because you never bothered to know me

For that is the whole point of the parable: some day, late or soon, it will be too late even to believe. We become what we do. If we trust, we become trusters, and we enter into the sure possession of him whom we trust. If we distrust, we become distrusters and close out the only relationship that reality ever offered to us.

That closure is the note on which the parable ends. "While they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast; and the door was shut. Afterward the other maidens came also, saying, 'Lord, lord open to us!' But he replied, 'Amen, I say to you, I do not know you.'" The shut door is God's final answer to the foolish wisdom of the world. In the death of Jesus, he closes forever the way of winning - the right-handed, prudential road to the kingdom, the path of living as the path of life. All the silly little girls with their Clorox bottles - all the neurotics of faith, all the wise fools who were willing to trust him in their lastness, lostness, leastness, and death - have gone into the party. And all the bright, savvy types who thought they had it figured are outside in the dark - with no oil and even less fun. The dreadful sentence, "Amen, I say to you, I never knew you," is simply the truth of their condition. He does not say, "I never called you." He does not say, "I never loved you." He does not say, "I never drew you to myself." He only says, "I never knew you - because you never bothered to know me."

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Judgment