Day 28 - Time to trim your lamp

Hieronymus Francken the Younger - Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins

Hieronymus Francken II created this oil on canvas painting in 1616. He and his brothers were prolific Belgian painters. On this April Fool’s Day, it seems appropriate to find an artwork featuring either the wise and foolish builders (Mt 7:24-27) or the wise and foolish bridesmaids (Mt 25: 1-13). Curiously there appears to be extraordinarily little classical art depicting the houses on the rock and the sand. I did find a painting of Jesus with a stone in one hand and a heap of sand in the other, by Haley Miller. You can look this up online but as she is still alive, reproducing her work would be tricky!

Franken’s work was usually painted with broad brush strokes and used earth colours. This piece is typical with the predominance of browns and beiges and the splurge of brick-red in the dress of the bridesmaid playing the harpsichord. The scale of his painted people sometimes looks wrong – but we can see here that the wise virgins are deliberately depicted as better lit, better dressed and significantly larger. They are also occupying themselves in a more productive way; we get the sense of how long they have been waiting by the discarded books and cards. They have brought food with them and a large flagon of oil.

The foolish virgins look bored and a skull presages their ultimate fate. The end of the parable is conveniently placed above the two groups of women and clearly shows the consequences for the foolish: the tower in Heaven echoes the tower outside the window. We can make out the wise virgins being welcomed in, while the foolish women are dancing in anger at being unwanted and barred.

The picture on the wall above the wise virgins possibly also illustrates the end times; it appears to be based on Mt 24:43: “But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into”.

Nowadays it is the bride’s privilege to arrive late at her nuptials; in Jesus’ time it was the groom who arrived to suit himself! The groom was the lord of surprises and the bridesmaids accompanied him with a procession of lights on the last bit of his journey. Light is a recurrent theme in the Gospels for example Mt 5:16 ‘In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven’. I am reminded of the children’s hymn by Susan Bogart Warner Jesus bids us shine, where each verse ends: we must ‘shine, you in your small corner and I in mine’.

Like the bridegroom in the parable, is Jesus similarly waiting for humankind to decide whether to be wise or foolish? Freewill in action!

Elaine Kinchin