I don’t know whether you are familiar with the BBC TV programmes Hustle in which a group of likeable con-artists relieve various fat cats of their ill-gotten gains by setting up clever stings using various tricks and deceptions. The morality of this has to be finely tuned of course. The heroes, after all, are con-men. Those being duped, "the marks", have to be deeply unsympathetic characters who have got their wealth by evil means allowing us, the audience, to feel comfortable with the fact that the charming gang of Hustlers are actually taking money that is not theirs. So there is a Robin Hood feel to it all. In creating the confidence trick it is, of course, important that the mark never suspects what’s going on – indeed it is the mark who believes that he is in control of the situation whereas, in fact, he is being played by the con-artists. Sometimes, we, the audience, are also duped. We think that the con is going disastrously wrong and will fail until, in the last 5 minutes of the programme, the trickery is revealed to us and there is a flashback in which we are shown how the whole scam is cleverly pulled off.

I hope you will not think it is too frivolous a comparison to say that, on one understanding at least, something like this happened on Good Friday. A trick was played and a trap was laid and someone walked right into it. Because there is a very longstanding account of Jesus’ death that sees cross as a trap to catch Satan and all his works and I call as witnesses the ancient church Fathers (and they were mainly fathers, I’m afraid), Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo and many, many others including the less well known Rufinus of Aquileia who wrote:

The purpose of the Incarnation was that the divine virtue of the Son of God might be like a kind of hook hidden beneath the form of human flesh... to lure on the prince of this world to a contest; that the Son might offer him his human flesh as a bait and that the divinity which lay underneath might catch him and hold him fast with its hook ... Having swallowed it, he was immediately caught.

This account is not without its problems, of course, but by this reckoning the "mark" here is the devil. He is lured into a battle in which he believes himself all along to be the victor and yet is in fact revealed to be the dupe who is defeated by the hidden power of Christ on the cross. What is revealed on the cross is not only the love and glory of God but also the witlessness and folly of evil.

Now we get a hint that there may be some truth in this picture in our gospel reading tonight. Jesus is at supper with his disciples. They are reclining at table, as was the custom, when Jesus suddenly announces that someone present will betray him. There is general dismay and confusion and a hurried private conversation takes place between Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved. "Ask which one he means." There is a further exchange, sotto voce, between the disciple and Jesus in which Jesus indicates that the one with whom he will next share bread is the betrayer but this information is not passed on because after Judas leaves to do the deed, the disciples are none the wiser. And we are told that at the point Judas takes the bread, "Satan entered into him".

So we have two, what James Alison calls, "boo" words in one passage – Satan and Judas, bywords for evil and its dreadful consequences. But we mistake the intention of the story if we think that actually these two players are at all important or significant in what happens next. Satan in particular and all he represents is just the mark with a bit part to play in the great drama of God’s love by which God shows up evil for what it really is – tawdry, banal and stupid. So Judas is not some great evil genius. He is a man who betrays his friend. That’s all he does. It was a wicked thing to do but anyone could have done it. It doesn’t take great intelligence or courage or energy to betray someone. We give Judas too much credit as we often do to such boo figures. The sociologist Mark Jeurgensmeyer points out how Osama Bin Laden (another "boo" word) has becomes this James Bond type villain striding the international stage whereas in fact he is little more than a bandit chief holed up in a ratty little cave in Pakistan. We have given evil a glamour it doesn’t deserve.

We don’t know what Judas’ motives were – several are given in the Bible and others have been invented since - but he, and the priests, and Pilate, and the soldiers, thinking of themselves as masters of the universe and in control of events are actually minor characters in this drama of God’s salvation. Jesus says to Judas, "What you are about to do, do it quickly". There’s a clue in flashback. Jesus knows where this is going and where it will end. It is God in Jesus who moves these events towards their climax, not Judas, not Pilate, not Caiaphas, not Herod. On the cross, the force of evil, the satan, is lured to its final defeat and shown up to be what it is – banal, futile and empty. Don’t get me wrong: the consequences of evil are terrible indeed and lead to enormous misery and loss and those who commit it are responsible for all they do but evil itself is nothing special. It is always squalid and pointless and on the cross it is defeated.

In Mel Gibson’s gory film, The Passion of the Christ, at the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross a raindrop falls in slow motion from the heavens. We are clearly meant to see this a tear from God himself. But if what I have been suggesting has any merit perhaps it’s the other way around. Rather than the sound of weeping from the heavens might come the sound of God’s laughter, not, of course, at the suffering of the Son or the pain of those who watch, but at the utter defeat of evil, stupid, blind, overreaching evil. If any tears are to be shed then it is the devil’s tears of rage that will fall. All along it looked like his show but all along, patiently, quietly, gently, Jesus dismantles the whole structure of evil and the grip it has on our imaginations and displays it to us and shows us what it really is and demonstrates that real meaning lies in his loving self-offering.

In the last five minutes, the truth is revealed. Our perspective is always Easter Day. When the women come to the tomb – that place of death and defeat, they find what? They find it is empty. Empty. Not a place of dread and darkness and fear but a hollowed out lump of rock with nothing in it. Because Jesus is not there. Proof if proof is needed (and it is!) that the devil and all his works have been decisively overcome. There’s still work to be done for sure in a world of violence, cruelty and pain but since the resurrection and the tomb that was empty, we now know for certain the truth both about evil and about its defeat by the patient, gentle, self-giving love of God. So if it seems a bit much to imagine any laughter on Good Friday you can bet your bottom dollar that on Easter Day that empty tomb reverberated to peals of laughter, the laughter of God.