You Fool!

Up and down the country today, preachers are standing in pulpits declaiming these words to their congregations, making sure not to catch anyone’s eye. It’s cathartic, but, of course, it’s not the preacher speaking. This is scripture.

“You fool!”

In fact, Jesus tells us that if call someone a fool, you should go to hell (Matthew 5.22). If you call someone a fool, you are saying that they are worthless in God’s sight, and, clearly, that’s not our call.

In the Psalms we read that

Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’
(Psalm 14.1 and 53.1)

You might think that this is a criticism of atheism – that those who don’t believe in the existence of God are fools – but that’s not what the psalmist is saying. The fool is not someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of God (the idea would have been unthinkable) but someone who does believe in God but lives as if God did not exist. And that is the man in our parable. He lives his life as if God doesn’t exist and other people don’t matter.

In the Old Testament Wisdom literature (e.g. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes) there is a lot of reflection on what it is that makes someone foolish or wise. Proverbs (9.10) tells us that

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom…
Proverbs 9.10

Wisdom (the opposite of folly) is founded on a relationship with God. Jesus makes the same point in his parable of the wise and foolish builders (Matthew 7.24-27). The wise man or woman builds a house on the rock which is like building your life on the words of Jesus. When the storms of life come, the house stands firm. The foolish builder builds on shifting sand and the house collapses. What they have built crumbles to nothing. It’s not that the foolish person didn’t hear the words of Jesus. They did. But they chose not to act on them.

The rich person in today’s parable should have listened to the preacher of Ecclesiastes whom we hear in today’s Old Testament reading (Ecclesiastes 1.2, 12-14, 2.18-23)

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 1.2

Here’s something I learned: the word which is translated in our bibles (NRSV) as ‘vanity’ (NIV: ‘meaningless’; GNT: ‘useless’) is the Hebrew word hebel which means ‘vapour’ or ‘breath’. Everything, says the Teacher, is vapour or breath. Nothing lasts forever. Everything is fleeting and insubstantial. Which is to say that

“Without God, ‘everything under the sun’ is as significant as vapour.”

That’s what the rich person in our parable hasn’t grasped. He thinks that his grain and his goods, stored in bigger barns, will make him happy. The wealth he has accumulated means that he can “relax, eat, drink, be merry.” It won’t. God says, “You fool!”. ‘When you die – which will be very shortly – they will mean nothing to you.’

Today’s reading from Colossians (Colossians 3.1-11) lists the things that don’t belong to those who “have been raised with Christ” – the things because of which “the wrath of God is coming” (‘anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language’), and among them is greed. Which is idolatry – putting something before God. Unlike the character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street who says

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

Conclusion

You will know the expression “money is the root of all evil” and you may think that that is a quote from the bible. Or from Pink Floyd.

Money, so they say
is the root of all evil today

But that isn’t what the bible says. What the bible (1 Timothy 6.6-10) says is

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil
1 Timothy 6.10a

Not money but the love of money. What the letter to Timothy says is that godliness with contentment is our goal – “if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.” (v8)

⁹But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. ¹⁰For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

Jesus warns us about the love of money. If we reject his warning, we are at risk of being fools.

As someone said

The best things in life aren’t things