You see a man curling up in pain and groaning incessantly along the pavement. What will you do? Naturally, you will walk over in hope of lending a helping hand and getting him on his feet. On turning him over, you realize his face shows much less agony than you had expected but you think nothing much of it, and its not until he finally stands up and asks you to look in a certain direction that you realize you’ve been on..
Gotcha!
You feel like a fool.
If this really happened to you, perhaps you would be appeased by the mere fact that you finally had your few seconds of limelight by being caught on national tv. But more often than not, most of us do not really take to the idea of being taken for a ride. We hate to look silly and make a fool of ourselves, privately or publicly. We have this immensely strong sense of pride that builds itself up around us, causing us to want to look all made-up and pretty all the time. We cannot afford to look any whee bit less than perfect.
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. – Jim Elliot.
Yet Jesus was made to look like a fool for us. He was made to wear a thorn of crowns. He was mocked. He was flogged in public. He was hung on the cross between 2 other criminals, for no obvious crimes whatsoever. He was made to suffer the most humiliating form of punishment in his time.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. – C S Lewis.
However, deep down inside, you and I know that we can never really call Jesus a fool, whether you are a believer or not. Perhaps the one thing, if any, that Jesus did, which might be remotely classified as ‘foolish’, was to die for a bunch of fools who did not have the slightest idea what was good for them, and instead chose to trudge on in their own foolish (and sinful) ways. He chose to die for us in spite of the fact that he knew way beforehand that we, the fools, would take His grace for granted and continue to hurt and grieve Him. He loved unconditionally.
Now who is the real fool?
I had been the fool all along. Yourself?
~~~
I scolded some of my students today very angrily for lousy attitude, and I pre-empted their apologies by saying something to the effect of "don’t show me the guilty face now and apologize, only to put on the same behaviour the next day.” It got me really heated up and I put on my black face mode for my remaining 4 periods for the rest of the day, which, on hindsight, was kinda unfair to the other classes. (I kept reminding myself to compartmentalize my anger/disappointment but to no avail). My temper became much shorter that day and my patience was constantly put to the test. Students had to ask me why I was in such a bad mood and I could only manage a weak smile and said “nothing much.” As the day drew to an end, I was still rather affected by what had transpired earlier in the day, until suddenly, it dawned upon me (and therein lie some of the uncanny ironies of life) that I just might have been like some of my students – unrepentant, stubborn, prideful, always coming back to seek forgiveness for the same sin over and over again, making no effort to change whatsoever, totally taking God’s grace for granted. And that, IS utter foolishness.
A double fool. I am.
A fool and all his stories.
A fool with all his sorries.
To the great I Am.
To the throne on which sits the Lamb.
I humbly come.
I pray I truly repent.
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