Comments on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Sermon on “The Man who was a Fool”
In March of 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was invited to preach at a Lenten series by the Detroit Council of Churches. He spoke about the parable of the rich man in Luke’s Gospel and teases out three reasons why Jesus would think this man a fool.
Then he told them a parable. “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’ And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God.” Lk 12:16–21
1. The foolish man was “more concerned about making a living than making a life.”
In our society, almost always the first question we ask each other is “What do you do?” And we are not inquiring about how we live our lives but about how we make a living. As King says, the man is a fool because “he failed to keep a line of demarcation between his life and livelihood.” The foolish man thus lets the accumulation of his wealth displace “the quality of his service to humanity.”
There is a sad irony in the fact that the millions in this world mired in soul-crushing poverty don’t even have the option of making that distinction. The rich man’s foolishness was in part a result of social structures that do not serve God’s purpose. As King was to say later [in a talk at Riverside Church in April of 1967], “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” Which brings us to the second reason King identifies.
2. The foolish man failed to realize his dependence on others.
Human beings were social long before they were human. The idea of the atomistic individual pursuing a completely self-determined destiny is a peculiar illusion of the modern world (and a particular blindness of U.S. Americans). As King says, “He was a fool because he failed to realize that wealth is always a result of the commonwealth.” There is a principle of Catholic Social Teaching called “The Universal Destination of Goods” that states that creation was meant by God for the good of all human beings together and therefore cannot be monopolized by a few. Wealth is only justifiable if all benefit. As King explains, to seek advantage perverts justice:
“God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race…. All I am saying is simply this: that all life is interrelated. We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
King draws the inevitable conclusion that any form of racial, gender or class discrimination partakes of the rich man’s foolishness:
“God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers and every man will respect the dignity and the worth of human personality. Whenever we fail to believe this, we indulge in a tragic foolishness.”
3. The foolish man failed to realize his dependence on God.
Another of the reasons King explains that Jesus found the man to be a fool is because he “talked as if he regulated the seasons. He talked as if he produced the rain. He talked as if he controlled the setting and the rising of the sun. This man was a fool because he felt that he was the creator instead of a creature. And so he sought to live life without a sky.”
It is not hard to identify these themes in modern society, in the economic system that claims sovereignty over the earth and its riches, in the political system that serves the interests of the powerful rather that recognizing that all human beings are created in the image of God. King offers an antidote:
God is still around. And all of our new knowledge cannot decrease His being one iota. And when we discover Him, and when we allow Him to be the central force in our lives, we begin to live with new meaning, for there is something about this faith in God that lifts us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, that can transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy.
The choice is stark: “We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools.” This year, when the holy seasons of Lent/Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are so close to each other, God invites us especially to embrace the kinship that lies at the heart of human solidarity.
T. Michael McNulty, SJ, is the scholar in residence at the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking.
