Da de da! April Fool. Let me point you this year even at the beginning of March towards April 1st. It's a day when you catch people out by leading them to think one thing when the opposite is actually the case. The truth contradicts expectations. When my brother and I were only about 8 and 6 we took a morning cup of tea to Mum and Dad in bed, hardly able to stifle the giggles. They couldn't believe their eyes at their amazingly thoughtful boys until no tea came out of the pot.

This year All Fools Day is Good Friday. Good Friday? It's the day when Christians celebrate a crucifixion, and because this nation, as all the nations in Europe, were built on the Christian view of life, there are crucifixes everywhere. People even wear them around their necks, in the ears. Christians celebrate failure, the failure of their hero. Crucifixion means just that. He was a washout; in his lifetime a flop. He made others feel a fool because he didn't deliver what they expected. Nil return in their eyes, even though he healed people and did miracles and got lots of followers. He went around saving others but without a care for himself.

You can't live like that so they made a Fool out of him instead. That's what we think of your way of life. Oh yes, he went around believing in God but in the end it was as if God was saying "The joke's on me folks!" Jesus got what was coming to him right between the eyes with that crown of thorns. Painful, but he asked for it. Loved everyone so much that he was prepared to die for them? You and me included? Rubbish!

The thing is I keep on meeting people all over the place who are very like Jesus. Just around the corner. At your elbow. You'll find them down your street, just around the corner, at the Town Hall, in your local school. Wherever. People always on the lookout for number 2 or 3 or 4 but showing no concern for looking after number 1. Pouring out their life's blood on what's obviously a lost cause. When others are saying "Why bother?" they bother. When the world is saying, "What a fool wasting all that time and money and effort, useless," they just keep on keeping on, through every hurt and disappointment imaginable. It doesn't matter. Out of sheer love for people.

I have met so many ordinary people wasting their lives caring for useless human beings wrecked by illness or evil or social disease. I think about them and it makes me weep at how beautiful they are. A waste? The love people give always makes new life after they have died. Always, though you may never see it. Seeds of love sown today for tomorrow. Only if a seed falls into the ground and dies does it bear fruit, ask any gardener. The good people do lives after them, the evil is buried with their bones.

So stop a minute and look at that figure on the cross. Look into that face and you will see your own. Your real self, even though such good love may be sunk very low under layers of shame and sham. Christians believe that Jesus came to show us ourselves. We are all capable of allowing ourselves to be crucified for the sake of others when the chips are down. It's all right to appear a failure for the sake of love, to lay your life on the line for somebody else. The real fool is not Jesus, it is the one who refuses to accept this picture of himself or herself. In the jargon, Jesus is a good role model for anyone to have, he can help us live our true selves.

This story happens to be about a nun who made a real Fool of herself but it could just as easily be about you. Elizabeth Pilenko joined a religious order in Russia. She was accused by some of neglecting the long traditions of the Church. In the early mornings she was at the market buying cheap food for the people she fed, bringing it back in a sack on her back. She was a familiar figure in the slum, in her poor black habit and her worn-out men's shoes.

In Paris she discovered Russians who had contracted T.B. lying in a filthy hovel on the banks of the river Seine. With 10 francs, she bought a chateau and opened a sanatorium. She became known as Mother Maria. Under her influence churches around Paris became real havens for the poor, served by the convent which she founded. One even ran an employment exchange. When the second world war started, the convent became a refuge for Jews, and hundreds escaped through its work. After a month the Gestapo came. Mother Maria was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. There she was known even to the guards "as that wonderful Russian nun" and it is doubtful whether they had any intention of killing her.

She had been there two and a half years when a new block of buildings was erected in the camp, and the prisoners were told that these were to be hot baths. A day came when a few dozen prisoners from the women's quarters were lined up outside the buildings. One girl became hysterical. Mother Maria, who, had not been selected, came up to her. "Don't be frightened", she said. "Look, I shall take your turn", and in line with the rest, she passed through the doors. It was Good Friday, 1945.