations on the divine forgiveness, for that is eternal and infinite.

Quite obviously Jesus is addressing the nation, his own beloved country –when he pleads for repentance before it is too late.  And it is the national leaders, the people who have the privilege and power of making top-level decisions to whom He addresses the crisis parables with their urgent plea for repentance.  But the national leaders in Jesus’ day would not repent.  They persisted in their headstrong rejection of their day of opportunity to receive the gracious salvation of God; and in 70 A.D. the conquering armies of Titus besieged Jerusalem and laid the city waste and destroyed the Holy Temple.  For Jerusalem then, it was too late.

What of our nation, America, today?  Is there any moral and spiritual significance to the swiftly passing historic events of our dwindling allies in the world, our tottering American dollar, our inner conflicts and racial tensions?  Are these simply the haphazard, unfortunate social phenomena of our era, or have they theological implications?

Now what significance, if any, have these crisis stories of Jesus for us, in the time form of our day as we approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week?  Certainly, if nothing more, they are dramatic exhortations of practical wisdom to people of all times to make the right decisions at the correct instant and act on them in the relentless sequence of historic events, before it is too late.

Everybody knows that the time comes when it is too late for the surgeon to operate; too late for the once pretty girl to marry; too late for the profitable investment to be made; too late for us senior citizens to make a will, or to make up with an estranged relative or friend.

But the gospel makes it clear that Jesus goes farther and deeper than mere practical wisdom in  his use of these time-crisis stories.  Jesus tells these parables on the theme “It may be too late” in a theological context.  They are an essential part of His call to repentance.

Jesus addresses his nation, his generation, and individual men and women with an impassioned plea that they accept God’s gracious invitation to salvation, that they change their ways to make room for his will to be done and his Kingdom to come, but they will not change.  He sees their unwillingness to repent, their rebellion against God, going on and on and on.  He sees the mounting danger of their wasting their day of grace, of their waiting until it is too late.

While nations and cities may suffer colossal catastrophe for their corporate failures, and social institutions crush humanity with injustice, cruelty, indignity and unspeakable pain, cities and nations, as such, do not repent.  Repentance must begin in the hearts of individual men and women.  It always starts with the soul that sincerely says: “I have been wrong.  I did this evil thing in God’s sight.  I wronged this person in this way.  I have gone along with a popular life-style that is unworthy of a Christian.  It is ungodly, selfish, wasteful and irresponsible.  I’m sorry and I’m stopping it, if only God will give me the strength to do it.  I’m turning around to go God’s way.”

A friend of mine, a Presbyterian Deacon, was convicted in Federal Court of fraudulent income tax returns and forced to pay, in fines and back taxes, hundred of thousands of dollars.  But he really repented.  He confessed his sin.  He began again.  He changed his whole life style.  He found time and money for establishing a home for the aged and a correctional school for boys.  He built another fortune in real estate.

In the last weeks of my friend’s life, when he was critically ill in the hospital, some flowers and a resolution were sent to him by the Tenant Association of the housing units he built and rented to low income workers.   As the owner of some 200 rental units this man had proved so exemplary  a landlord that both Public Housing and redevelopment agencies in his city declined to take his land to build Federally funded housing because of the splendid job he was doing to provide low cost housing in the free enterprise system.

It wasn’t too late for my friend to repent and change his life style, not only in honest reporting to the Federal Government, but also in responsible stewardship to Almighty God.  So the fruits of his repentance were repaid in the harvest of good will and changed corporate values in his home city.

Just two or three weeks ago Frederick Loew died, and the news releases of his death on TV and in newsprint recalled to our memory those delightful musicals that he and his partner, Lerner, had created: Brigadoon,  My Fair Lady,  Camelot.  As I listened again to snatches of those songs of his, my mind went racing back to how moved I was at that moment in Camelot when Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur come together for their last, sad, misty meeting.  I recalled how superb Vanessa Redgrave was in her role as a repentant Guinevere.  Her blood-shot, brimming eyes revealed the anguish of her tortured, unfaithful soul as she parted with both Lancelot, her clandestine lover, and Arthur, her noble husband and her king.  In her face was all the feeling Tennyson had forged into those lines for his Guinevere:

“Is there none

Will tell the king I love him, tho so late?

Ah, my God,

What might I not have made of Thy fair world,

Had I but loved thy highest creature here?

It was my duty to have loved the highest:

It surely was my profit had I known.

It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

We needs must love the highest when we see it

Not Lancelot, nor another.”

The great tragedy of our time — in our nation —  in our world — but most of all in our individual hearts — our desperate tragedy is the discrediting of Christian idealism — the denial of the goal of humane living.  “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” God has revealed the highest for human eyes to see in Jesus Christ.  O see the Christ stand!

When the highest in Christian ideals has been desecrated in our private, corporate and national life — when the human heart has rejected the Lord of all life and made its own golden calf and bowed down and worshipped its little “Lord of the Flies” of carrion and corruption — no matter how proud a flag of freedom we raise over it, no matter how pious a name we call it, no matter how deviously we connect it with the holy tradition of a past glory, it is rebellion and must be repented.

Though it may be too late to save a relationship, as Guinevere discovered, and though it may be too late to save a city or a nation by reform and repentance, as Good King Josiah discovered, it is never too late for a man or a woman by repentance to take his or her stand with the Christ of God and be found with those through whom God on earth and in heaven is working His purpose out. For always – those things that can be shaken are being removed, in order that those things which cannot be shaken may abide.