The Best April Fools

For every April Fools' Day joke played successfully this day someone must be full of confusion or annoyance or some similar sentiment.  Imagine then the apostles, who had just undergone the most brutally cruel crashing of their expectations in the death of their Lord only to have Him rise again three days later as if to say, "April Fools.  You thought I was dead and this was the end of all things, but look, now I am alive."

Of course He never said that.  First of all, they had not yet invented this delightful celebration called April Fools Day.  Even if they had, Christ's resurrection would not have fallen on that day.

Still, there is a perennial truth in this year's coinciding of celebrations as much as there was in that of Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday.  It is a truth deeper than we might dare admit.  Sometimes we can grow so comfortable with the darkness and pain and our own grieving that we do not want to admit the light.  It is uncomfortable, just like the prank of April Fools, to find ourselves faced suddenly with the overturning of our expectations.  How can we be demanded suddenly to accept as necessary the most horrific of circumstances?  Yet is that not what the resurrection demands?  For how could there be resurrection without first the crucifixion?

Christ appears like a child, eager in His glory to welcome us into the Kingdom of Heaven, a kingdom that has dawned through the trampling of death by death.  That child-like love, however, runs up against grieving hearts who had just undergone the most tragic experience of their lives.  How could they be prepared to go from pain to joy?

We too are called to be children.  We are called to let loose our own expectations and rejoice with the reappearance of Him who was dead.

He is alive!

Do those words not strike the mind with more comprehension than to say that He was dead?  For death we all understand.  It comes for all those we love and we know it will come one day for us.  It is, according to folk wisdom, one of the only sure things in life other than taxes.

Yet resurrection?  Of that we have no experience.  How then can we comprehend something so amazing, so heartbreakingly beautiful, so true?

We cannot.

Still, by the power of Christ within us, perhaps we may catch some glimmer of what this awesome mystery portends.  Perhaps He send the Holy Spirit to enlighten our earth-trod minds, to awaken us from the weary monotony of our self-wrought circles of madness, and to breathe in the fresh air of a new joy, a new hope, a new life that might just as well be the April Fools joke.  For to embrace such a mystery seems folly to the world, and even to our mortal minds.

Let us then embrace the folly of this joke that is no mere joke, although it makes the heavens ring with the laughter of joy.  On this day, let us become fools for Him!

Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
and on those in the tombs
lavishing life!