No Joke! It's Time to Get Ready for Easter!

I've been thinking about Easter a lot as we draw closer to that festive day.  And this year it falls on April 1st, April Fool's Day.

 

Back when I was a boy, April Fool’s Day was one of the highlights of the school year.  We would play tricks on one another, and if we thought we could pull it off, our teachers.  The most ambitious April Fool’s prank I was ever involved in was the year I was in sixth grade.  Our math teacher was the long-suffering Miss Grover, who did her level-best riding herd on a rambunctious bunch of prepubescent boys and girls.

 

Several days ahead of time we hatched our plan.  It was really rather simple, but it involved the whole class.  Our subject teachers moved from classroom to classroom, while we stayed put.  That morning, before she arrived, we took a big ball of string that someone had brought into school that morning, and we tied together all the moveable desks in the room.  Finally, we attached the end of the string to the door knob, so that when our unsuspecting teacher opened the door, all the desks would go careening across the floor.  Once she made her way into the room, of course, we would all shout “April Fools!”

 

Our plan went off without a hitch.  Between periods we got to work tying together desks, and then we waited.  Outside the door we heard her high heels click against the linoleum floor, and then, when they stopped, the door knob turned, and as she flew open the door—kapow!  It was marvelous!  We had succeeded!  April Fool!

 

Miss Grover was not amused.  And a teacher can only allow so much mischief.  And so in the name of safety and decorum, we ended up being the April Fools, as we spent the next afternoon in detention.  So much for our engineering triumph!

 

Some suggest that Easter is just an April Fool's joke.  That some uneducated country bumpkins from Galilee got tricked into believing Jesus was raised from the dead.  But I disagree.  I don't know exactly what happened.  But clearly something did!  And in some mysterious way they experienced Jesus' presence among them anew.  And while our engineering triumph was rather short-lived back in sixth grade, the triumph over death has endured lo these many centuries!