It is fitting that April Fool’s Day should fall in the middle of Holy Week this year. Though it’s not noted in the Church Calendars alongside Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, or Easter Sunday, yet the gospel of Christ’s passion has always been caught up with the reality of folly has it not?

Writing to the Corinthians who were caught up in a worldly admiration of “wisdom”, so-called by the intelligentsia of the Greco-Roman world, Paul reminds them of the “foolishness” of the Cross.

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. (1 Corinthians 1:18-25)

To a world that has inverted the order of things, chosen creation over the Creator, and whose understanding has become darkened (Rom. 1), the word of salvation the Cross is something only a fool could believe. What power is there in a man broken, bleeding, dying the death of a criminal, strung up between two bandits? What delicate wisdom in the heaving, labored, last cries of one more revolutionary, peasant preacher, expiring in the backwaters of the Near East?

Paul, of course, does not mock true learning, or the various technical, scientific, philosophical, or literary pursuits that Image-bearers pursue. But the reality is that the gospel is not something you come to see because of your native intellect or the pursuit of a couple of extra degrees. Human knowing–like all human doing–is caught up in the reality of sin, rebellion, and wilful avoidance of a knowledge of the true God.  Our idolatry extends to our ideas about what’s “reasonable” and good so that we begin to call good “evil”, and evil “good.”  Down becomes up, and left becomes right. Our folly stems from our alienation from the God who made all things (Col. 1:21). Claiming to be wise, we became fools, by trying to know the world apart from the God who made it.

Little wonder, then, that this is what put Jesus up on the cross: the foolish unbelief of the world’s finest minds.

None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Corinthians 2:8)

Jesus came into the world as Wisdom, the Logos of God incarnate, the light of the world (John 1:1-3). But according to the irrational logic that passed for wisdom in his time, Wisdom himself had to die, extinguished by the darkness. To the religious leaders of the nation of Israel, it was better that one man die for the sake of the nation than that his kingdom message upset the balance their real-politicking had established (John 11:48-52). The greatest legal and political power of the day, Rome, saw nothing but an opportunity to exert their power and cynically extract a confession of political loyalty out of a subject nation (John 19:15). Paul knew first-hand the reaction preaching Christ to the intellectuals of his day provoked (Acts 17:32); the wisest men in the world still couldn’t recognize the good news when they heard it.

No, to see the wisdom of God in the Cross of Jesus Christ, you need new eyes, a new heart, indeed, the Spirit of God himself who given to us “that we might understand the things freely given us by God” (1 Cor. 2:12).

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. (1 Corinthians 2:6-7)

Though this wisdom is a hidden one, not seen by the rulers of the age, blind as they are in sin, it is, nonetheless, the wisdom for our salvation that undoes the death-dealing folly of the world. In the foolish wisdom of the Cross, God appointed his Son to undo the curse of brought on by our sinful folly through his sin-bearing death. In the wise weakness of the Cross, God appointed his Son to undo the power of death, by allowing Christ to be killed so that he might rise again because the pains of death could not rule over him who has the power of an indestructible life (Acts 2:24; Hebrews 7:16).

Beyond that, through union with him, the Crucified and Risen Christ becomes a personal remedy for our own folly:

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.” (1 Corinthians 1:30-31)

Calvin comments on this verse here:

Now he ascribes here to Christ four commendatory titles, that include his entire excellence, and every benefit that we receive from him. In the first place, he says that he is made unto us wisdom, by which he means, that we obtain in him an absolute perfection of wisdom, inasmuch as the Father has fully revealed himself to us in him, that we may not desire to know any thing besides him.

Again, a parallel verse Colossians 2:3 says that in Christ are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Calvin expands there:

The meaning, therefore, is, that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hid in Christ — by which he means, that we are perfect in wisdom if we truly know Christ, so that it is madness to wish to know anything besides Him. For since the Father has manifested himself wholly in Him, that man wishes to be wise apart from God, who is not contented with Christ alone.

Christ is the only sure way we come to know the true heart of the Father. “With God are wisdom and might; he has counsel and understanding” (Job 12:13). Instead of our idolatrous, vain attempts to make sense fo the world without reference to its Maker, in  union with him, our alienated minds and logics are judged in light of and reconciled to the wise purposes of Creator, just as he is revealed to be our gracious Redeemer. In Christ, folly will be driven out as, “wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul” (Prov. 2:10).

Soli Deo Gloria