‘The Taking of Christ in the Garden’ by Caravaggio (1598), the National Gallery of Ireland … the betrayal of Christ is a major theme for the Wednesday of Holy WeekPatrick Comerford
We are half-way through Holy Week, the last week in Lent, as we prepare for Good Friday and Easte. Today is the Wednesday of Holy Week (16 April 2025), known in many places as ‘Spy Wednesday’, and in some places 1 April is also ‘April Fools’ Day’. Passover also begins this evening (1 April 2026) and continues until Thursday next week (9 April 2026).
I hope to sing with the choir of Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church today at the funeral of Dave King, who gave so much and so cheerfully to the life of the parish and the community in Stony Stratford. Later in the evening, the choir continues its rehearsals for the rest of Holy Week and for Easter.
But, before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, reading today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
‘The Betrayal by Judas’ by Giotto (ca 1304-1306)John 13: 21-32 (NRSVA):
21 After saying this Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.’ 22 The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking. 23 One of his disciples – the one whom Jesus loved – was reclining next to him; 24 Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. 25 So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, ‘Lord, who is it?’ 26 Jesus answered, ‘It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.’ So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. 27 After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’ 28 Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. 29 Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, ‘Buy what we need for the festival’; or, that he should give something to the poor. 30 So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.
31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32 If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.
Today’s Reflections
Today [1 April] is marked throughout much of the English-speaking world and in many parts of Europe as April Fools’ Day, a day for people play practical jokes and hoaxes on each other, so that victim becomes the April fools.
My long-time friend and former colleague in journalism and history projects in Wexford, the late Nicky Furlong (1929-2022), managed to make me the victim of his April Fool’s prank in the Echo group of newspapers in Co Wexford – the Wexford Echo, the Enniscorthy Echo and the New Ross Echo – back in 2009.
On their front pages on 1 April 2009, the Echo newspapers carried reports and photographs of sharks spotted variously in Wexford Harbour, in the Slaney at Enniscorthy and in the Barrow near New Ross. The sightings were confirmed by no less an expert in large fish than one Mr Ray Whiting.
But I had to turn to page 36 inside the 1 April editions to find a report by Nicky that the Pugin churches of Co Wexford were suffering a unique infestation that threatened the demolition of the Pugin churches – and only the Pugin churches. And right beneath the dateline on the page, Nicky also carried the following preposterous report: ‘Wexford man’s church promotion’, claiming, quite preposterously, that I was to ‘become Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin’.
He gilded the lily, saying I had spent ‘holidays in Greece, Armenia, Ethiopia and even Soviet Russia when religion of any kind was forbidden’, and that I was the author of a whimsical work The Tower that ‘was a comic delight in Wexford associations’.
Two of my all-time April Fool pranks were the work of the BBC and the Guardian.
In 1957, the BBC staged the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest prank, with a fake news report of Swiss farmers picking freshly-grown spaghetti. The BBC was later flooded with questions about buying spaghetti plants.
The Guardian’s successful April Fool joke was a seven-page travel supplement on the tiny tropical republic of San Serriffe on 1 April 1977. San Serriffe was ‘a small archipelago, its main islands grouped roughly in the shape of a semicolon, in the Indian Ocean,’ and was celebrating 10 years of independence.
The name San Serriffe and the shape of the islands were concocted from printing and typesetting terms. The two main islands were Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, the indigenous islanders were Flongs, and the Republic is ruled by a dictator General MJ Pica. School subjects included A-level pearl-diving.
The supplement was designed by Philip Davies, the editorial was the work of the Foreign Editor, Geoffrey Taylor, and the advertising agency J Walter Thompson filled the advertising space on four of the seven pages, including one from Kodak running a competition for photographs of San Serriffe,
My mother, who could hold some unusual evangelical opinions, would have nothing to do with April Fool’s Day, insisting it was a continuation of the Gospel stories of Christ being mocked during his sufferings and passion before the crucifixion (see Matthew 27, Mark 15, John 19) and on the Cross (see Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke: 23).
So, how did 1 April become April Fool’s Day?
The earliest record may be in an ambiguous reference in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392). The ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ is set Syn March bigan thritty dayes and two. However, many scholars now believe that there is a copying error in the extant manuscripts and that Chaucer actually wrote ‘Syn March was gon.’ If so, then this passage meant 32 days after April, or 2 May, which was the anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1381.
Readers apparently misunderstood Chaucer’s line to mean ‘32 March,’ or 1 April. In Chaucer’s tale, the vain cock Chauntecleer is tricked by a fox.
For centuries, the mediaeval Christian Feast of Fools took place in January. In the opening passages of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo describes ‘rowdy theatricals and underworld parades of lay Parisians ... on the sixth of January 1482’ as a combined celebration ‘of the day of the kings and the Feast of Fools.’
The actual feast was developed in the late 12th and early 13th centuries and was finally forbidden by the Council of Basle in 1435, despite its fictional survival in Victor Hugo’s novel.
‘The Ship of Fools’ by Hieronymus Bosch (ca 1450-1516) is a fragment of the left wing of a triptych, painted ca 1490-1500 in oil on an oak panel. It measures 58 cm x 33 cm, and was given to the Musée du Louvre, Paris, by Camille Benoît of Paris in 1918.
This painting is rich with symbolism and is probably a satirical comment on Albrecht Dürer’s frontispiece of Sebastian Brant’s book of the same name. As it is seen today in the Louvre, it is a fragment of a triptych that was cut into several parts. ‘The Ship of Fools’ was painted on one of the wings of the altarpiece, and is about two thirds of its original length. The bottom third of the panel belongs to Yale University Art Gallery and is exhibited under the title ‘Allegory of Gluttony’.
The wing on the other side, which has more or less retained its full length, is the ‘Death and the Miser’, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The two panels together would have represented the two extremes of the prodigal who is condemned and the miser who is caricatured.
Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff) is a book of satire published in 1494 in Basel, Switzerland. Brant was a conservative German theologian. In a prologue, 112 brief satires, and an epilogue, all illustrated with woodcuts, the book includes the first commissioned work by Dürer, a great Renaissance artist and engraver. Much of the work was critical of the state of the Church at the time. Brant tackles the weaknesses and vices of his time, and creates the fictional Saint Grobian, who becomes the patron saint of vulgar and coarse people.
The Ship of Fools was inspired by a frequent motif in mediaeval art and literature, particularly in religious satire, due to a pun on the Latin word navis, which means both a boat and the nave of a church.
The theme of foolishness is a frequent literary device for criticism before the Reformation. Examples are provided by Erasmus in his In Praise of Folly, by Martin Luther in his Address to the Christian Nobility, and by the role of court jesters or fools. By writing in the voice of the fool, Brant found an acceptable literary device for his criticism of the Church. Dürer carved many of the woodcuts for the first edition, and the book found immediate popularity. However, it is still debated whether The Ship of Fools is a humanist work or just a late example of this mediaeval genre.
But the association of foolishness, pranks and 1 April may not have developed until the 16th century, after Pope Gregory XIII restored 1 January as New Year’s Day in the Gregorian Calendar. The change was important because the Julian calendar meant the March equinox was occurring well before 21 March, and the date is important to the Church because it is fundamental to the calculation of the date of Easter. To reinstate the association, the reform advanced the date by 10 days: Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 October 1582.
Before the Gregorian Calendar was introduced, New Year’s Day was celebrated on 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation, in many parts of Europe. It developed in some places into a week-long holiday ending on 1 April. Perhaps those Catholics who celebrated the New Year on 1 January made fun of those Protestants who continued to celebrate it from 25 March to 1 April. They were seen as foolish, and so became April Fools.
The change was widespread throughout Europe – although Britain, Ireland and what became Canada and the US did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752.
The first unambiguous British reference to April Fools’ Day is by the diarist John Aubrey to ‘Fooles holy day’ in 1686 – although he might have been referring to Germany: ‘We observe it on ye first of April … And so it is kept in Germany everywhere.’
More recently, Ship of Fools has been adapted as the name of a satirical, church-related website that has its roots in a student print magazine, Ship of Fools, first launched in 1977. The print magazine, folded in 1983 after ten issues. It was revived again on April Fools’ Day 1998 as a website, and has quickly grown into an online community as well as a webzine.
‘We’re here for people who prefer their religion disorganised,’ according to Simon Jenkins, editor and designer of the website. ‘Our aim is to help Christians be self-critical and honest about the failings of Christianity, as we believe honesty can only strengthen faith.’
Ship of Fools describes itself as iconoclastic and debunking but also committed to the ultimate value of faith, and aims to attract readers more interested in searching questions than simplistic answers. Regular features include the Mystery Worshipper.
The co-editor of Ship of Fools is Stephen Goddard, who met Simon Jenkins at theological college in London in the late 1970s. ‘As committed Christians ourselves, we can’t help laughing at the crazy things that go wrong with the church, and we’re also drawn to those questions which take us beyond easy believing. In the end, we want to make sense of the Christian faith in today’s complex world.’
The notion of ‘holy fools’ has a long, respected place in Jewish and Christian traditions. Hebrew prophets were often scorned as mad or eccentric for pronouncing unwelcome or uncomfortable truths, the Apostle Paul talked to the Corinthians about becoming ‘fools for Christ’ (I Corinthians 4: 10). Eastern Orthodoxy still sees the ‘holy fool’ as a type of Christian martyr or wise paradoxically and saintly.
The Catholic theologian and priest Professor John Saward is a Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars in the University of Oxford and the author of Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (1980). He writes: ‘If the wisdom of the world is folly to God, and God’s own foolishness is the only true wisdom, it follows that the worldly wise, to become truly wise, must become foolish and renounce their worldly wisdom.’
The Yale theologian Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006) was a Lutheran pastor who joined the Orthodox Church in later life. In Fools for Christ (2001), he looks at various ‘fools’ and explores the motif of fool-for-Christ in relationship to the problem of understanding the numinous: ‘The Holy is too great and too terrible when encountered directly for men of normal sanity to be able to contemplate it comfortably. Only those who cannot care for the consequences run the risk of the direct confrontation of the Holy.’
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.
– John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 1 April 2026, Wednesday of Holy Week, ‘Spy Wednesday’):
The theme this week (29 March-4 April 2026) in ‘Pray With the World Church’, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is a ‘Holy Week’ reflection’ (pp 42-43). This theme was introduced on Sunday with reflections by the Revd Kenson Li, Assistant Curate of Manchester Cathedral and a Trustee of USPG.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Wednesday 1 April 2026, Wednesday of Holy Week, ‘Spy Wednesday’) invites us to pray:
Generous God, we remember how Judas betrayed you for silver. Transform hearts ruled by love of wealth rather than love of you and your people. Give us generous hearts to know that to give is to receive, and to love our neighbour is to love you.
The Collect:
Almighty and everlasting God,
who in your tender love towards the human race
sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
to take upon him our flesh
and to suffer death upon the cross:
grant that we may follow the example of his patience and humility,
and also be made partakers of his resurrection;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post Communion Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ,
you humbled yourself in taking the form of a servant,
and in obedience died on the cross for our salvation:
give us the mind to follow you
and to proclaim you as Lord and King,
to the glory of God the Father.
Additional Collect:
True and humble king,
hailed by the crowd as Messiah:
grant us the faith to know you and love you,
that we may be found beside you
on the way of the cross,
which is the path of glory.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
