Watching Studio 60 this past week, heard a particularly engaging quote: "So you became a Christian and a comedian at the same time?" In the context of the show, it was a particulary astute observation.
It got me thinking about another quote: Joy is the gigantic secret of the Christian. I've always maintained that God has a sense of humor (and no, not just because he made the Platypus. But seriously, it is pretty funny looking). And what if, when you become a Christian, you also become a comedian?
Much of the debate of Christianity's rationality revolves around questions like the problem of evil. And those questions are all well and good and have their place in discussion and questions of its validity. But sometimes I think it casts a rather ominous shadow around Christianity. You see humor and joy and laughter is what Christianity's all about. Those characteristics echo deeper in us than any suffering and any pains. They have to.
I've always felt Christ had a sense of humor, a sense of joy. Look at the Road to Emmaeus; look at the Feeding of the 5,000; heck, when Jesus appears in the Upper Room -- he had to know he was going to scare the crap out of the disciples and there's nothing funnier than a scare or fright that turns out to be a good thing.
Maybe this sounds like the last two pages of Orthodoxy. So be it. But in being a Christian you have the supreme responsibility to bring joy to others and I read this as: to make people laugh.
The thing of it is: Whether or not that means you're actually funny is another question entirely.
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6 comments:
So you're saying that I am doing God's work by just being me? Yoohoo! Take THAT Church!
If what your saying is true than how come most preacher's have such corny jokes!!!
BTW Josh and I did Peace of Fuirt last sunday, It was the first time he has ever been the thrower. You would have been proud
If we are still in doubt that hyperbole is a legitimate way to express truth, we can turn to the example of Jesus. Elton Trueblood shows in his book The Humor of Christ that the most distinctive feature of Jesus’ discourses is their use of exaggeration — the preposterous overstatement in the mode of “our conventional Texas story, which no one believes literally, but which everyone remembers.” G. K. Chesterton notes that “Christ had even a literary style of his own.…The diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea.
Well said. I forgot that latter quote. And it made me chuckle.
I think, unfortunately these days, we forget the power of exaggeration. That it's not a legitimate way to make a point or get across and idea. Sometimes the world is full of too many realists -- too many pragmatists. In exaggeration their is imagination.
....camles leaping through needles. Hilarious.
Steve...
Why preachers tell such corny jokes is my whole point. Preachers are supposed to bring joy to others...to humor their congregation. However, whether this means they're actually funny is, like I said, a different story entirely.
It's not always in the words but also the delivery...the power of the pause, I believe, Jesus also used. It is just not easy to see it between the spaces but one certainly can imagine it when the light comes on as Jesus waits for them to catch up
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