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.

The discussion with Daniel C. in the comments on the previous post started me thinking. The biblical prophets laid their lives on the line time after time after time because when the kings and other powerful people of their land were unrighteous, they confronted the wicked with the righteous anger of God, to their face, in the sharpest possible terms. One of the reasons I disparaged (in my old Presbyweb piece) the claims of Presbyterian liberals to be speaking prophetically is that there was no risk involved—they were merely aligning themselves with one group of powerful people against another in an interparty dispute, saying things which had been said many times before.

The same surely cannot be said of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Any government which would turn biochemical weapons against a group of its own citizens and plan atrocities to justify policy decisions—for such and no less is what he has alleged—would never allow anyone who exposed its activities to live, at least without divine intervention. These are the sorts of things, if true, that one might expect God to reveal to one of his prophets. If the Rev. Dr. Wright’s accusations are in fact prophetic revelations from God, then they’re justified. If not, then he’s a false prophet. Given that we know how AIDS entered this country, courtesy of Randy Shilts (who bears particular responsibility for publicizing the story of Gaëtan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was one of those who brought the virus here from Africa), I’d say that test doesn’t look too good for Sen. Obama’s pastor.

At first blush, he would seem to look better on the test of boldness; certainly he pulls no punches in his language. Where he fails, however, is in his location. Jonah went (under protest, of course) to Nineveh; Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos and many others went into the court of the king. True prophets, when they have a condemnation to announce, do so in the presence of the one whom they are condemning, setting aside all earthly safety, trusting God to get them out. (Or not, as the case may be; tradition has it that Manasseh had Isaiah sawed in half inside a hollow log.) Put another way, true prophets speak to “us.” The Rev. Dr. Wright, by contrast, denounced “them.” He failed the test.

There’s a deeper significance to this as well: denouncing “them” tells “us” that “we” are free to believe what we want to believe, both about ourselves and about “them”—and that’s not something God’s prophets do. Judgment begins in the house of God, and so that’s where his prophets begin: by challenging and rebuking us. Before they let us pronounce the judgment of God on our enemies, they call us to pronounce it on ourselves—to fall to our knees in repentance for our sin and to rise in humble awareness of our fallenness, and our desperate need for grace. In so doing, they bring us to a place where we would be just as happy to see the repentance of our enemies as their obliteration.

The problem with self-anointed prophets is they don’t stand in that place, because they don’t have that humility. As I wrote in 2005, to folks like that,

the rest of the world divides into two camps: the righteous (those who agree with me) and the unrighteous (those who don’t), which leaves only the question, “What fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Belial?” There in a nutshell is the state of things . . . for too many folks, the presence of people who disagree with us, instead of serving as an opportunity for learning and self-correction, merely hardens us in our own positions, because “we” are light and “they” are darkness. This wouldn’t be a problem for someone whose life and beliefs were already 100% in accordance with the will of God, but that isn’t any of us; we all have areas where we need to grow, and beliefs (sometimes cherished ones) which are simply wrong, and we can’t afford to set those in stone. . . . [We] need to set aside this self-aggrandizing nonsense that we’re speaking “prophetically,” which sets us above those with whom we disagree, and learn instead to approach them in a spirit of humility and grace. Our motives and vision just aren’t pure enough to justify doing things any other way.