Back when I was in college, we liked to think of our selves as budding, young intellectuals. That’s certainly gone by the boards, these days. But back then there were a number of passing fads. One of them was an enthusiasm for films by the then-famous Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman. One movie that sticks in my mind was Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal. In it, woven throughout the action, the camera would cut away to the scene of a chess match between a character representing Death and the knight, who was the main character in the film. Each engaged the other in conversation while he tried to win the match by tricking his opponent. Then the camera would cut back to the main plot again.

On this Palm Sunday, which happens to fall on April Fools Day, that image struck a cord with me. Just imagine the story of this last week of Jesus’ public life and ministry played out as it did, but picture behind the scenes a chess match played out between God and Death or the devil – the way it was in the prologue to the Book of Job. You may recall that the story of Job began in God’s heavenly throne room with the devil sauntering in -- just returning from an excursion on Earth. God asks the devil if he had occasion to see one of God’s favorite sites, there, a truly righteous and just man named Job. A challenge ensued between the two over whether the devil could make Job turn against God if life got too tough for him. That was a game, and it could easily have been portrayed as a chess game. Now, you know that, unlike checkers, the object of chess is not to take away all your opponents pieces. It’s to leave your opponent unable to move because his king is checkmated -- completely neutralized – and so you rule. Often times a player will make moves to trick his opponent to think that one thing is happening, when in fact some other tactic is playing itself out instead.

Now if there were a cosmic contest between God and evil or death – the devil --that would, of course, be the very point of it, wouldn’t it? The goal of God’s opponent would be to leave God unable to move – checkmated and completely neutralized – so that he’d rule on planet Earth instead of God. In this contest Jesus is clearly the king. God makes His move and Jesus is born on Earth. God’s opponent makes his move and King Herod tries to kill Jesus. God makes His move -- Jesus’ family listens to a warning in a dream and takes Jesus to safety. Later, God makes His move -- Jesus is baptized and makes a retreat into the wilderness to pray. God’s opponent tries another frontal assault and tries to get Jesus off track -- to doubt who he is or to seek material and political goals. God makes His move -- Jesus deflects the temptations -- spending the next three years preaching about following God’s lead, teaching people God’s ways, and demonstrating that God is with them in miraculous ways. God’s opponent makes his counter moves by stirring up religious resistance all along the way. God makes his move -- and it looks like the winning move -- Jesus is swept into Jerusalem by throngs of enthusiastic supporters wanting to make Him their ruler. That would checkmate God’s opponent and put God in charge. But His opponent makes another, bold, frontal attack – pulling together fear, religious tradition and political maneuvering – to make a brilliant move. Jesus is arrested, tortured, and crucified. He’s dead and buried. It looks like games end.

God looks defeated – unable to make any more moves -- and so it looks as if God’s opponent will have a free hand to rule instead. After all the opponent caught on to God’s game plan – that God would make Jesus king, and He’d make people be faithful to God and obey Him, by sheer government control. But wait a minute, no, that wasn’t God’s game plan, after all. God’s game plan wasn’t to put Jesus in a position to make people stop sinning by force. Instead God’s game plan seems to have been for Jesus to remain faithful to the very end, die a criminal’s death, and in the process, take the punishment for all of the rest of us. God’s game plan wasn’t to make us all act the way He wants, after all, but to forgive us for all the ways we don’t -- to realize that we’re loved and to love Him back. And Jesus was faithful to the end. So instead of His death being God’s defeat, it was actually His victory. God tricked His opponent to fall into the trap of actually making it happen. April Fools! It looked as if God was outmaneuvered, but instead His opponent was outsmarted. It looked as if God lost, but He won. It looked as if Jesus died, but…

For now, it’s enough to say that, while it might seem confusing to have Jesus welcomed as a king one day and a few days later executed as a criminal, it was all God’s game plan to liberate us from the Opponent and from death. Another Swede, a theologian named Gustav Aulen, wrote a book – Christus Victor. His point was that Jesus’ death was the means of His victory – of God’s victory – over evil. And so you and I need not fear evil of any sort – no matter how pervasive or powerful it may seem – no matter how much of a grip it may seem to have over the world or even of our own lives. The decisive move has already been made and Jesus has been victorious. Evil may seem to have the upper hand, by all the misery in the world, but just like chess, they’re merely the desperate moves of an opponent trying to delay the inevitable. All we need to do is trust Christ and entrust ourselves to Him – whenever we need help. He provides forgiveness for our failures, guidance to know how to avoid evil and the strength to overcome it – whatever forms it takes. In fact, He even provides us with the help that we need to oppose evil, ourselves, by guiding us to live loving lives and to promote justice and peace on Earth as He did.