SEARCH FOR THE LORD
Sense of Christian Humour
What is Humour?
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, tells us that humour is often connected with the gap between reality and fantasy, between a person’s aspirations and their true situation. So we often laugh out of a sense of superiority. When an old woman falls in the street, nobody thinks it’s funny. But when a pompous self-important man slips on a banana skin then we split our sides.
The psychologist, Freud, says that laughter is our way of relieving stress and disarming things that threaten us by making them seem smaller and less important. So we love it when a civil servant leaves yet another laptop full of confidential information on a bus or train.
When we realise that the shadow creeping up behind us on the wall is not an axe murderer but the reflection of a tree branch caused by the moon, then we feel the comic relief. This incongruity is at the heart of humour, according to Kant.
Whatever sense of humour we might have, we usually find that it involves some wittiness, some sense of fun and some physical outburst of laughter or giggling.
Comic Book
To call the bible comical is not quite true, but you would have to be blind and deaf not to realise that there are sections of the bible that are intended to be funny. To read the bible does not mean that you have to be a killjoy.
When the writer of the Book of Proverbs says, “A beautiful woman without discretion is like a golden ring in the snout of a pig”, he may not be politically correct these days, but there can be no doubt that he was trying to be funny as well as conveying a moral truth.
The way we read the story of Adam and Eve tells us a lot about our sense of humour. The talking snake, the luscious fruit, the husband blaming the wife, both of them trying to hide from God in the garden, the sudden realisation that they had no clothes on, is all worthy of any modern-day farce, while at the same time conveying the most profound religious teaching about the nature of God and humanity.
The whole of the Book of Jonah is a comedy script. The timid Jonah is sent to preach in one of the roughest areas of the day. He deliberately gets a boat going in the opposite direction, gets thrown overboard by the crew, is swallowed by the “whale” and is belched up not far from the very place that God had told him to go to. When he gets there he announces that God will punish the people if they don’t repent. To make it all worse, the people decide to repent and God saves them, so he misses out on the great destruction. Angry with God he goes and sits on a hill, but he ends up under a castor-oil plant and God sends a worm to eat it so that it withers and Jonah gets burned.
The Humour of Jesus
Because Jesus was fully human like us, he had to have a sense of humour. However, sometimes we read what Jesus says and we think that it must be very holy and therefore very serious. We miss the wood for the trees. In fact, that was one of the many one-liners that Jesus used in the New Testament. In trying to get across the idea that some people are critical of others whilst applying much lower standards to themselves, he said that they notice the splinter in other people’s eyes but not the plank in their own!
Leave the dead to bury the dead, was his quip to someone who wanted to be his follower but wasn’t prepared to drop everything there and then. When he said that the poor will be with us always, it can only have been with tongue in cheek, for otherwise it would have been completely out of character.
Often Jesus used irony to get his message across, claiming that the religious leaders knew how to live the high-life but did nothing to lighten the burdens of the ordinary people. He tells amusing stories about people who are just concerned with feathering their nest but who die and don’t get their chance to enjoy their wealth.
He gives silly names to people, calling Peter a rock when he was anything but, and referring to James and John as Sons of Boanerges, meaning Sons of Thunder, and implying that they are hotheads.
When the woman at the well coyly says that she has no husband he points out wryly that the man she is living with is not her husband and neither were any of the previous five. He says, “You speak the truth there”; we would probably say, “You can say that again!”
And with clever use of humour Jesus is not afraid to shock. The story of the Good Samaritan is funny because Samaritans were outcasts who were shunned by good Jewish people, but in the story it’s the priest and Levite (…heard the one about the priest, the rabbi and the mullah….?) who ignore the man who has been mugged and it’s the Samaritan (the chav, the punk, the hippie) who turns up trumps. Jesus puts the humorous sting in the tail of the story that would have delighted the ordinary people who listened to him.
The pages of the gospels are packed with amusing references to whining widows who wear down powerful judges, of nagging neighbours who come pestering for a loaf at midnight, of people who embarrassingly have to be re-seated at a wedding because they thought they were more important than they were, of religious people in the middle of the street with long, glum faces and ashes on their heads trying to show that they are fasting, of a self-important person praying on the front row of the synagogue but whose prayer is not as effective as the sinner who crouches on the back row…No one was safe from the butt of his humour, a butt that was simply intended to get people to think and act differently.
Body, Mind and Spirit.
Jesus became fully human, and that extended to having a sense of humour. Someone once said that God must laugh out loud daily when seeing how we human beings go about our daily lives and the mess we often make of them. To be holy, you don’t have to be miserable. The world has enough Holy Joes without our pretending that religion is so sombre that it should never raise a smile. We are called to experience life with body, mind and spirit: to use all our mental faculties in learning about our world, about each other and about the promises that God has made to us in Jesus. And that includes our sense of humour!