p/c Davidson Luna via unsplash
Sauron, dark Lord of Mordor, is a “wise fool.” His knowledge and cunning is great, but he reckons wrong because he reckons only according to his own scales — of power, control, and anxiety. Sauron learns that the Ring is abroad and calculates carefully:
“He supposes that we are all going to Minas Tirith [the great stronghold city of the “good guys”]; for that is what he himself would have done in our place. And according to his wisdom, it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place.”
In his foresight and “wisdom” he lays careful plans and makes “all the right decisions” and works-out all the contingencies, and maps all the algorithms to the nth degree. But for all this wise planning he is a fool and his folly is great. What is Sauron’s error? Himself. The very scales by which he weighs decisions are not the scales by which others lay their plans. His purposes are not the purposes of Gandalf, Aragorn, the hobbits, and the other free folk of Middle Earth.
“That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs in his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into its darkest dream.”
Sauron cannot imagine that anyone when given the chance to take the Ring of Power for themselves would refuse it; he cannot imagine that anyone would choose to not be like him. This is his undoing. As good as he can reckon, he cannot reckon on people making decisions he himself is unable to make; he cannot reckon beyond those things that he himself would do. As all-seeing as his eye is, it is blinded by its perpetual focus on itself.
Thus Sauron jumps-the-gun and launches his great war in haste:
[…] Imagining war, he has let loose war, believing he has no time to waste[…] So the forces that he has long been preparing, he is now setting in motion sooner than he intended. Wise fool. For if he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile to the hunting of the ring, then indeed hope would have faded: neither Ring nor bearer could long have alluded him. But now his eye gazes abroad rather than very near to home…
It is the folly of Gandalf which is actually wise: to trust the Ring to two hobbits who do not know the way to Mordor, and who have no map, and who are not warriors, and who are counted neither among the wise nor the mighty. But this is precisely the one thing Sauron does not —cannot— imagine and therefore cannot prepare against.
Jesus is the true and greater Gandalf. How many are the little things which are actually big things in Scripture: Noah building a boat and being laughed at; an heirless Sheikh named Abram leaving Ur; A widowed Moabitess following her mother-in-law to Bethlehem; Jesse’s youngest son getting doused in olive oil; a Jewish boy born under the poverty line in the dead of winter on the far reaches of the Roman Empire; A Jewish carpenter being crucified as an insurrectionary and blasphemer some Friday during Passover in Judea; a rushing wind in an upper room; the manumission of a runaway houseslave named Onesimus.
All these things, to a gaze like Sauron’s, pale in comparison to the “Great Events” of history and economy, just as the planting of a new church in Puna is unlikely to raise any eyebrows in the U.N. Security Council. We may even be tempted to weigh things in broken scales; our gaze may also my myopic and blurred by an over-focus on the mighty. Lest we too become wise fools, I’d encourage us to read history, and the history which unfolds in our own day with eyes like Gandalf’s —eyes a little more keyed to the balance of heaven’s scales, in which small foolish things often carry the weight of eternal glory.