Easter Fool's Day

Easter Sunday does not often fall on April Fool's Day but this year the two have coincided.

If you were to read the four original accounts of the event which Christians celebrate on this day, this unusual conjunction might not seem as incongruous as it initially feels.

Because in each of the accounts there is what appears to be a ridiculous April Fool. Jesus had been killed on Friday. Two days later, his small band of followers were still huddled in a locked room in Jerusalem, keeping their heads down and grieving the loss of their leader. It was the women who were brave enough to head off to the tomb that Sunday morning, to anoint the corpse with spices. It was the women who discovered that the corpse was no longer there. It was the women who had some encounter with angelic messengers. And in three of the four reports, it was the women who first met Jesus, returned to life.

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The women rush back to the men, burst in and tell them what they've seen.


This was not in the script. None of the rag-tag bunch of disciples had any idea they should expect this. “They did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense”. (Luke 24 verse 11). It was the first April Fool, as well as the first Easter Sunday.

In fact it wasn't even a very good April Fool because it wasn't very believable. It probably seemed like a joke in rather poor taste. If you're grieving the recent loss of a loved one, along with all your hopes of a radical new kingdom replacing the hated Roman overlords, the last thing you want is someone shouting “Wahay! It's OK I just saw him down at the Post Office. He's fine.” Because the one thing the Romans could be trusted to do was to make sure people were dead before they took them off their torture-crosses.

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The accounts carry on in a mixture of confusion and joy. Jesus begins appearing to more people. He appears to two previously unmentioned disciples on a walk outside Jerusalem, and pretends to have no knowledge of recent events including his own death, before revealing who he actually was. He somehow pops up in the locked room where the male disciples were hiding and proves he is not a ghost by eating a piece of broiled fish. He shows them the crucifixion holes in his hands and the spear mark in his side.

It takes them a little while to accept that this man is their recently deceased Rabbi, quite understandably. Yet at no point do they argue, you are someone else, not Jesus. They recognise him from his features, his voice. And when they begin to believe it is really him, joy replaces grief.

New "staging" in the polytunnel 

This strange series of events is, for me, at the core of the Christian message. Unpacking what it means, for them and even today for us, is an exercise that can take a lifetime. Yet I'd recommend it to anybody. If you have a few moments this long weekend, have a read of those accounts for yourself. It's the last section of each gospel. You can find them here:

Matthew chapter 28
Mark chapter 16
Luke chapter 24
John chapters 20 and 21

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