Look At Easter Story As Helpful Holy Humor
When it comes to Easter, there are two kinds of Christians in the world: those who giggle, even laugh, and those who don’t get the joke!
I’m serious, folks.
For over a decade, my view of Easter has been expanded by the radical hospitality of God’s outrageous sense of humor.
This holy humor keeps me humble. But it also keeps me wondering what God is up to next.
One of the most cherished beliefs we have is the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. God’s incarnation as Jesus embraces the essence of God’s radical effort to show us, in human terms we might understand, just how much God loves us.
Death is a natural consequence of being human. But God doesn’t just leave us there.
Humanity is only a taste of life at its fullest. So death mustn’t and doesn’t have the last word!
Holy humor is an important way God helps us understand that truth. This humor is the ability to laugh at ourselves because we know that God is still in charge.
“B.C.” is one of today’s best cartoon strips for the theologically adventurous. In a recently published strip in “The Joyful Noiseletter,” a humor newsletter that focuses on the joy in Christianity, “B.C.” cartoonist Johnny Hart has Wiley the poet reflecting beneath his tree.
He writes, “Man, man, magnificent man - creates forces that outshine the stars, He can shoot himself up and tap dance on the moon, or hurl himself clear out to Mars! He can unleash a force that evaporates steel since he’s learned how an atom behaves. Yet he has no recourse but to bow to the force that summons the dead from the graves.”
It’s impossible to avoid death, though we try ridiculously hard to do just that. So what’s the most unexpected response we could make to death?
Embrace it. And by embracing it, we transform its fearful power over us into loving power through us.
But we can’t do that all by ourselves. Of course, God knows that much, much better than we do.
So God has a little cosmic fun with us. How? By embracing death in a way we could never do. God’s embrace transforms death from “the end” into a new beginning.
However, we still have trouble believing that. We must. Or else why woud we fall all over ourselves in foolish efforts to pretend that (1) death isn’t real and (2) if it is, death won’t happen to us.
God knows the difficulties we have in understanding and accepting death. God also knows we may believe that death is the last word.
Could it be that God invented the resurrection of Jesus as a dramatic reminder for us that death, for all of its power to imprison us in our fears, will not be the end of life?
God also invented a number of ways for us to laugh away the closet monsters that death conjures up in our minds.
Humor helps us see our human fears for what they are: basically silly.
Still, I think God is also waiting for us to do things that suggest we get the joke called Easter.
So here’s my contribution: Since the resurrection is God’s joke on death as we understand death, let’s always celebrate Easter on April 1, April Fool’s Day. Because, you see, the joke is not on death alone. It’s also on us. Life does have the last word!
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Paul Graves The Spokesman-Review