Within today’s reading we find opposite pronouncements in adjacent verses: “Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes” (Proverbs 26:4-5).

If we take these as “clear imperatives in scripture,” we are faced with a hard situation: the text forbids a certain behavior in one verse and requires it in the next. When the way we read the Bible assumes that scripture ought to work a certain way – namely that we can take every verse as an absolute – then we create for ourselves “a contradiction in the Bible.”

But if we read the Bible seriously enough to recognize that these lines are written as proverbs, we can see that each one expresses a deep sense of wisdom. “Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself” – that is, it’s a fool’s errand to try to talk sense into a fool. Yet “Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes” – that is, if you don’t help people see their folly, they’ll go on thinking everything’s just fine, and so they’ll never learn any better.

We generally consider Solomon the author of the book of Proverbs, though chapter 30 says it comes from the otherwise-unknown Agur son of Jakeh, and chapter 31 is credited to the unnamed mother of the otherwise-unknown King Lemuel. In any case, the book was apparently compiled by editors two centuries after the time of Solomon, during the reign of King Hezekiah (25:1). It is interesting that these editors were not afraid to put these two contrasting pieces of wisdom side by side to form a compound proverbial unit that laments that it’s a vain hope to instruct a fool, yet recognizes that if you don’t try, they’ll never learn to do better.

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We are all fools, lost in our folly, O Lord; we have nevertheless thought we were wise, and we have all made fools out of those who have tried to help us, time and again. Yet you have drawn near to instruct us in the way we should go: give us grace to learn from you, that we may gain true wisdom.

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