So how did you get on yesterday morning? Did you get caught out by tricks and pranks? Did you spot the stories in the papers for April Fools Day - those strangely convincing tales that could just be credible but as they go on they get just that bit more fanciful. The Today programme on Radio 4 had a piece about changing the morning medley of sea shanties and folk tunes to a European version. The Independent had a story about aromatherapy being bunkum, which I think was the spoof.

There have been some classic pranks over the years. One year Panorama ran a story about Spaghetti trees and was inundated with requests from viewers wanting to know where they could get them. In 1998 Burger King launched an advert for a left handed whopper burger. A perennial is metric time, where our clocks will all have to be changed to count in units of 10, though there could actually be something to be said for that one.

The trouble is there have been so many stories over the past year that you just couldn’t make up, but were true, that it is now quite hard to spot the obvious fakes! The thing about fooling is that it rests on the assumptions and values that we live by. What we think of as being sensible and obviously wise affects what we see as being foolishness. The trouble is that we all see this differently, just look at the curtains and colour schemes that people choose, the cars they drive and the songs and music they like.

St Paul came up against this when he was trying to convince people that the Christian faith might just have something in it, that it was and is the way of life. The Lord’s Prayer - ‘fine’. Love your neighbour - ‘fine’. Parable of the sower - ‘fine’. Blessing little children - ‘lovely’. The trouble comes when we get to the heart of things. Champion and leader strung up on a cross and dies - ‘you what’? Love your enemies; forgive those who persecute you; don’t flaunt your rank and status, rather shun such things - ‘are you joking’? The way of the cross is the way of life and truth - ‘I don’t think so’!

Paul expressed this April Foolishness of the gospel by saying “Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them…” (1 Corinthians 2:14) ‘The message about the cross is foolishness to Gentiles and a stumbling block to Jews’ (cf. 1 Cor 1:18, 23).

The Christian gospel has never been obvious to anyone. It has always taken time for its wisdom and its spiritual power to distil and change the way we see things. And it does require us to change the way we see things. So it is foolishness to some. Who in their right mind celebrates a cross? It is a stumbling block to others; it just defies credibility in so many ways because it often requires us to come at it from a different angle.

The more we enter into the gospels, into their deeper allusions and imagery, the more we allow the stories in the bible and the events that we celebrate to play on our minds, the more I find what starts out as looking like foolishness turns me into the fool because it works and has a very profound level of truth within it.

There is something about sacrificial love that does transform us. For Harry Potter it is the very protection that means Voldmort can’t touch him and couldn’t kill him. It is described as being a very old form of magic and one more powerful than hatred and violence. Harry’s mother sacrificed herself to protect him and this sacrificial love gave him a protection more powerful than anything else.

What we see as we stare at the cross is the worst that human power and violence can do to someone, to anyone. What we see in Jesus allowing himself to be subjected to it is all of this violence being taken and absorbed into the heart of God. It is a mystery that starts off looking like foolishness, but gradually comes to be pure genius. We expect a dramatic show of force to blast those who try such a sacrilegious act and what we get is darkness covering the earth, a cry of “it is finished” and he dies. The end; time for tears and a funeral.

The power of this sacrificing love comes of course through the Easter triumph. The dramatic change of events makes fools of us all. But it is the cross that we have to stay with today, because if we are not careful we rush to the happy ending and forget about the darkness and the utter challenge that it brings. Through its pain we find that there is no grief, no suffering, no horror that is not caught by it. I see it as God taking responsibility for the world he made and showing that he has taken responsibility for it and what is more continues to keep hold of it.

Whether this is foolishness or wisdom depends on how you see it, on the angle you come at it from. If you just can’t see it and have bought the contemporary obsession with control and everything being achievable, then it won’t fit. The truth, though, is somewhat different. Pain and death are just part of how it is. As my barber said the other day ‘life has sharp corners’ and we will never remove all of them. Our faith therefore needs to be able to cope with this and have a place to put it all.

So are you a fool or are you wise? There is a deep April Foolishness about the gospel because it calls on us to change the way we look at so much. As we do that we are able to make Alleluia our song; not as an avoidance but because we can stare into the darkness and find light.

© Ian Black 2006

Home