The flies came first.
Before the nails. Before the cross. Before any of it. The flies found the blood on His back where the Roman flagrum had opened Him up in strips. Thirty-nine lashes. The leather straps had bone and metal braided into the tips — designed to catch skin and rip it off in ribbons. His back didn’t look like a back anymore. It looked like something hanging in a butcher’s window.
And the flies found it.
He was standing in Pilate’s courtyard at dawn. Barely standing. The trial had been going since the middle of the night. No sleep. No water. Judas had kissed Him twelve hours ago, and now His face was so swollen from the fists of the temple guards that the flesh around His eyes had puffed shut to slits.
His mother was somewhere in the crowd.
Try to sit with that for a second. Your mother. Watching men take turns hitting you in the mouth. Watching soldiers spit on your swollen face. And she can’t do anything. She can’t scream loud enough. She can’t push through the wall of Roman armor between her and her son. She just stands there. Watching the boy she nursed, the boy she wrapped in swaddling clothes in a barn because nobody in Bethlehem had room for a pregnant teenager, she watches them destroy him.
And the flies keep landing on his back.
It’s April 1st.
The world is posting memes. Fake pregnancy announcements. Gotcha videos. Brands pretending they made a cologne that smells like chicken nuggets.
Two thousand years ago this morning, the joke was a man from Nazareth who said He was God.
They dressed Him in a purple robe — not because they believed He was a king but because it was funny. Like putting a crown on a dog. The robe stuck to the wounds on His back. The dried blood had fused the fabric to the exposed muscle, and when they ripped it off later to nail Him up, it reopened everything. Like peeling a bandage off a burn victim. Except the burn covered His entire back, shoulders to waist.
They braided a crown out of thorns. Not small thorns. The thorns in Jerusalem grow two, three inches long. Hard as nails. They didn’t place it on His head. They shoved it down. Drove the points into His scalp. Blood ran down His forehead, into His swollen eyes, into His beard, dripped off His chin onto the stone floor.
“Hail, King of the Jews!”
They bowed. Laughing. Took turns slapping Him across the face. Not open-handed. Closed fist. A game. See who could hit the blindfolded prophet hard enough to make Him talk.
“Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee?” — Matthew 26:68
April Fools.
“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” — Psalm 14:1
That’s what most pastors quote today. The atheist is the fool. Clean sermon. Nice tie. Coffee in the lobby.
But the fool on April 1st, 33 AD wasn’t the man who said there is no God.
The fool was the man who had God standing three feet in front of him — bleeding, shaking, barely conscious — and asked “What is truth?”
Then walked away.
Pilate didn’t wait for the answer. The Truth was standing in his courtroom with blood running down His face and Pilate turned his back and walked out to the crowd and said “I find no fault in this man.”
Then handed Him over to be murdered anyway.
Because the crowd was loud. And crowds are always loud. And politicians have always been cowards. And the man bleeding on the tile floor didn’t look like he was worth the trouble.
It’s 7 AM right now.
Two thousand years ago at this hour, He was carrying the cross.
Not the smooth wooden cross you see in church art. A rough-hewn beam. Splinters the size of your finger. Somewhere between 75 and 125 pounds laid across shoulders where the skin had been flayed off.
He fell.
He fell in the street. The beam came down on top of Him. His knees hit the stone. His hands — the hands that healed the blind, that broke bread for five thousand, that reached out and caught Peter sinking in the water — those hands hit the ground and couldn’t push Him back up.
He was too broken to carry His own death.
Simon of Cyrene. Some random man from Libya in town for Passover. The soldiers grabbed him out of the crowd and made him carry the cross because Jesus physically couldn’t anymore. Simon didn’t volunteer. He was drafted. Pulled out of line like a man yanked off the sidewalk. Wrong place. Wrong time. Carrying the instrument that would kill God.
And the crowd followed. Some wailing. Some curious. Some laughing.
The same crowd that waved palm branches five days ago.
At 9 AM, they nailed Him down.
“And it was the third hour, and they crucified him.” — Mark 15:25
In two hours.
The nails weren’t through the palm. That’s the painting. That’s the stained glass. The Romans drove the spike through the wrist — between the radius and the ulna — because a nail through the palm would rip through the flesh under body weight. The wrist held. The bones locked around the iron.
They stretched His arms across the beam. One soldier held the forearm flat. Another positioned the nail. Square iron. Seven inches. The hammer came down, and He screamed. Or maybe He didn’t. Maybe by that point, the pain was so total that His body had stopped processing it in sounds.
Then the other wrist.
Then both feet. Stacked. One nail through both. Driven into the wood.
They lifted the cross and dropped it into the hole in the ground. The jolt when it hit bottom would have wrenched every joint in His body. The weight of a man’s body hanging from nailed wrists dislocated the shoulders almost immediately.
“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.” — Psalm 22:14
Written a thousand years before this moment. David described it in detail. The dislocated bones. The dehydration. The pierced hands and feet. Five hundred years before Rome invented crucifixion.
The soldiers sat down at the base of the cross and rolled dice for His clothes.
His clothes.
The garment that had touched the body of God — the hem that the woman with the issue of blood had reached for and been healed — four Roman soldiers were throwing bones for it in the dirt while He died above them.
“They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.” — Psalm 22:18
A thousand years of prophecy fulfilled by men who didn’t know they were fulfilling it. They just wanted the robe. It was seamless. Good quality. Worth something.
The sign above His head read KING OF THE JEWS. Pilate wrote it. The Pharisees asked him to change it to “He SAID He was King of the Jews.” Pilate refused. The one true thing that coward ever did.
It’s April 1st, and the world is looking for fools.
Here’s your fool:
A man who could have called twelve legions of angels and didn’t.
A man who healed every disease He encountered and wouldn’t heal Himself.
A man who knew Judas would betray Him, who knew Peter would deny Him, who knew every single disciple would run, and washed their feet anyway.
A man who looked at the soldiers driving nails through His wrists and said:
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” — Luke 23:34
That’s the fool.
The fool who forgave the men who were actively killing Him.
The fool who loved a world that was spitting in His face.
The fool who died for men who were gambling for His clothes ten feet below His bleeding body.
“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.” — 1 Corinthians 1:18
“Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” — 1 Corinthians 1:25
The foolishness of God.
The weakness of God.
Hanging from a cross. Suffocating. Covered in flies and blood and spit. Naked. Mocked. Abandoned by every friend He had. His mother watching from the crowd.
That’s the weakness of God.
And it’s stronger than anything you’ve ever seen.
At 3 PM — nine hours from now — He screams.
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”
My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Not a question. A citation. Psalm 22, verse one. He’s dying, and He’s still teaching. Still pointing to the scripture. Still trying to show them where to look.
Then it goes quiet.
“It is finished.”
And the earth shakes. And the veil in the temple rips from top to bottom — not bottom to top, top to bottom, because God did the tearing. And the centurion at the base of the cross, the Roman soldier who had watched hundreds of men die on crosses, looks up and says:
“Truly this was the Son of God.” — Matthew 27:54
The first man to stop being the fool.
Today is April Fools Day.
Two thousand years ago today, they called God a fool and murdered Him in public.
Three days later, the tomb was empty, and the joke was on every last one of them.
Happy April 1st.