August 1, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Perils of Hubris

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 107:1–9
Luke 12:13–21

“But God said to him,‘You fool!’”

Luke 12:20 (NRSV)

So be it, Lord; thy throne shall never,
Like earth’s proud empires, pass away;
Thy kingdom stands and grows forever
Till all thy creatures own thy sway.

John Ellerton
From “The Day Thou Gavest”

An old Russian fable frames our reflections on the parable this morning:

An old woman died and was taken to the judgment seat by the angels. While examining her records, however, the judge could not find a single act of charity performed by the woman except for once having given a carrot to a starving beggar. Such, however, is the power of a single deed of love that it was decreed that she be taken up to heaven on the strength of that carrot.

The carrot was brought to court and given to her. The moment she caught hold of it, it began to rise, as if pulled by some invisible string lifting her up toward the sky. A beggar appeared. He clutched the hem of her garment and was lifted along with her. A third person caught hold of the beggar’s foot and was lifted too. Soon there was a long line of persons being lifted up to heaven by that carrot. And strange as it may seem, the woman did not feel the weight of all those people who held onto her. In fact, since she was looking heavenward, she did not see them.

Higher and higher they rose, until they were almost near the heavenly gates. That is when the woman looked back to catch a last glimpse of the earth and saw this whole train of people behind her. She was indignant. She gave an imperious wave of her hand and shouted, “Off! Off, all of you. This carrot was mine.” And in making that gesture, she let go of the carrot for a moment and down fell the whole train.

The perils of hubris. Hubris is what one writer calls the old Greek sin, the sin of self-pride, the reliance on self to the exclusion of other voices. Inherent in this sin of hubris is a flaw that brings doom. In our passage this morning, the parable of the rich fool, we find Jesus among a crowd—as so often he is—teaching about what good discipleship is. He is interrupted by a voice in that crowd, someone who wants Jesus to make a judgment, to arbitrate a question of an estate, of family inheritance.

Note that the man doesn’t really ask Jesus to judge; he asks Jesus to vote in his favor. Perhaps this is why Jesus immediately refuses and does one of these interesting shifts. In seizing on the interruption, Jesus uses one of his favorite subjects in the Gospels, particularly in the Gospel of Luke—that is the question of money, goods, possessions, greed.

The parable may seem somewhat straightforward. A farmer has a bumper harvest, realizes that he needs to build more storage for the crops, and so replaces the barns with larger barns. Having done with that, he decides to rest up, all content and self-satisfied with his lot. And then the sting in the tail: God says, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.”

Twentieth-century scholarship on the parables saw them as very simple stories that Jesus told to simple people, stories with one central meaning in them, in which one thing is laid beside another. Jesus used the parables to speak of God’s reign, God’s kingdom. And so the role of the listeners and interpreters, it was believed, was to search for the teller’s intent, that one simple meaning in the parable. Here perhaps it is God’s judgment on those who stockpile possessions for themselves. It’s a story of how God judges those who are not, in the words of the Gospel, rich towards God. It might be the perfect parable, you think, for a stewardship sermon, exhorting the congregation in their giving to the work of the church and of God’s kingdom. I’m certainly not against such sermons, and particularly as we ramp up towards Project Second Century, there will be ample opportunity for that to happen.

But for today, we might be reminded that more recent scholarship in the parables has seen them not as very simple stories, but as multilayered and very rich in their meaning. So if we take a deeper dive into the parable, perhaps we might get to a point where we say the issue here is not so much the fact of having possessions, per se. We might even reflect that there is something exemplary in the work the man undertakes. He is thoughtful about the future; he’s a good farmer; he gets a bumper crop and develops smart plans for storing. Perhaps the meaning of this parable is not so much about possessions, but about hubris, about the self-pride and self-satisfaction that the rich farmer shows. “I will say to my soul,” he says, “‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, and be merry.’”

Hubris. And God calls him on it. “You fool!” Why is he a fool? Perhaps it is not that he has possessions, but that possessions are all that he has. There is no suggestion of the life of the spirit here. The fool is not rich towards God.

My colleague John Vest has written a commentary our psalm, Psalm 107, in a recent publication and tells us that the thanksgiving that has been given in this psalm if for God’s chesed, in Hebrew; for God’s steadfast love. John says it might best be translated as God’s faithfulness or loyalty. The psalm offers thanksgiving for God’s loyalty, and that thanksgiving is the response, a loyal response to that experience. That kind of spirituality is absent in the parable. There is no reliance on God here, only on self.

Isn’t that such a part of the human condition? Isn’t this one of those places where it’s not only that we read the Bible, but the Bible reads us? Hubris is present in the Bible, in literature, throughout history. Perhaps the prime example is in the Old Testament, when David, the king, decides he can basically do anything with impunity. He commits adultery with Bathsheba and sends her husband off to be killed in battle. And then the prophet Nathan comes with a word for King David and tells a story, a parable, about one man who has many sheep and one man who has only one new lamb. The man with many steals the lamb of the other. Nathan asks David, “What should happen to the man who took the new lamb?” And David replies, “The man deserves to die.” To which Nathan replies with these chilling words, “You are the man.”

There is Peter, who makes a desperate claim to Jesus that he will never deny him despite what others may do, and we know that Peter is the one that three times will say I do not know him. You can’t open a Shakespeare play without coming across hubris: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello. Hubris causes the downfall of those who live in that way.

For me, the most striking example in literature is in that famous poem by Shelley called “Ozymandias,” in which the poet meets a traveler from an ancient land who tells a story of a statue that is ruined and fallen in the desert.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, you mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Hubris. I can’t read that poem without recalling in my mind the haggard, disheveled image of Saddam Hussein when he was discovered hiding after the invasion of Iraq. I’m sure you know or could share other examples of that.

I was reading an article recently, written around the time of Watergate by the journalist William Shirer. He thought that what was happening in the United States then was hubris, that which has brought the downfall of so many conquerors, he noted—of the Greeks themselves, the Romans, the French under Napoleon, the Germans under the Kaiser and Hitler. Power tends to corrupt, he said, quoting Lord Acton, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That’s the result of hubris.

But hubris is not just an individual sin; it can happen to countries, to institutions, to the church. In some sense, the Reformation was a response to the hubris in the late Medieval Catholic church. In many senses, the church has been responsible for hubris in many ways. Anytime the church says, “We have the truth and you don’t,” we’re entering into the realms of hubris.

So what then is it to escape this flaw? What does it mean to be rich toward God? I was doing some research recently and came across a fascinating piece of history about a woman called Jane Haining, who was born in Dumfriesshire in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth century. She worked as a missionary for the Church of Scotland. She was posted to Hungary to work specifically in Budapest, working there in a school that sought to educate Jewish girls. Jane Haining went to Budapest in 1932 and fell in love with Hungary, with Budapest; fell in love with the girls that she was educating. Four hundred Jewish girls from six to sixteen. She was loved and respected by her students. In 1940, faced with the worsening situation in Europe, the Scottish missionaries throughout Europe were ordered to return home. Jane Haining refused to leave, believing that her children needed her more than ever. In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary and soon began deporting the Jews from the provinces to the death camps. Jane Haining stood by her students, exposing herself to danger, and was denounced and arrested by the Gestapo in April of 1944.

She was charged with working among Jews. She was charged with weeping while she sewed the yellow stars onto their outfits. She was charged with visiting British prisoners of war and listening to the BBC. Jane Haining was deported to Auschwitz, where she became prisoner number 79467 and was forced into hard labor. Her last message to friends was a postcard asking for food. She ended the letter with these words: “There is not much to report here on the way to Heaven.” Jane Haining died probably on July 17, 1944. She was forty-seven years old. She probably died either from starvation or by being gassed.

Such a life lived with richness towards God.

Take my life and let it be,
consecrated Lord to thee.

Amen.