I preached these sermons in 1999 (St. Martin-in-the-Fields and St. Columba’s, Strawberry Vale), and again in 2010 (Holy Trinity, North Saanich), both, like 2021, years in which Maundy Thursday falls on April Fools Day. That won’t happen again until 2083, so this is the last opportunity that I will have to share them with others.

On the morning of Maundy Thursday, 1999, I really had no idea what I was going to preach for the Triduum services. I drove out to the end of Fairfield Road and then walked around McNeil Bay and up past the Royal Victoria Golf Club. As I walked, an idea of a sermon for that evening came to me; and, as I continued to walk, it resolved itself into three sermons, one for each of the three days.

I don’t know how inspiration works, but there are times, like this, when something is suddenly just there, pretty much complete. Translating what’s in your head into written words on a page can be agonizingly difficult, but in this case they just flowed.

There is a seed from which this inspiration grew. Sometime in the 1990s I took a summer course at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA, that was taught by Tom Woodward, who is both a priest and a professional magician/clown. He looked at ways of using imagination and creativity in our preaching, and led us to think of the resurrection as God’s great hat trick.

So I present this to you on this “God’s Fool” day and week-end.  

Maundy Thursday: April Fool  

April fool! I cannot let the concurrence of this Maundy Thursday and April Fools Day go by without comment. For there can be no better or greater April Fool than the Easter joke God pulled on Satan and the powers of sin and death.

God really led them on. God let what the baptism service calls “Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God” believe that their rebellion had succeeded. God let them believe that they had carried off a palace coup. Under the semblance of justice and the rhetoric of religion, they had killed Jesus. If this was indeed God’s Son, they had killed the heir apparent. They had driven God from the field. Now it was all theirs—not only “the kingdoms of this world and their splendour,” which had always been theirs, but the very souls of every human being. Now irredeemably in its grip, Sin could pay them the only wages it has available, that is—death. The last word.

God really led them on. God let “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God” believe that, in corrupting Judas, they had brought about the destruction, not only of that unhappy man, but of Jesus, the Son of God. And with him out of the way, they assured for themselves the everlasting corruption of the human race.

God really led them on. God let the “sinful desires that draw you from the love of God” believe that, by prompting all his disciples to flee and to leave Jesus desolate and alone to face what they had prepared for him, they had broken God’s hold on human hearts, and had broken the human will to be free.

God really led them on. Through it all God said not a word. Not a sign that everything wasn’t on the up-and-up. No hint of a twinkling eye behind the clouds of that dark noonday. It was only when it all seemed over and done—the body of Jesus safely in its grave, the seal and the soldiers’ watch in place to keep it there—that God said, “April Fool!”

“You thought you’d beaten me, Sin and Death. You thought you’d finished off my Son for ever. But you were wrong. You killed the wrong person. You claimed the one person you had no right to claim. Being sinless, he was not yours, Sin, to kill. Being sinless, you, Death, could not hold on to him. So he slipped through your fingers, and now, living beyond the grave, you can’t touch him. The tables have been turned. You didn’t kill the Son of God on the cross, you killed yourselves. April Fool!”

We come to this table to celebrate God’s April Fool. Because in that greatest and best of all April Fools, we who are baptized into the body of Christ, we who are nourished by the body and blood of Christ, we who have been baptized into his death and raised to the new life of grace, have also slipped through death’s fingers and, in Christ, we live where death can’t touch us.

What St. Paul calls “the foolishness of God” has made a fool of Satan and his minions. The cross—scandal and foolishness in the eyes of the world—turns out to be the power of God to save and the wisdom of God to teach.

April fool!  

Good Friday: God’s Fool  

“And my poor fool is hang’d!”

King Lear’s sad, last words. They are a conundrum. Is Lear speaking of the Fool who has been his constant companion in his misery; or is “fool” a term of endearment for his beloved daughter Cordelia who lies dead in his arms?

Ultimately it matters not. It works either way. Today it serves to lead me into a second meditation on God’s Fool. Last night I talked about the resurrection being God’s April Fool, turning the tables on Sin and Death. Today I want to draw some resources from the Christian tradition that speaks of Christ as God’s Fool.

The Fool of Shakespeare’s plays, and the clown of the circus and the children’s party, are both Christ figures that come from that tradition. Surprising? True. Lear’s Fool, like that other wonderful fool, Feste in Twelfth Night, are the culmination of a long tradition in English and European drama of the “wise fool.” The wise fool sees the folly of the rich and the powerful. The wise fool punctures the self-inflated pomposity of those who would be thought profound or wise. Not constrained by the conventions of society or good manners, the wise fool can tell it like it is, because he sees it like it is. And those who take themselves too seriously can’t stand it. So the poor fool gets hanged. See the parallels?

But what about the clown? Surely not? Yes! The clown with the sad painted face where huge teardrops fall from one eye, who makes us laugh. The clown whose sorrow fills us with joy. The clown whose stumblings and fumblings leave us shaking with mirth. The Christ whose suffering brings us freedom. The Christ whose cross brings us joy. The Christ whose death brings us life.

And the clown is often the magician. The clown can tease coins out of your ear, discover playing cards hidden in your hair, pull miles and miles of colourful bandanas out of your mouth, all as strange and wonderful and abundant and profligate as grace itself. Grace abounding. In the clown’s hand a stick can turn into a bouquet of flowers, a handkerchief into a dove. The dead turn into the living. And the clown pulls a live rabbit out of an empty hat with all the panache of a God pulling a living Christ out of an empty tomb.

Christ is God’s fool. He empties himself for the sake of others. He riddles circles around the wise keepers of the scriptures and the law, making them look like fools. He wags his tongue at the rulers of this world, making them tremble in their insecure boots. He throws himself away on the chance that he might actually be saving himself. And if himself, then maybe others too, into the bargain. He takes no thought for the morrow. He has nowhere to lay his head. He speaks with the authority of one possessed, rather than with the careful cadence of academic reserve. He trusts in God. Absolutely. Totally. No holds barred. Against all reason. Flying in the face of common sense. With utter disregard for his own welfare. And the poor fool gets hanged. He ends up on a cross, the fall guy for the jokes of passers-by. God’s Fool indeed.

God’s BELOVED fool, like Lear’s beloved Cordelia. This Fool, fool enough to get himself killed because he thinks it’s the trapdoor to life, is God’s beloved, the one on whom God’s favour rests. This Fool’s life is so precious, so single-mindedly focussed on the foolishness of God in a world distracted by the wisdom of humans, that his death does indeed turn into new life, life abundant, as the dead stick turns into blooming flowers or the handkerchief into the beating wings of a dove. This foolish, faithful life is so perfect that it merits the stamp of God’s approval in resurrection. Its death releases into the world the Spirit of life for any fool foolish enough to breathe it in.

And as for those of us who are fools enough to believe that this Fool possesses divine wisdom—well, what can we do but take a balloon from the clown’s hand and join the dance?  

Easter Morning: Fools for Christ

“We are fools,” St. Paul says in his letter to the Christians in Corinth, “We are fools, for Christ’s sake.”

We are fools, if we believe that, when Satan, Sin and Death thought to nail Jesus, the sinless one, the eternal Son of God, to the cross, God nailed them. We are fools, if we believe that death died there, at the cross.

We are fools, if we believe that the power of sin was broken there, at the cross. We are fools, if we believe that Satan, that old liar, was shut up in hell, and the gates nailed shut for all eternity, there, at the cross. We are fools, if we can look at the world around us—the world of Syria or Yemen.* The world of child abuse. The world of hunger. The world of hate—and still say that the powers of evil have been defeated. We are fools, if we can watch the television news at night and still say that the power of sin and death has been broken—decisively and for ever.

But we ARE fools—fools for Christ’s sake. We are fools, because we DO believe, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that in Christ God has “overcome the old order of sin and death and has made all things new in him.” We believe that, at a deeper, more profound level of reality than the reality of the television news (and even of our own experience of the world out there, where “life is hard and then you die”), the reality is that God HAS broken the powers. That, in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, the age to come—the age where sin and death, sorrow and pain are no more—has already broken into this world. That the game is over. THAT is the REAL truth about this world. Only a FOOL would believe it.

But we ARE fools, for Christ’s sake.

We are FOOLS—for Christ’s sake.

We are fools, if we believe that, when Christ died on the cross, we died with him. We are fools if we believe that, when God raised Jesus from the dead, he raised us, in him, to the life of the age to come, to life beyond death, to deathless life with God.

We are fools, if we can look at our very corporeal, living selves, and still say, “we died with Christ on the cross.” We are fools, if, certain in the knowledge that this body will return to the dust from which it came, we can still say, “in Christ we will never die.”

But we ARE fools for Christ’s sake. We are fools, because we DO believe that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, “we have died to sin and are alive to God in Jesus Christ.” We are fools, because we DO believe that, at a deeper, more profound level of reality than the reality where this “too, too solid flesh” is battered about by the changes and chances of this fleeting world, “we have died, and our life is hid with Christ in God.” That is the REAL truth about us. Only a FOOL would believe it.

But we ARE fools, fools for the sake of Christ. For the sake of Christ, God’s Fool, in whom God played the ultimate April Fool, turning death into life for all fools foolish enough to believe it.

With such a Fool to follow, who would be wise?

[*In 1999 it was “Kosovo”; in 2010 “Somalia or Sudan”.]