Did Jesus laugh?
by Jeremiah Bartram on 19/02/10 at 7:04 am
Well, of course Jesus laughed, you say. How could it be otherwise? Babies laugh. Children laugh as they play. All of us – even the clinically depressed, even theologians – laugh, at least once in our lives.
Jesus was human. Ergo, he laughed.
But nowhere in the gospels is his laughter recorded.
He weeps; he is angry; he is moved by compassion or love. His irony is bottomless and many of his sayings are comic exaggerations. He is a welcome guest at feasts, generally occasions for boisterous talk and laughter. His first miracle in the gospel of John is a gift of wine – perhaps 180 gallons of it – for a wedding feast, at a point in the feast when guests are already drunk.
(That itself is a joke, isn’t it? The Messiah’s first miracle makes people drunk?)
But never is he shown laughing, or even smiling.
Why is this? What does the omission of his laughter say – about the scriptures, about the official portrait of Jesus, about the phenomenon of laughter, about God?
These notes explore these questions, in no particular order, and the research I undertake over the next few months as I try to find answers to these questions.
**
First, why don’t the scriptures show him laughing?
I think there’s a very simple reason.
I think the writers were scared to do so.
Scared of laughter?
Not necessarily.
Rather, scared of something deeper and profoundly troubling.
Scared of even approaching the notion that the God who made this flawed creation might laugh, since if God laughs, he must either be rejoicing in what he beholds, and, as in Genesis, finding it very good – or laughing at human folly, human sin, human misery.
Take your pick: delight or ironic detachment.
Either mode poses problems for the Christian notion of a loving God.
(Don’t forget: Jesus is a man, yes, that’s true in Christian teaching. But Jesus is also the Torah, Jesus is the fulfillment of Scripture, Jesus is God.)
**
Fundamentally, the problem of laughter is also the problem of suffering.
Of course, Genesis tells us that God looked at all he had made and found that it was very good. He was happy with what he had done. Perhaps he was so happy with what he saw that he laughed in delight, the way a baby laughs.
So what’s wrong with the idea that God the creator and sustainer of all this marvelous stuff should delight in what he has made?
Because when the author of Genesis says that it was very good, he or she had not yet told how humans brought death, and necessarily suffering, into this marvelous creation by eating the forbidden fruit, in disobedience to God.
So in Genesis, God the creator was rejoicing in a prelapsarian creation, creation as he himself designed it, not creation as marred by sinful human creatures.
At least, that’s the conventional – i.e., the orthodox – Christian teaching.
**
Unfortunately, it’s not a teaching that stands up to any real scrutiny.
Just a minor example.
We post-Darwinians know something that the author of Genesis did not. From the fossil record, we know that millions and millions of creatures preceded the existence of humankind, dinosaurs for example. And we know that for millennia, these miriad forms of non-human life lived, reproduced, frequently consumed each other violently or otherwise, and died.
Therefore, suffering and death preceded the fall, even if we accept the idea of a signal act of disobedience causing a fundamental rupture in the relationship between God and humans.
So Milton – and the authors of the long tradition on which he draws, Paul and Augustine in particular, are factually wrong when they argue that the somewhat bizarre sin of Adam and Eve brought sin and death and all our woe into this life.
Not possible. Didn’t happen that way.
Rather, if we believe in God, we are obliged to believe in a God who designed suffering and death as part of his creation. This is a very uncomfortable but somehow wonderful idea, an idea which the contemporary church has so far failed to address in any satisfying way.
So back to my point.
To show God laughing in delight over a creation that includes the suffering of – to take a current example – the victims of Haiti’s earthquake is to show a God that none of us would want to contemplate.
A heartless God, a God who finds intolerable suffering, unmerited suffering, funny. A sadistic God.
Therefore, God does not laugh.
And therefore, Jesus-God does not laugh.
We could imagine a devil laughing – but the image does not fit with a God who is, by definition, nothing but love.
**
However, I think Jesus laughed, like every other human person.
What does that mean?
What is laughter, anyway?
Stay tuned.
Terence Weldon
Feb 19th, 2010
The Scriptures do not show him laughingm and you may be right that the writrers were just too scared to show it. But they do show him enjoying food, wine, hospitali and friendship, in private homes and at a wedding. Somewhere in all of that, there must surely have been laughter. In my view, he was a fun-loving guy, just like th rest of us.
bart
Jul 4th, 2010
Intersting thoughts. I am sure Jesus laughed but it just isn’t necessary for us to see, any more than we need to read about Him going to the bathroom or bathing. Of course He did all those things – but we don’t read about them, because it isn’t the point of what was written, not because the authors were somehow scared of writing about it. Were they scared to write that He bathed for fear that others might want to bathe too? Of course not! To build an entire doctrine around such a presupposition is baseless and wreckless.
Of course Jesus laughed and of course He had fun and enjoyed parts of life – He was fully human after all.
Now, the bigger question is… where do you get your “facts” from? What “truth” are you building your life on? How do you know what you say is really true? How do you evaluate what is objective truth and what is merely a fine-sounding argument? To what standard do you appeal?
Obviously, you do not beleive the Holy Scripture, so you do not believe in the Bible as the truth of God. If this is the case then, you cannot appeal to the Bible in any real way nor make any arguments from it that have any merit. In fact, you might as well appeal to the writings of Shakespeare instead of the Bible if you do not beleive the Bible to be the inspired Word of God.
I would entreat you to forsake your own way and your own interpretations, where you set yourself up as the standard for what is true and what is not. In making yourself the standard of evaluation, you set yourself up as god. And your gospel is no “good news” because it provides no real answers for the bad news that we all face – we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Each one of us has gone astray in our own way and none of us are good on our own. We need the objective truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ that is proclaimed in the Bible and that brings freedom from sin, shame and punishment from God. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the only good news. The “good news” is not that Jesus laughed. The good news is that Jesus wept for us and suffered and died in our place and took the punishment of God on our behalf completely, so that we can know Him, live for Him and love Him in all that we are. We can even laugh for Him now too…