When it comes to Jesus, and Easter, God sort of played the ultimate April Fools’ Day joke. For thousands of years the Jews had been looking for a Messiah. They had been waiting expectantly for the Anointed One, the Chosen One, a Savior who was going to come restore their nation. They were waiting for a conquering warrior king who was going to usher in a new kingdom and bring the Jewish people back together and free them from the chains of slavery and oppression that they had been living under for so long.
When Jesus entered the scene there were many who saw Him as this Chosen Savior, but there were also many who rejected Him because He did not fit the profile that so many were looking for. He was not a warrior. He was not an influential politician. He was not a powerful king. He did not overthrow Rome. In fact, he encouraged submission to the authorities. He encouraged paying taxes. He was, for the most part, non-violent. So, many people questioned how a nobody carpenter from a nowhere town could be the long-awaited Anointed Chosen Messiah of the Jewish people. It didn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people.
Now, granted, there were some amazing things about Him. He could do miracles. He could heal people. He was influential. He spoke eloquently and He was knowledgeable. He claimed that He could forgive sins, and He claimed that He was God.
How could this be? If the prophecies were true, and if God's promises were true, there needed to be a powerful king, a conquering warrior, not a wandering, nomad carpenter.
However, what we see is that Jesus really was the promised Messiah, and God was not playing some cosmic joke on people, but He was revealing that his knowledge of reality and of what we need is far greater and far different than our own. We see this exemplified in 1 Corinthians.
1 Corinthians 1:18-31 ESV
“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
That is a lot of verses, but to sum it up, what Paul is saying here is that God doesn't work the way that we work. He doesn't do the things that we think He's going to do. He doesn't set up kingdoms or prophecies or freedom in the way that we would or from the things that we would. God's ways are higher than our ways. His knowledge is far beyond our knowledge, and the result of that is that we can often look at what God's doing and think it is foolish. However, God has perfect knowledge, and the things that we think are foolish are, in fact, perfect wisdom. The things that we think are weak or dumb or ineffective are the strongest, most powerful systems in place.
The Jews were expecting a King who would establish a new kingdom of Israel, and Jesus WAS a king who brought a new kingdom, it just wasn't what the Israelites were thinking. He didn't come to reestablish a Jewish nation and to reestablish Jerusalem. He came to establish the kingdom of God, and that kingdom is not and never was an earthly kingdom. He didn't have a castle or a palace. He didn't have royal guards and armies. He didn't have court jesters and servants in the way that a traditional king or ruler did.
The kingdom Jesus established was the kingdom of heaven. It is a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom that resides within our hearts, and also in the world around us, but not in the physical sense that we think of a kingdom in. The kingdom of heaven has power and dominion over hearts and minds and souls, and it exists in the spiritual realm of angels battling demons and fighting for the souls of humanity.
The Jews were looking for a Messiah, a Chosen and Anointed one who would set them free from chains. They were looking for freedom from chains of slavery that they had endured for hundreds and thousands of years. They were looking for freedom from the chains of socio-political oppression that they lived in under Rome, at the time, and other nations throughout history. They were looking for freedom to be a nation.
Jesus was a Chosen, Anointed Messiah who brought freedom, but the chains that he set them free from, the oppression that he would bring people out from under, were not physical chains and were not socio-political chains. They were chains of sin. They were the bondage of Satan. Just like his kingdom was not a physical kingdom, the chains and oppression that he brought freedom from were not physical chains and physical oppression.
The Jews were looking for someone that would validate them, that would reinforce their privileged status as God's chosen people, that would set them up as strong and free members of a powerful kingdom, but Jesus was something very different. He established a spiritual kingdom. He brought freedom from spiritual bondage, and He didn't make it exclusive for the Jews. He opened up freedom to all people. He opened up citizenship into his kingdom to all people: the Jews, the Romans who oppressed them, the Gentiles who were unwelcome and unwanted in Jerusalem, the Samaritans who the Jews hated. Jesus brought freedom to everyone.
You see, today we play April Fools’ jokes and pranks and issue press releases as a way to pull the wool over someone's eyes because it's something that is unexpected and out of the ordinary and doesn't seem like it could be real, but when we think about the “April Fools’ joke” on Israel and on the world it was not to pull the wool over people's eyes or to trick them or to make them look like fools. Rather, it was to show the foolishness of human wisdom and the expansive perfection of God's wisdom. When Jesus came to this world and lived and preached and healed and died and rose again many people didn't see him for who He was or believe who He was. He didn't meet their expectations, but God doesn't work within our expectations. He quite literally works outside of all normal expectations. He chooses things that we think are foolish things that we think are weak, and He uses those to do something amazing above and beyond anything that we could ask or imagine.
So, I challenge you not to be a fool. Don't get so stuck in trying to figure out the world or God from your own limited understanding, but open your eyes to what God is doing and saying. It may be unexpected. It probably will be unexpected, because God works in unexpected ways, but God's ways are far better than anything that we could come up with on our own. While the Jews thought they were just looking for someone that would make they're small group powerful and free for a limited time in this earthly world God gave them something that would set, not only, them free, but all of the world free for eternity. God wants to work in your life too.
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