“This man was a fool because he said ‘I’ and ‘my’ so much until he lost the capacity to say ‘we’ and ‘our’.” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s Dr. King’s sermon I always remember whenever I come across this parable in Luke, his sermon titled, “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool.” The point of the story and the point of King’s sermon is simple. As King said, “No matter where you are today, somebody helped you get there.” We are but fragile mortals, death awaits each of us; and so, it’s foolish to act like the Creator, as if we accomplished it all without help. Foolish too not to recognize our obligation to give thanks for the help we’ve been given and to help others in turn.
King called it “man-centered foolishness,” that selfishness which ruins everything, rampant in greed, rampant in our foolish, petty hearts. It’s a foolishness which will meet its maker, as again King said elsewhere, “The God that I worship has a way of saying, ‘Don’t play with me.’” That is the subtle threat implied in Jesus’s parable. Injustice isn’t eternal, justice is. All foolishness is humbled, all greed destroyed. “The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty” (Lk 1:53). This is Mary’s prophecy, and it will come to pass; it’s inexorable. The only question is whether we’re smart enough to share in it or foolish enough to fight it. This is the moral question of the parable, a haunting one for we the privileged.
But we shouldn’t despair; rather, we should be inspired. For those of us materially blessed, the lesson is clear. We should recognize our dependence upon others, and we should work with the tools and resources we have to build the kingdom of God which is a kingdom of justice. Rich and poor, employer and employee, citizen and undocumented: our task is to recognize our solidarity and then to seek charity and justice in action and not just words. This is how we’ll keep away from foolishness and from judgment, if we recognize our common bonds and the justice those bonds demand.
Don’t be a fool. Be a Christian, just and grateful. And make the world more just too.
