I sometimes wonder whether I have always been rather what we kindly call “slow on the uptake”. I remember as a child that when April came around April Fool jokes passed me by (or took me by surprise) either because I never realised the date, April 1st, or because having registered this fact I promptly forgot and fell victim to whatever pranks were played! Well it’s April once more and I dare say I shall succumb once more.
When I was a child my father worked with a kindly lady named Xenia, a name that always intrigued me: it sounded very exotic for Tyneside in the 1950s, even more so when I discovered that it was spelled with an X.
It wasn’t until much, much later in my relentless accumulation of useful (??) information that I discovered there is in the Orthodox Church a Saint Xenia of St Petersburg, one of a group which that church calls ‘Holy Fools’.
As Orthodox priest Father Philip LeMasters puts it, “It is easy to forget that our ways are not God’s ways, that there is usually a stark difference between what is popular and what is holy. He has given us some pretty unusual people to make that point clear through the example of their own lives…. people who, though perfectly sane, acted and spoke in ways that made them appear crazy in the eyes of many and went against the grain of their societies. Through their unique witness, they called their neighbours to the life of a Kingdom not of this world.”
Christians can do what seem to be very odd things (just look around any Sunday morning!); and I have participated in many of them in my long(ish) life. But April this year includes the most foolish event of all, Christ’s death and Resurrection, and all the beliefs and practices which flow from that.
St Paul admitted to the clever-dick people of Corinth that most of his and our beliefs seemed pretty absurd to both Jews and Gentiles: Virgin Birth, miracles, Resurrection, Ascension. St Xenia had an unusual life (look her up on Wikipedia, I haven’t the space to tell you here, slothful reader!) and she wasn’t alone. The story of the church is filled with the bold, the bizarre and the downright barmy (and I seem to have met quite a few of them in my time.)
In today’s world, you and I might appear to be fools because of our commitment to Christ. It isn’t always popular to believe that Jesus is actually the one-and-only Saviour of the world. And many will think the Easter story of a crucified and resurrected Jesus makes no sense whatsoever, so we might very well end up looking like “fools for Christ.”
One way to respond to this situation is to play down or even deny whatever makes us seem oddballs. Or we might try to fit into our world by hiding or changing the Gospel. But our calling is to different ways of thinking and being, a way that the world might well regard as foolish. If we live out this calling with integrity, if we are truly people of love and grace, if we live sacrificially in service to others, many in the world will be drawn to Christ. It was true 2,000 years ago in Corinth, and it is still true today.
Bring it on! Happy Easter!
Colin Dixon