The Sage vs. the Fool: Fools for the Lord

The Sage vs. the Fool: Fools for the Lord.

The Sage: A person known for wisdom, understanding and discernment; for developing the practical art of living skillfully; for growing in moral intelligence; for being able to practice the truth in daily life; for expressing astute insight and shrewd street smarts; for applying knowledge to make thoughtful decisions and healthy choices; for knowing the difference between wise and foolish, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, true and false; for effectively demonstrating a practical spirituality; for choosing to live into Wisdom itself, the Person of Jesus the Anointed One.

“In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus was crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow Him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.”  (Frederick Buechner)

You Gotta Serve Somebody. When I was a teenager thick in the middle of the 60’s Jesus Movement, I liked wearing a t-shirt that read “I’m a fool for Christ” on the front and “Whose fool are you?” on the back. It’s still a great question. One sign of faith in God is to accept the fact that this world is the High King’s courtyard. And often enough, He has a royal request: We are to play the jester before Him. This jesting is far from a private audience, though, since the world is bound to be watching. And our public foolery isn’t intended to entertain the King, but instead represent Him, and reveal to the viewing audience what’s on the King’s mind… that weakness is a gift; the meek are super heroes; the persecuted are the elites; the forgotten are the blessed; and the outsiders are the in-crowd.

Surely We Jest. So the King’s jesters are living, breathing visual aids, object lessons with flesh on. Because the King’s thinking is often different than His subject’s, He needs to teach His lessons and do His deeds through those who don’t mind looking foolish for the sake of His kingdom. And since the King is holy, His courtly representatives are on a sacred mission.

A Fool According to the Bible: A person who doesn’t know what is best for himself; who doesn’t learn from mistakes; who is habitually rebellious; who does not consider the consequences of his behavior; who stubbornly remains unteachable; who is content with self-satisfied ignorance; who ignores counsel and discipline; who pridefully rejects a reverence for God; who has access to the truth but rejects it; who is impulsive and unable to control emotions; who is not concerned about moral blindness; who is unaware of his self-destructive lifestyle; who does not recognize the need to change his thinking and behavior; who is gullible, naïve and dim-witted.

A Fool according to the World: A person who doesn’t appreciate the ways of the world; a gullible person who will trust in an unseen Person and believe in the reality of an unseen world; an ignorant person who doesn’t live for worldly success; people who are so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good; a person who refuses to accept the values of accumulation, personal achievement, self-advancement, wealth, prestige, power over others; a person who is dependent on God instead of being a “self-made person;” a person who is willing to live a hidden life of weakness, mercy and grace.

A Biblical Who’s Who of Holy Fools. As the King’s holy fools, we sometimes are honored and respected by the world’s observers. Other times though, we are expected to make royal spectacles of ourselves. In fact, down through the ages many of His jesters have been ridiculed, ignored, misunderstood and worse…

• Abram sells his heirlooms, packs up his family, and leaves home for parts unknown on a wing and a prayer. He went on to cooperate with the Lord when asked to produce a child at 99 years old, and then agree to sacrifice his only son as a test of faith, only for God to say at the last minute, ‘Don’t do this my friend, you passed the test!
• Noah builds the world’s biggest boat on dry land, without a cloud in sight, and proceeds to fill it with animals. All the people thought him foolish of course, until the rain started to fall, Noah brought his family into the boat, and they lived inside this floating zoo with all the animals for over a year.
• Moses is an unknown shepherd in the wilderness for forty years, then talks to a burning bush to get his marching orders from Yahweh, and proceeds to one-up the Pharaoh ate very turn, then hikes through the mountains and desert with a mutinous mob of bickering malcontents for 40 years, and still never entered the promised destination.
• Rahab, Jericho’s scandalous lady of the night, fibs to her king, hides enemy spies, sends the cops on a wild goose chase, and is rescued from certain death as Jericho’s walls come a’tumbling down. In another of God’s wonderful little twists in the plot, Rahab ends up continuing the royal bloodline for the High King, Jesus Messiah;
• Gideon, a young inexperienced farmer in Israel, is asked to tear down his family’s pagan altar and fertility pole, gather some troops to take on a huge, fearsome enemy with only a small handful of 300 raw recruits, and scare the willies out of the enemy with trumpets, torches, clay pots, and booming voices. This fool’s errand ended with complete victory.
• David challenges a giant warrior who is in full armor while he is wearing only shepherd’s garb and slinging a stone, then he pretends to be insane in the enemy’s camp with spittle drooling down his beard, and then while a young king dances a heavenly jig in public worship wearing only a loincloth without a care in the world for royal reputation or domestic embarrassment.
• Elijah unexpectedly thunders into Israel from a little place on the other side of the tracks wearing a cloak of animal skin and fur as well as a homemade leather loincloth. He proceeds to confront an evil pagan Queen, pray for a three-year drought, and finally call on heavenly fire to consume over 850 pagan prophets and priests in their duel with him on Mt. Carmel. Of course, God’s fool won the duel.
• Elisha was one of Scripture’s greatest miracle-workers who got his feet wet in hopeless religious reforms, political controversies, military campaigns, and palace intrigues. He looked mighty foolish when he called on two ferocious bears to maul 42 young troublemakers. As Frederick Buechner once said, “There is no need to try making a fool out of a prophet, because sooner or later he will probably make one out of himself.”
• Isaiah, after being instructed by the Lord to casually walk around town barefoot for three years wearing nothing but burlap-sack boxers, and foolishly beating his prophetic head against the wall in speaking the word of the Lord to the apathetic and rebellious chosen people for over 50 years with five different kings, he had the humiliation of dying the martyr’s death at the hands of the very evil king Manasseh.
• Jeremiah obediently played the Lord’s fool in Jerusalem and was completely ignored and ridiculed. He was asked to act out street theater, such as wearing a smelly loincloth for a long time without washing them, then burying them in the ground, and then digging them up for public display; then he was asked to smash a perfectly good clay pot in the garbage dump in front of the people; then he was told to wear a heavy wooden oxen yoke around town for a few months. Somehow he was completely obedient and engaged in God’s foolishness for over 40 years.
• Ezekiel starts out by being fed a scroll to eat and fill his stomach, after which he was instructed to speak to a valley of dry bones, speak to the wind, then watch as the bones assemble themselves and come back to life; he was also told to lock himself in his house and tie himself down with ropes without speaking for seven years; then to lie on his right side for 390 days and his left side for 40 days, all while mixing cow manure into his bread dough at God’s request and eating this hearty meal while lying on his side; then to top it all off, Ezekiel was told to take a sharpened sword, cut off his beard, shave his scalp, and stand on a busy street corner to sing a solo, a funeral song, for no apparent reason. Could anyone appear more foolish?
• Hosea was asked by God to foolishly marry a common prostitute, raise a family with her, and remain faithful to her despite her ongoing sexual adventures with others. He was asked by the Lord to be a living parable of His faithfulness and covenantal love. Hosea just might have been a little humiliated in the process as others looked on, but he never expressed it in his book.
• Jonah hears the Call from the Lord which sounded completely ludicrous, proceeds to sail in the opposite direction, gets thrown in the drink during a violent storm at sea, and then swallowed by a giant fish. After a suitable time of repentance inside the fish, Jonah finally seems agreeable to the Call and is belched onto shore, and proceeds to shout fire and brimstone to an historically sadistic enemy in Gentile territory, undoubtedly feeling rather foolish but at least obedient. He later blamed God for being too merciful to the enemy and not merciful enough to him.

It looks like Christian author Flannery O’Connor was right when she said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.” But we don’t have to go out of our way to be peculiar. And it’s not necessarily righteous to be weird for Jesus. It seems that foolishness just seems to happen naturally enough when we take God at His word, and when we follow His lead in offering a countercultural presence wherever we find ourselves… Forgetting ourselves on purpose instead of living out an achievement-fueled ambition; forgiving others and bearing burdens instead of judging others and bearing grudges; seeking depth of character instead of breadth of financial portfolio; sharing power instead of hoarding it. The list goes on, and it’s clear that holy foolishness is not an easy lifestyle. But take heart, for we are told by the King that sooner or later, in His timing, His court jesters trump all that this world considers wise.

“Don’t fool yourself. Don’t think that you can be wise merely by being up-to-date with the times. Be God’s fool – that’s the path to true wisdom. What the world calls smart, God calls stupid. It’s written in Scripture, ‘He exposes the chicanery of the chic, the Master sees through the smoke screens of the know-it-alls.’”  (1 Corinthians 3:18-19, The Message)

Holy Foolishness in  Education. Is there a more difficult place to swallow pride than academia? In education, where impressive credibility is sought, where so many believe that knowledge is power and prestige, intentionally becoming a fool for Christ is very tough sledding. What happens when we decide not to conform to this world’s way of thinking (Romans 12:1-2), when what we believe runs upstream against the academic current? Then, we begin rowing in the same boat with God’s fools in ages past and present, most of whom were not defensive for Christ or feeling like some woebegone victim, but instead cheerfully, obediently foolish in the eyes of the world. That’s right, our very reason for being will at some point run counter to conventional wisdom. It’s inevitable that at some point, following the truth will make us look odd.

After all, followers of Jesus do believe that absolute truth exists and is knowable, that Creation, Fall and Redemption is God’s outline in HisStory. Countercultural to say the least. Even more outlandish, we believe in a personal Creator God who fashioned a moral universe, in which each person is an icon, an image of this God, so each human being from the womb to the tomb is sacred, unique, and full of worth and dignity. To top it all off, we believe in the historical fact of Jesus, God with flesh on, the world’s only spiritual genius.

But what about ambition, America’s great blind spot, or more specifically academic ambition, where self-advancement is the highest goal? Christ-centered schools need to keep examining ourselves: How do Christians measure success, and to what extent does our success model imitate gospel values? How do we order our academic community, and does it reflect a biblical vision? Perhaps our holy ambitions that are set apart from the mainstream are to result in the presence of Jesus in the academic marketplace, keeping our intellectual integrity while remaining servants of the truth, bearing witness to heavenly foolishness with winsome balance, developing a school culture where students are nurtured and challenged to become wise and loving people.