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!

Fool for Christ

"Imagine if you were in love with goodness itself—what wacky things you would do."

This quote resurfaced and I have no recollection of who spoke it or where I heard it.  That matters little enough, though.  It is the thought contained in the quotation and not the speaker to which I wish to draw your attention.

I will digress for a moment first, however.  Yesterday I had the opportunity to go on a spontaneous adventure with a couple of friends.  Having decided upon hiking in the forested park in the middle of the city, we had no expectations of unusual adventure; considering our limited time, it seemed reasonable to enjoy a tamer sort of adventure.  After a brief stop at another friend's house and a dishtowel prophecy—"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson—we continued on to the trailhead.

As we started hiking up the hill, we soon found ourselves scrambling up a ravine with a few pools and trickles of water left within it.  The trail lost its façade of officiality and turned into no more than a deer path.

We might have turned back to find the actual trailhead, but instead we continued on, scrambling over fallen trees and crawling through brush and ferns, following the rocky bed of the ravine in what seemed like a tropical adventure.  The faint trail grew fainter, twisting back and forth across the ravine, sometimes disappearing entirely.

In retrospect, it would have made much more sense to find the trail proper and likely we would not choose that path again knowing what it held.  Yet that makes us all the more grateful for the experience.

You can extrapolate from this story to the adventure of life.  So often we choose to follow the well-beaten trail.  We give in to the pressure of society or the expectations of our friends—or what we imagine them to be—and find ourselves trudging on doggedly, clamping our jaws in the face of the monotony that drags us down.

Let us return now to the quotation with which I began:

"Imagine if you were in love with goodness itself—what wacky things you would do."

It speaks to the heart of what it means to be a fool for Christ.  When you fall so deeply in love with Him—when you learn to trust Him so entirely—you no longer care so much for the security the world offers.  You learn to leap out in faith, knowing that He will catch you.  You embrace every cross and every trial because you know that behind it lies the Providence of the One who loves you more than you love yourself.

Go my friends and be fools for Christ!