Lenten Laughter

The Last Laugh

Solo: In a byre near Bethlehem (vv 1 & 5)

Traditionally, if the season of Lent has been a time of stringency and hardship, punctuated maybe by smiles but not guffaws, and Good Friday a day of anguish and sorrow, then Easter Day has been the day to laugh your head off. The devil had been defeated. Evil had been routed. The dead had come to life and hope had replaced despair. It was the happy ending. 

Yet the remarkable thing is that if you stick to the text rather than to the traditions, Easter Day, far from being a day of rejoicing and celebration, was a day of hesitancy and uncertainty. Certainly not a day to throw your hat in the air. More likely one to batten down the hatches, keep your head under your collar, and wait to see what happened next. The trouble is that traditional Christians are by definition more interested in the traditions than they are in the text. So let us look.

In Mark the women arrive at the tomb, anxious and worried about moving the stone, and the first emotion is one of amazement after which ‘they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone’ (for how long, I wonder?), ‘for they were afraid’ (16:8).

In Matthew even the guards are afraid, tremble ‘and become like dead men’ (28:4) and when Jesus meets up with the disciples he has to tell them not to be afraid (28:10).

Luke says that when the women came to the disciples with the news ‘these words seemed to (the disciples) an idle tale, and they did not believe them' (24:12). Two of them then had a revelation on the Road to Emmaus, dashed back to Jerusalem to the disciples, and while they were telling their tale Jesus himself stood in the midst, and in spite of being warned Luke says the disciples ‘were startled and frightened, and supposed they saw a spirit’, and it was so obvious that Jesus noticed it and asked them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do questionings arise in your hearts?’ (24:37-8). Fear and anxiety then gave place to ‘disbelief for joy’ and ‘wonder’ (24:41) and only after he led them out to Bethany to leave them do they at least return to Jerusalem ‘with great joy’ (24:52). But overall, the first Easter Day was hardly a Celebration. 

Any suggestion that all that had to happen was for the disciples to pop round to the tomb on the third day, find it empty, as expected, and then roll out the carpet, let off the fireworks and begin the party should certainly be treated with considerable caution if not downright disbelief. In the Synoptics at least it just wasn’t like that.

John, once again, is different but even here the overall pattern is much the same. Here too Mary Magdalene was first on the scene, found the tomb empty and went to tell Peter and John. They ran with her to the tomb, found it was as she had said and then ‘went back to their homes’ (20:10). Mary stayed on the site weeping and Jesus had quite a job first convincing her he was alive, then convincing the eleven that he was alive, and eight days later convincing Thomas that he was alive. Rather a disbelieving crew, you might feel! 

Even then despondency is such that Simon Peter decides to go fishing. The rest go with him and the experience of an appearance and a recognition has to be gone through on the seashore all over again. You would think by now they might have begun to get the idea, but if they could have so much fear and uncertainty about the empty tomb when they were there on the spot there can surely be sympathy for some of our contemporaries who also have difficulty with it.

I don’t wish to get into the nitty-gritty of the empty tomb argument for it can easily become sterile territory and blind our eyes to the reality of the resurrection rather than open them, but Hans Küng¹ makes some interesting points that deserve a wider audience.

First, he asks, ‘who would suppose on finding an empty tomb that here someone had risen from the dead?’ You wouldn’t. You would think of all sorts of other explanations, and both friends and enemies of Jesus did.  

And nobody has anything positive to counter these explanations. Nobody claims to be an eye-witness. Nobody uses the empty tomb as an argument for belief in the risen Christ. Nobody appeals to it to strengthen the faith of the young community or to refute and convince their opponents. 

The earliest reference to the resurrection does not mention it (1 Cor 15:4), Paul nowhere refers to it (though that does not necessarily mean Paul did not know it or did not believe in it), and anyone who tries to make sense of the empty tomb stories finds the reports are to say the least confusing if not contradictory. So that if the resurrection is thought to depend on the empty tomb it is certainly not on a very secure foundation.

Therefore, says Küng, ‘belief in the new life of the risen Christ with God does not depend on the empty tomb’ and that may explain why there is no mention of it in the Creed. What the Christian faith does call us to is ‘an encounter with the living Christ’ because this is what was responsible for changing the lives of the disciples — an encounter with the living Christ — and it all happened as a result of a number of overwhelming appearances and experiences over the first few weeks after the crucifixion: Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says.

Even today, we don’t know how to explain these appearances. In some cases the body seems spiritual, in other cases physical. But we do know enough now to appreciate that things like this can happen and it is not too difficult to understand that when the New Testament therefore talks about resurrection it is not talking about a revival to earthly life or a reversal of death but rather to a totally new form of existence. And about this new form of existence we can be both negative and positive. Negative, in the sense that resurrection clearly does not mean Jesus coming as a radiant visitor, complete with horse, cross in hand, and saying, ‘I always told you so!’ Positive, in the sense that there was a variety of appearances — some ‘seeings’, some ‘hearings’ — but all of them very much events calling for trust, and for commitment, yet in no way ever excluding doubt. And that makes sense of all those gospel stories we mentioned earlier where doubt and fear were almost always the dominant emotions.

Belief in the resurrection then is not the happy ending, the celebration, the certainty of victory, with or without the triumphalism we have often associated with it. Belief in the resurrection is learning to see and hear in a new way, and in a variety of unexpected and unforeseen circumstances.  

We will look at two examples. That special appearance to Thomas and the Walk to Emmaus.

In the case of Thomas the key phrase is, ‘Except I see.....’ but I put it to you that Thomas did not really want to see, he wanted to look and they are not the same. Consider for a moment what you look at. You look at television, a book, a newspaper, old castles and old churches. You don’t normally go to look at the sea, or the Downs, at the countryside or a lake. You don’t normally go to look at beauty, though any day you might see it in a remarkable way. You don’t normally go to look at truth, though any day truth may suddenly search you out and confront you. You don’t normally go to look at goodness, though any day an act of sheer goodness may completely overwhelm you. 

Thomas is the classical example of the man who wants to look. He wants to look at the wounded side and the nail prints. But then so do the others, and this is why they too have difficulty seeing. Mary and the other women want to look. They go to the tomb to look at the body, and that is why they fail to see it, especially when it turns up in the guise of the gardener. The disciples want to look. They meet in the upper room to look at their life, their fears and their future, and they actually meet Jesus but they don’t find it easy to recognise him. 

So what’s the difference between looking and seeing? Well, when I am looking I am detached from the object in front of me. Usually I am assessing it as an object. When I see, I am hit between the eyes. The ‘me’ element is suspended and for the moment I become a part of what I perceive. It takes me over. That is why we prefer looking. That is why we have difficulty with the resurrection. As long as we look we can remain in control. When we see, something else — Someone — has taken over control of us. 

And belief in the resurrection is only possible if we are prepared to go through that frightening experience of exposing ourselves sufficiently to be taken over any time by God’s Spirit as day after day we are compelled to see him at work in new places. Moses with the Burning Bush. Lord Shaftesbury with the Pauper’s Funeral. And a hundred others. 

The distinction is made by Frederick Franck², writing in The Zen of Seeing.

The problem for Thomas, and indeed for all the disciples, was that their fear prevented them from seeing and reduced them to the level of looking.

In the case of  Emmaus, we find the experience in story form with a few details to fill it out. Emmaus is the recognition of God in the very ordinariness of every day events for those with eyes to see.

To begin with they are on a journey. They are pilgrims on the road of life. They are the sign of God’s pilgrim people in every generation since the Exodus. The travelling people of God.

But it is not an unaccompanied journey. First, he is there and they don’t realise it. Then when he makes his presence felt they think he is out of touch. He’s no idea what’s been going on. Yet the irony is that in fact he is the one who can see and does know what’s going on. They are the ones who are blind. George Caird says they failed to recognise him because they believed miracles couldn’t happen. Another possibility is that they were unaware of the way in which miracles did happen and therefore missed it when it was under the noses. 

Gently the Stranger tries to open their eyes. They were foolish and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had told them (24:25). So he tells them what they have been missing. His unity with Israel. The emergence of a holy people dedicated to his service, and how it can only happen if people are prepared to undergo suffering and humiliation. Still the penny doesn’t drop. 

In the end, he stays the night and breaks the bread, and that does it. Not a recollection of the Last Supper, as some commentators would have us believe. These two weren’t even present at the Last Supper. Something much more simple, much more ordinary and much more everyday. So simple as to be totally unexpected, totally inexplicable and (in this precise form) totally unrepeatable. And yet so basic as to be possible for everyone of us every day if only we are prepared to open our eyes and see.

And then what a terrible shock when we find out — when we realise how it’s been there all along, and we have been missing it. You can almost hear them: ‘I could have kicked myself as soon as he disappeared. I never dreamed it was him’. And how they must have had a good laugh when they told the other disciples and the other disciples had to admit the same thing precisely had happened to them. It really was incredible the way this Man kept turning up when they least expected. The Scarlet Pimpernel: ‘They seek me here, they seek me there’ and they could never find him.This Man they weren’t even looking for, and they couldn’t get away from him. 

But not even that is the Last Laugh. No the Last Laugh is the realisation that the One you miss is God in his all glory. Never on top, always underneath. Never loud, always silent. Never obvious, always hidden. Never triumphal, always humble. Never overpowering, always enabling. Never strong, always weak.

‘God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to light things that are’ (1 Cor 1:27-28).

To believe this is indeed to be a fool for Christ’s sake.

God is love: let heaven adore him

In one of the ancient papyri (the Oxyrhyncus Papyrus) there is a saying of Jesus which never found its way into the New Testament: 

If we are to think of the resurrection as being the coming of the risen Lord in unexpected places then we have to be prepared to lift some unusual stones. And if we are to think of the resurrection as being the coming of the risen Lord in unexpected ways then we have to be prepared for him to break in on us when we are doing the most ordinary and everyday things. 

People who are so sure that they will have an encounter with the Risen Lord in the Sacrament, or in the Word, in observing the right traditions or embracing the right doctrines, are very often the ones who have most difficulty with the living encounter. They can be so sure that they know how it all works that they so easily miss him when he does the unexpected. Like disciples missing him in Galilee because they were still scratching around for him in Jerusalem.

Trevor Dennis³ refers to Eden as the place where you were always likely to bump into God in the cool of the day, a privilege lost with the Fall. Man was banished from the Garden of Easy Access. He had to wander on the face of the earth. Rules and regulations had to be made, rituals of relationships had to be maintained; there were sacrifices and burnt offerings and yet none of them could atone. What the resurrection does is to re-create the Eden of Easy Access for all who wish to take advantage of it, where once again you may suddenly bump into God in the Garden in the cool of the day, but only if you have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Sometimes that means learning to see without being too precise. People who always have to see ‘the faith’ or ‘the Christian’ or ‘the hand of God’ in this, that or the other can be a menace. It so often means they miss him elsewhere. Listen to Dennis⁴ again, watching and wondering with a child at the sight of a flock of dunlin gliding through the sky,

But he does hide himself in some strange places, and it isn’t always as easy as spotting him even in a flock of birds. What about a sewer?

Carlos Christos⁵ was from a traditional middle-class Brazilian family who entered the Dominican Order. In 1969, when he was 25, he was arrested on charges of subversion against the Brazilian government. He waited 22 months for trial and was then sentenced to four years further imprisonment without his guilt having been proved. During that time he wrote letters to his family, friends and colleagues and his book, Letters from a Prisoner of Conscience, Letters and Papers from Prison bids fair to rival Bonhoeffer’s. Shortly before Christmas Day 1970 he wrote to Pedro, a Brother in the same Order, describing the indescribable conditions in which he lived with his fellow prisoners. Then he went on,

But then he continues,

There we have a discovery of the Living Presence, in the solidarity of prisoners in a sewer, as together they hold hands in the darkness and push towards the sunlight. Not exactly your typical Easter Day service. More smells than bells, and not very pleasant smells either. But perhaps nearer to the emotions of the disciples on that first resurrection morning when they began to try to put together again the fragments of their broken life. 

Sometimes it is even more difficult. Life at its most base is a darkness of a different kind. Come with me in the co⁶mpany of John Taylor, former Bishop of Winchester, to the climax of Tolstoy’s work, The Power of Darkness. This is how Taylor tells it:

Taylor says, ‘It is only a surmise, but I wonder whether something like that did not happen on the day of Pentecost.’ Was it in the moment when the disciples were able to admit their lostness to one another, their fear, doubt, guilt and despair, that they suddenly enjoyed a deeper confrontation than could ever before have been possible — an I and a Thou — and in that open exposure to one another they found the Spirit of the Risen Christ. So Taylor relates it to Pentecost. I wouldn’t want to argue about three days, three weeks or six weeks, but what a revelation of the resurrection. 

What both those readings illustrate is not only that God hides himself in some strange places but also that we cannot expect to experience the resurrection without first being prepared to experience the darkness of Gethsemane, and that sometimes the difference between the two, in terms of human emotion and understanding, is almost impossible to identify. When that happens suffering is not so much the force that brings the resurrection to light as the very means by which the resurrection is accomplished, and to illustrate that we turn to a Chinese legend about the building of the Great Wall of China, as told by C S  Song in The Tears of Lady Meng⁷.  

The story goes that every time they tried to build the Great Wall it kept falling down, till a wise man suggested that with a wall 10,000 miles long you really needed to immure a human being in every mile. ‘Each mile will then have its guardian’. People not being in short supply in China the command was given and the process was about to begin when a wiser scholar suggested that since the name WAN in Chinese meant 10,000 all they had to do was to find one man called WAN and it would be expedient that he should die for all. They found him, at his wedding breakfast, seated beside his wife, Lady Meng, and the soldiers carried him off, leaving Lady Meng in tears.

In her despair she decided not to rest until she found his bones. Heedless of the fatigues of the journey she travelled over mountains and through rivers, but when she came to the Great Wall she was beaten. There was nothing to be done, so she simply sat down and wept. She wept for herself. She wept for WAN. She wept for all 10,000. Day after day she wept, until in the end her tears washed away the Wall to reveal her husband’s bones.

But then Lady Meng had the Last Laugh. The Emperor, sensing his embarrassment, decided to make a friend of her and offered his hand in marriage. She was no ‘soft touch’. She agreed on three conditions. One, a festival for 49 days in honour of her husband. Two, the Emperor and all his officials to be present at the burial. Three, a terrace 49 feet high on the bank of the river where she could offer a sacrifice to her husband. The Emperor agreed.

When all was ready she climbed the terrace and launched into a fierce denunciation of the Emperor, who wisely held his peace. But when she threw herself from the terrace into the river he flew into a rage and ordered his soldiers to cut up her body into little pieces and grind her bones to powder. And when they did all the little pieces changed into little silver fish in which the soul of the faithful Meng lives for ever. 

Not like that in real life, you may say. No? How then may we believe in a resurrection and in a God who always has the Last Laugh? 

What is like real life is that it can never happen without suffering and sacrifice. It can only ever be real to those who are prepared to weep with those who weep, and to mourn with those who mourn — not those who back the Emperor with his Wall, nor Herod with his slaughter of the innocents, nor indeed the Pharaoh with the cities of Egypt. Indeed, what saved the Children of Israel from the cruelty of the Egyptian Pharaoh was when the first-born died, and Pharaoh and his friends experienced for the first time the sufferings of the slaves. Again, only tears washed away the injustice. Only pain paved the way for a new beginning. 

Is this what the Jews meant when they talked about the victim of mockery being the one through whom enlightenment came? The Last Laugh from the Laughing Stock? 

Or what Isaiah meant in the Servant Songs when he talked about the Suffering Servant fulfilling his mission by means of his sufferings. 

Or what Gustavo Guttierrez⁸, the Liberation theologian, meant when he said that it is through the sufferings of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, (and the worldwide struggles of the poor against authority and oppression in every generation) that the Almighty wins his wager with the Devil in the Book of Job? It may not look like it but there is such a thing as disinterested goodness, and love, and sacrifice, and where you find it there you find God’s ultimate victory.

And if you are beginning to feel that this is all rather a long way from the Lenten Laughter we started with, I wonder if it is. Anyway, let’s finish on a lighter note, because what God’s Last Laugh surely says is that whatever you do, or indeed fail to do, life somehow will always come creeping through the cracks. Like grass. Like grass? Yes, crabgrass. Crabgrass? Yes, merry crabgrass. I don’t understand. Norman Habel⁹ explains:

So, to pick up some lines we used on Monday evening by Norman Habel¹⁰ and take them further,

Until he does, and for as long as we continue on the Emmaus Road, a prayer from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, meeting in Seoul 1989, and based on the Emmaus story, can be our prayer:

And when we recognise him and he disappears from our view then we can kick ourselves like the disciples of old and join Norman Habel¹¹ once more with his  'Litany for Learning When to Laugh'. It goes like this

Thine be the glory