In
the world of literature, there is the character of the Fool. Think of Uncle Billy from “It’s a Wonderful
Life,” C3PO in “Star Wars,” Timon and Pumbaa in “The Lion King.” These second-banana sidekicks tend to be the
comic relief, the ones who cause the Heroic Central Characters to roll their
eyes and shake their heads, tolerating their friend who is not “all
there.”
Christians
tend to look like Fools, at least to the world.
After all, we are the ones who believe in things the world believes aren’t
really there, things like Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, a Spirit that
lives in our hearts. We are the ones
who, like Paul, hear Jesus’ voice while the world hears only thunder.
We
appear foolish to the world because we have faith: faith in the existence of
God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit; faith that God will work all things for our good
(Romans 8:28); that he has plans to help us and not to harm us, to
give us a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11); that he loves us so much that he sent his only begotten son, so that whoever
believes in him will not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Faith, as Hebrews 11:1 says, is being…certain of what we do not see.
To
the world, it looks foolish to believe in things we cannot see, but it looks downright
crazy to believe that these things are MORE true, MORE real, than those we can
see. Yet that is exactly what God calls
us to believe. His ways are higher. His love is real love. His truth is THE truth. We need to believe what He says over what we
see, hear and feel.
This
level of crazy, of faith, is what Jesus exemplified. After all, when you start teaching about
loving your enemies, treasure in Heaven and being born a second time, you’re
going to see some eyes roll. My friends,
if the people of the world are not rolling their eyes at us, we are doing
something wrong.
How
many eye rolls, and worse, do we think Noah got while he built the ark? Can we
imagine what the people of Jericho were shouting at the Israelites as they
walked around the city? How crazy did
Gideon seem with his little band of 300 weaponless men going up against an army
of 135,000 soldiers? Even Jesus Himself was
thought to be a lunatic by his own family.
But
we have the Bible, and we know the rest of the story. Noah, the Israelites, Gideon, and Jesus were
not crazy. They simply knew something no
one else did. Or rather, Someone no one
else did. They counted His promises to
be truer than their circumstances, and God honored their faith.
Literarily
speaking, by the end of their stories, they had become the Heroic Central Character
as well as the Fool.
Perhaps
one day, if we live out our crazy faith, our stories will show that we also are
both the Hero and the Fool.
