The fact that Easter Day falls this year on 1st April may provoke some reflection on Paul’s meditation on the message of the cross in 1 Corinthians: ‘For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God’ (1 Corinthians 1.18). St Paul is wrestling with the profound paradox at the heart of the Easter mystery: God’s power is revealed in human weakness, God’s glory is made manifest in the pain and suffering of the cross, God’s love is shown to us in a world of rejection, hatred and violence. In the English language, the Friday when we remember and bring to mind the deadliness and tragedy of Calvary is called “Good Friday”. This perspective does not come to us naturally. It is paradoxical. It is foolish. It is absurd – that the cross, a degrading and dehumanising form of execution, used throughout the Roman Empire, should be – for us – a sign of hope. The cross is a sign of the sovereignty of sacrificial love – in a culture obsessed with restless competition and anxious self-defence. This is the paradox that Paul is trying to express: Easter is the Feast of Fools, the Feast of Divine Folly.

In the plays of Shakespeare, the fool is often the shrewd and wise commentator on events. The fool is given licence to speak the truth, particularly when others would recoil. In a sense that was the purpose of a court jester – to speak the truth, when others out of fear or ambition, would simply say what they thought their patron wanted to hear. The fool was often called to be a sign of contradiction. And we can learn something from the example of the holy fool, characters like St Simeon Salos, St Andrew the Fool, St Basil the Blessed and St Francis of Assisi. Martin Luther King once described the vocation of a Christian in terms of being “creatively maladjusted”, living in the light of God’s kingdom as a present reality, always expectant, forever hopeful. Hope lies at the heart of the Easter mystery and the resurrection of Jesus Christ is itself a sign of contradiction, a sign of the scandalous and limitless love of God, a sign that death is not the last word: ‘For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’ (1 Corinthians 1.25).