Matthew 17:24-27
“The Humor of Jesus”
August 31, 2003 - Twelfth after Pentecost

         We never watch the new “Saturday Night Live.” For Beth and me, a couple of old fogies, nothing will ever match the thirty year-old humor of the cast of John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and their sketches like “The Land Shark,” “Samurai Delicatessen,” and the “Cone-heads.”

         However, we did happen to tune in to a rerun of the March 16, 2002 show when Darrell Hammond of the new cast was doing an impression of Tom Ridge, who was then advisor for Homeland Security. He announced the new color-coded security advisory system. The colors marking the various alert levels, which every American citizen needs to be able to distinguish, were “taupe, cream, off-white, putty, bone and natural.” He concludes by saying, “At my request, the President has placed the nation on condition: taupe.”

         One very human response to serious and dire situations is humor. We lighten our burdens by lightening our hearts with laughter. When the whole country was living in fear of the next act of terrorism, it helped to find something comic in it all.

         Despite what some people seem to think, Jesus was no stranger to the role of humor in lifting the deadly weight of seriousness from our shoulders. The passage I just read is best interpreted as our Lord’s light-hearted response to the way-too-serious business of paying taxes. In it, Christ displays yet another aspect of His genius, His humor. Jesus Christ was, among all His other geniuses, a comic genius, a wit.[1]

         It’s true that you can only arrive at the humor of Jesus by reading somewhat between the lines of what He says and does in the Gospels. It cannot be denied that the sharpest focus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is on our Lord’s suffering and death on the Cross. These are not biographies, but have been called “passion narratives with long introductions.” The whole aim of the Gospels is to show Jesus arriving in Jerusalem to die. It’s hard to take a comic view of the Crucifixion.

         And, of course, we are nowhere told explicitly that Jesus was ever funny. As G. K. Chesterton notes so brilliantly, we never see Him laughing.[2] And as Jim Young pointed out to me last Sunday, there is only one place where it is recorded that other people laughed at what Jesus said. In Matthew, Mark and Luke as well, we’re told that when Jesus came to heal a twelve year-old girl, everyone thought she was dead. They were wailing and playing flutes for a funeral. He said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” Matthew 9:24 says that they all laughed at Him. But this was obviously derisive mockery, not genuine humor, not the feeling that Jesus had said anything actually funny.

         So we have to approach the topic of the humor of Jesus with open hearts and minds if we’re going to see it. There is a certain attitude, a certain brand of Christianity which steadfastly refuses to find anything funny at all in our faith. The conviction seems to be that we must always be deadly serious in order to be Christian. Anything less would be frivolous, would be sacrilege. One must never joke about sacred things.

         I met that solemn Christian seriousness one day getting off a plane. Long before I ever came here, I was courted by a church to be their pastor. In one enthusiastic phone call they arranged a visit and sent me a ticket to fly there. In the meantime, I was to send them some biographical information and tapes of a couple sermons. I felt very wanted.

         By the time I walked down the jetway and met the couple who was picking me up, the feeling was different. They greeted me with reservation and frowns. Tension hung over the whole meeting with the search committee. I didn’t know what was going on, but in between the phone call and my arrival, something had changed.

         Finally, someone explained was going on. They had listened to my sermons, two of my best, I thought. But one of them was what I call “The Basketball Sermon.” It was a bit of story-telling based on the raising of Lazarus, and I pictured Jesus as the coach of a team consisting of His followers, including Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha. I filled it with as much humor as I could draw out of the images of Peter and Mary running plays and Jesus tossing in jump shots.

         My hosts found my humorous preaching completely unacceptable. They clearly thought I had crossed some line way too far for their church. We finished the uncomfortable interview, they took me to the plane and said goodbye, and that was that. It was fine with me. On the way home I resolved that I would send that sermon to any and every church I ever talked to. I knew that if they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t like me!

         I have never believed that Christian faith demands absolute seriousness. When I read the Gospels it appears to me that the really grave, the really serious people are not Jesus and His disciples. It is the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the teachers of the Law, those who won’t accept the Good News, who refuse to join in the fun. Over and over, the joke is on them. Christ did not come to take away our laughter, He came to bring us an abundant life full of even more things to laugh about. The humor of Jesus is there if we’re only willing to see it.

         Let’s start with what some view as the lowest form of humor but others regard as its highest expression. I’m talking about the wordplay known as a pun. You know the sort of thing, like the man who gave up fishing because the dock was too crowded – he couldn’t stand all the pier pressure. Or the guy who was a hairdresser in Texas – he dyed with his boots on. Or the new soap opera being created by a group of high school students in cooperation with the WWF – it’s called “The Young and the Wrestlers.”

         Depending on your point of view, yes, Jesus did either stoop or rise to making puns. Matthew 23 verse 24 is funny just in English. Jesus pictures the legalistic Pharisees as fastidious diners, doing their best to strain a gnat from their soup, but swallowing a whole camel in the process. In the language Jesus spoke, in Aramaic, the humor is even better because the word for gnat is galma, while the word for camel is gamla. Of course, we don’t laugh or groan at it because puns don’t work in translation.

         Because we’re often so worried about the theological implications of it we usually fail to note that the well-known passage in which Jesus gave Simon the name Peter is also a pun. Peter means “rock.” So in Matthew 16:18 Jesus is really saying, “I tell you that you are Rock, and on this rock I will build my church.” The pun works even in Greek, but in Jesus’ own Aramaic tongue it’s perfect, exactly the same word for the disciple’s name and for the foundation of the church.

         The humor of playing with words shows up other places in the sayings of Jesus. The man who was the living Word of God loved words. He used them with brilliance and with delight. I have to believe He took a poet’s joy and fun in finding just the right way to express what He wanted us to know. It’s inevitable that some of it would be funny.

         A deeper flow of the Lord’s humor occurs on the numerous occasions when He employed the comic tactic of irony. It’s hard to define, but irony is a way of looking at things and seeing other than what’s expected. Irony is a situation that turns out comically reversed from what seems right or fair.

         One of Garrison Keillor’s monologues[3] tells of the time a member of the Catholic church in Lake Wobegon thought it was too dark in their beautiful old church building. So during Holy Week he had six powerful mercury vapor lamps installed high in the ceiling. When Father Wilmer saw the intense blue light shining down on the Good Friday service he was devastated. There was no way to dim them. It seemed to him like some sort of Protestant conspiracy, designed to remove all the mystery from his faith.

         So the night before Easter Father Wilmer loaded his 22 rifle and went into the sanctuary with the crazy idea of shooting out those lights. That rash action was only narrowly averted when he thought he heard the Virgin Mary say to him, “What’s the matter with you? Have you got cornflakes for brains?” So he went and got the church’s thirty-foot step ladder instead. He set it up and saw the top waving around way up by the lights.

         Without looking down he slowly climbed up under the first light, reached up, took hold of it, and twisted it out. Then he moved the ladder, looked up, saw it still swaying up there, and bravely climbed again. He stretched way up and pulled out the second light. He moved the ladder again, and again and again, got the third, the fourth, the fifth light. As he started up the sixth time, he looked up all those rungs and prayed, “O Lord, please don’t be ironical. If you wanted me to fall, it should have been on the first one!”

         Father Wilmer made it up and down the last time safely, but our Lord can be ironical. He saw the irony and humor in those serious Pharisees who wanted everyone to know how righteous they were. He pictured them blowing trumpets whenever they gave to the poor and making their faces look sick when they were fasting – just so everyone would notice.

         Jesus was not afraid to poke a little fun at others with His irony. It wasn’t only the hypocritical Pharisees He teased. When He comforted those of us who get too anxious, He told us in Matthew 6 how much God cares for us. So we should not worry about tomorrow. Then He couldn’t resist adding a little pointed irony in verse 34, “Each day has enough trouble of its own.” And calling Peter a “Rock” was probably irony. Over and over Peter proved he was anything but a rock when it came down to the clutch.

         Christ could banter and be ironic in the most delicate situations. Earl Palmer points out how He teases Nathaniel on their first meeting in John 1:47, saying “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false,” as if all other Israelites were liars.[4] Elton Trueblood’s brilliant exposition of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter in Mark 7 gives us another example of how Jesus ironically teases others. It has always been difficult to understand how our Lord could be as cruel as He is verse 27 when the woman asks Him to deliver her daughter from a demon. He’s only been healing Jews to this point, and He tells her “it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

         As Trueblood tells it, the only explanation for Jesus’ words is that they were said with a smile. What we cannot see is the playful expression which must have accompanied what sound like hard words. She must have known He was kidding in the same way that my children know I am when they ask what’s for dinner and I say with a grin and laughter in my voice, “Nothing. We’re not having dinner tonight.” The woman got the Lord’s joke. That’s crystal clear in the fact that she responds with some wit of her own, “Yes Lord, but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”[5] Jesus bantered with her and she bantered right back.

         That kind of banter and all our Lord’s teasing is truly genius because it is both humorous and harmless. We all know there is malicious humor. There is teasing intended to wound and aggravate. But the ironic sarcasm of Jesus is tempered with one luminous reality. In all of it, Jesus is motivated by love and compassion. He kids the Pharisees and Sadducees so hard and pushes them so far for only one reason. He hopes by the lightness of humor to soften their hearts, to let them see themselves as others see them, to help them turn from their own righteousness to His perfect grace. His humor may sometimes be pointed, but only because the ultimate point is love. He wounds in order to redeem.

         On the most recent Prairie Home Companion joke show, I heard one about a man standing at St. Peter’s gate into heaven. St. Peter asked him what his occupation was on earth. “I was the president of an HMO,” he said. “In that case,” Peter replied, “you can come on in for three days. Then you have to go to hell.”

         There’s a touch of the hurtful about that joke, a little bit of delight in thinking that there will be some revenge on people we imagine have caused us such aggravation and pain. But if told and heard in the right spirit, there might be something redemptive about it as well. It just might just wake up a human spirit blinded by profit. The irony of such eternal justice could help a man remember justice on earth. Jesus told many of His jokes with that kind of purpose.

         So in Luke 12 there is Christ’s joke about the rich fool, the man who has no place to put all his stuff. One night he comes up with a plan to tear down all his barns and build bigger ones. He goes to sleep dreaming of years to come taking it easy. And God shows up and says “You fool! You’re going to die tonight. Who’s going to get all your stuff now?” It’s painful comedy, designed to make us smile, but also to make us think.

         In the end, however, the best humor of Jesus has no hurt to it at all. It calls for gentle laughter based in hope. The stories in Luke 15 of the lost sheep, the lost coin and finally the lost son all have their humorous aspects. But the message in the laughter is the ultimate hope of God’s saving grace. A man who leaves 99 sheep by themselves so he can hunt for one is a bit silly, but the silliness is that of unconditional love. A father who gives half his fortune to a no-good kid who throws it all away is a joke, but the biggest laugh is that it doesn’t matter in the end. The father still loves his child. And, once again, the genius of the wit of Jesus is that it’s rooted in love.

         That’s why it is perfectly all right and even good for the people of Jesus Christ to follow their Lord in having fun. Our comedy is not black humor, whistling in the dark to put the best face on a bad situation. In faith, hope and love, we can joke with each other in bad times because we know that our ultimate destiny is finally good.

         The validity of Christian humor is confirmed forever in God’s best joke. Some of the early church fathers thought it was a joke on Satan. The most wonderful and humorous irony in history is the great reversal at the end of the Gospel story. The joke’s on and for everyone. Death is not the end, but life. The greatest one liner ever told is “Christ is risen!”

         A living Jesus justifies all the laughter, comedy and joy you care to engage in. I love the Russian Orthodox tradition that the priests gather after Easter Sunday worship to tell jokes to each other. That’s the true spirit of the humor of Jesus. It’s a comedy based in real happiness because in all that really matters we are victorious. Christ is risen and so are we. I also like Garrison Keillor’s story of the young substitute priest who showed up for the Lake Wobegon Easter sunrise service wearing a T-shirt showing Jesus on water skis. It read “He’s up!” That’s the spirit of Easter, that’s our living Lord. Joyous humor about the greatest event ever to happen. His risen life is the best reason we all have to laugh.

         My wife always reads my sermons before I preach. Sometimes she helps me sharpen them by asking the question, “What’s the point? What are you asking us to do?” If I had to answer that question this morning, it would be two simple words: Lighten up. Christ is risen and that calls for joy – and for laughter. As the old King James Version said in Proverbs 17:22, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

         G. K. Chesterton said that “a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”[6] God did not mean for our spirits to be always heavy and grave, living in total seriousness. Chesterton went on to make a wonderful pun of his own: “Satan fell by the force of gravity.”[7] The devil took himself too seriously, too gravely. God does not want us to do that. Christ Jesus raises us out of heaviness into lightness when we quit taking ourselves seriously. Jesus is the light of the world and He makes the world lighter on our shoulders. He gives us the easy yoke, the light burden. He is bringing an end to gravity and the grave. He invites us to soar with the angels on the wings of holy laughter. So today and always, as God gives you grace, lighten up. He’s up! Let us lighten up and join Him.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj