Thought for the week - 8 November 2026

Today’s Gospel takes us straight back to the ministry of Jesus, right back to what it was like, how it felt, for the very first disciples. The parable of the ten girls at a wedding is a homely tale which reaches its denouement in the crunch line, ‘Stay awake because you do not know either the day or the hour’. We may well ask what day, what hour – and with some haste. Those are our immediate questions but people in Palestine in the time of Jesus didn’t need to ask them, those who He first told this story did not have to ask, and the fact that we need to shows us how important Bible Study is.

The Jews to whom He spoke were generally pessimistic about changing small things to improve the world. The world seemed such a complete mess – the chosen people in the promised land living under Roman pagan oppressors - that it was a little like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Should we not just leave it to God?

And for us, faced as we are with the mess we are in, it seems not unreasonable to be in a permanent state of mild despair about humanity as we know it. The growth of knowledge and technology doesn’t, evidently, reduce the malice in humanity. It just gives it more scope for evil and distress.

Therefore many Jews, holding to the faithfulness of God to his own goodness, expected a new creation, a new world: the ‘turn of the ages’, as they called it — or, again, ‘the ‘Day of the Lord’, or — yet again, the ‘hour of the Son of Man’. This was the moment when God would send some undefined person to sort out supernaturally the mess we’ve made of the first creation. So this is what Jesus is talking about, this is ‘the day’ and ‘the hour’ that his hearers don’t know and so they’ve got to stay awake. Many Christian cults operate on similar lines, saying that they know the day and the hour, and close down when that day and hour passes – which is why Jesus, shortly after, says do not believe those who say they know!

But we are not Jews in Palestine two thousand years ago, and we are not Millennial Cultists. And this is NOT how the New Testament sees it, because the New Testament doesn’t end the story with the preaching of Jesus. It goes on to talk about his passion, death and resurrection. It sees in these events the breakthrough, the new world, the divine intervention that Jesus discussed and we need.

At Cana, Jesus at first refuses his mother’s request for a miracle of some kind by saying, ‘My hour has not yet come’ and Saint John in his Gospel ties the day and the hour immutably to the Crucifixion – it is the death of Christ that brings the healing, it is His death that heralds the remaking of the world, it is by His wounds that we are healed, and by His death we can be sure this month of the Holy Souls and this day of Remembrance, that death is not the end.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Now the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you most solemnly, unless a wheat grain falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain but if it dies it yields a rich harvest’. At the Last Supper he prays, ‘Father, the hour has come: glorify your Son, so that your Son may glorify you, and through the power over all mankind that you have given him, let him give eternal life to all those you have entrusted to him’. So the death of Jesus is the day, the hour: it was for this they were to stay awake, to be vigilant.

And did they stake awake? The Gospels describe for us the flight of the disciples, save only John; and with great irony the literally falling asleep of Peter, James and John in the Garden of Gethsemane as Jesus sweats blood before them.

‘Could you not have stayed awake with me one hour?’ What layers of meaning for our faith that question contains! This is the moment when a new world is to be born; when God made man is to make the ultimate sacrifice of his infinitely precious life; when the endless energy that sacrifice releases is about to pour back into the world as the One we call the Holy Spirit who renews the face of the earth. This is the hour, the hour of salvation, after which the world can never be the same again, and ‘Could you not have stayed awake with me’ in this hour of all hours? Once again, keep your lamps lit!

The death and resurrection of Christ are the central events in the history of the world. This is the new start, the hope for the world, the source of love to whom we commend the fallen and those we have loved, and for that, for Him, we are asked to stay alert, stay watchful and stay faithful. Not so much to ask for what we are given.