April Fool!

April Fool’s Day isn’t a Christian holiday, but the more I think about it, the more I think it ought to be. After all, while we tend to think of this as a day when people try to make fools of each other, it also reminds us of all the ways we make fools of ourselves, and the interesting fact that sometimes it’s the smartest people who are the biggest fools—both theologically quite important points. For instance, one of the smartest men who ever lived was the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon; this is a man who was interested in everything, who invented modern scientific method, and who was gifted enough that some people think he wrote Shakespeare’s plays on the side. Bacon died stuffing snow into a chicken. Honest.

One afternoon in 1625, Bacon was watching a snowstorm and was struck by the wondrous notion that maybe snow could be used to preserve meat in the same way that salt was used. Determined to find out, he purchased a chicken from a nearby village, killed it, and then, standing outside in the snow, attempted to stuff the chicken full of snow to freeze it. The chicken never froze, but Bacon did.

In Bacon’s defense, of course, he was on to something there; it was the execution, not the idea, that was off. His foolishness came from the fact that he was too smart for his own good—he saw the possibilities, and didn’t stop to think about the downside. That’s often the way of it with us; which is why, as the saying goes, it’s not what we don’t know that hurts us, but what we do know that ain’t so. (I’ve seen that attributed, btw, to Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Josh Billings; I wouldn’t presume to know who said it first.) As I’ve said before, the root of the problem is that we’re neither as smart nor as wise as we think we are; when we come up against true wisdom, the wisdom of God, we cannot understand it without his help, because it contradicts everything the world teaches us to think is wise. By the world’s standards, God is a fool, and his wisdom is folly.That’s why, as Dr. Stackhouse wrote during Holy Week, Easter is subversive. The crowds wanted Jesus to come along and take the world’s pretensions seriously, play along with them, and win on their terms; they wanted him to be a military and political messiah, a great liberator and conqueror, who would capitalize on his popularity to drive out the Romans and re-establish Israel as a political entity, as a nation among the nations. Instead, he confronted those pretensions and tore them down, exposing the emptiness behind them. Where the crowds identified Rome as their enemy and their salvation as overthrowing Roman rule, the enemy he set out to destroy and the salvation he would offer were very, very different. Indeed, what he did, he did as much for the people of Rome as for the people of Israel—and while that made him the king they needed, he wasn’t the king they wanted; and so, within a few short days, the crowds went from shouting “Hosanna!” to shouting “Crucify him!”Where the world celebrates those who climb the ladder of success, praises Jesus as long as he seems to be heading toward an earthly throne, and is even willing to follow him when it looks like a good career move, we’re called to praise and follow him on the road of thorns; where the world glories in money and power, we’re called to glory in the cross. Which is foolish, from any human perspective; what glory is there in all that pain and blood and death? But that’s the faith to which God calls us—not a Palm Sunday faith, that celebrates Jesus when he’s popular and we’re riding high and everything’s going well, then turns on him when he starts making people mad and the road starts to look rough, but an Easter faith: a faith that understands that it was precisely by his defeat that Jesus conquered, that such a shameful and scandalous moment as a criminal’s execution on a cross was indeed the moment of God’s greatest glory, and that it’s only by going through that death and coming out the other side that Jesus brought about our salvation. To the world, the idea that a triumphal procession would lead not to a throne, but to that, is pure foolishness; but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God for us, in which we glory.