INTRODUCTION
First, a health warning. After nearly six weeks of iron rations, abstemious living, early morning rises and extra quotas of prayer and psalms any suggestion that there might be a lighter side to Lent will not, I hope, be thought inappropriate, though I can well understand the person who says, ‘Now, he tells us’. But then if you invite a Nonconformist, and a nonconforming Nonconformist at that, to address you on something that is not really part of his tradition you can hardly complain if he says something different or at least comes at it in a different way. Anyway, if you don’t like it you can readily dismiss it as a Free Church aberration and you have nearly twelve months to work it out of your system before Lent next year.
Second, a word about the theme. I have chosen Laughter because I think Laughter is not silly but serious. It can also be enjoyable and healthy. I suggest a lot of religion is miserable and unhealthy because too many of its adherents have never learned to laugh, not at it (as from outside) but within it, because God in Jesus introduced an element of lightness and laughter, humour and fun which many people found difficulty to cope with. Lent therefore could be a good time to explore what we may be missing.
My question is not ‘Have we been taking Lent too seriously?’ but rather ‘Have we been taking Lent seriously enough because (paradoxically) we have been too serious about it? And might we take it more ‘seriously’ if we learned to laugh?
Third, a word about method. We will begin with the biblical texts, move to other material — contemporary parallels, real life situations, stories from every day, tales from the Third World, human experiences in literature and poetry — and intersperse our journey with appropriate devotional material.
A Day for Laughter
Solo: In a byre near Bethlehem (vv 1-2)
The difficulty with Lent and the whole Easter saga for regular churchgoers is that we have gone through it all too often. We know the stories backwards and the exercises that go with them. We absorbed them with our mother’s milk, heard them at our grandmother’s knee and framed them in Sunday School or Family Church. It is not easy to see them any other way. Here and there a preacher tries to breathe new life into some aspect or other, only to be thanked or berated by his congregation for his pains, whilst the juggernaut of traditional interpretation pursues a steady course without hesitation or deviation, though never without repetition and usually in the slow lane. But does it have to be like this?
We begin with Palm Sunday. It was the Sunday before Easter.
It was, wasn’t it? You’re sure about that? You could be wrong. It might actually have been at Christmas. But never mind.
Jesus decided that since nobody was listening to what he was trying to say an object lesson might not be out-of-place. So by a secret arrangement he sent two of his disciples to a village just outside the city where they were to find a colt tied.
Why it had to be so secret is strange because there can hardly be a village in that part of Palestine where you couldn’t easily have found a colt tethered any day. But never mind.
Some of the disciples spread their garments on the animal and others spread them in the road. Jesus sat on the colt and set off for Jerusalem, and the crowds came from nowhere with palm branches in their hands.
Where they got them from is something of a problem because there were no palm branches round there. Jericho was the place for palms. And anyway palms didn’t go with the Feast of the Passover. They went with The Feast of Dedication or Hanukkah. But never mind
And as they went along the excitement grew and they shouted Hosannas. Jesus entered Jerusalem, looked round to size up the situation and then because it was late retired to Bethany with the disciples. That, broadly speaking, is the story.
The commentary is that the disciples and the crowds were going a bomb after Jesus proclaiming him Messiah and he was trying to say, ‘Yes, but not the sort of Messiah you are thinking of; not one who rallies the troops and fights for deliverance, because he would have come on a war horse, but one who comes peacefully and in humility’. And the authorities didn’t like it and decided to take action and those who shouted their Hosannas on Sunday were equally ready to shout ‘Crucify him’ and ‘Give us Barabbas’ on Friday. Broadly speaking, that’s how it’s usually interpreted.
A more careful look at the biblical text, however, might suggest some problems, as well as some variable interpretations and different emphases not immediately obvious.
Mark (the earliest account) and Luke (closely following Mark) are the most straightforward and therefore likely to be the most reliable accounts of what actually happened, though the more embellished accounts in Matthew and John are not to be distrusted, much less rejected, on that account, because the Bible is always more interested in what the events mean than in the events themselves and what Matthew and John are trying to do is to interpret what was going on so that we can appreciate its significance.
One question we have to ask is whether the Entry was a Messianic Triumphal Entry or might we have been mis-reading it.
In Mark, for example, the story has very little messianic significance and is hardly ‘triumphal' — more a spontaneous outburst on the part of the people, with no climax once they get to Jerusalem.
Matthew, on the other hand, in common with much of the rest of his gospel, interprets the event in the light of ancient prophecy, in this case the quotation from Zechariah 9:9,
‘Tell the daughter of Zion,
Behold, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on an ass,
and on a colt, the foal of an ass,’
and so is held responsible for giving the whole story an emphasis on Messianic Kingship and turning it into a Triumphal Entry which is scarcely there in the Mark and Luke.
John takes a similar line, if anything with more emphasis on Messianic Kingship, and notes that only later did the disciples understand the royal significance of what was happening. This is possible. Schweitzer even suggested that the event was Messianic for Jesus if not for anybody else, though another possibility is that it was Messianic for everybody only for Jesus it was different, which would explain how when Jesus sensed all the Messianic expectations gathering round him he decided to show them once and for all ‘yes he was’ but ‘no, not quite what they expected’.
That might also explain a further interesting variation in John because whereas in the first three gospels Jesus takes the initiative and sets off with the disciples into Jerusalem so that the cry of welcome (Blessed be he . . .) is the climax of the event, in John the cry of welcome (Blessed be he . . .) is what sparks it off as they all come out of the city to meet him, as a result of which Jesus, now by way of response, finds the ass to demonstrate his point and possibly to lower the temperature.
It might also explain an interpretation of Luke 19:40 in that when the Pharisees tell Jesus to rebuke his disciples for going mad with messianism, Jesus’s reply (‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out’) is not so much a cry of triumphalism as of despair. He is really saying, ‘It’s no use. I don’t like it any more than you do — I am doing all I can to control it but the whole atmosphere seems to be impregnated with these ideas — everybody’s going mad and there is nothing we can do to stop it’.
So, whether at the time the event was triumphal, how it was perceived by the various participants and whether the reluctance of Jesus to get involved in the excitement can be substantiated from the text, may all be debatable. What is not so debatable is that John, in common with the rest of his gospel, carefully spells out what he understands by it which may well be a reflection of how the early church was viewing it at the end of the first century.
John does it by the sequence of events and the interpretation he places on them. First comes the Raising of Lazarus and the claim to be the Resurrection and the Life, allegedly a claim in deed as well as in word. That, for John, was the last straw which led some of the Jews to go to the Pharisees and make it plain that something had to be done. Jesus gets wind of it and retreats to the country and the Chief Priests put out the message that if anyone knows where he can be arrested they would like to hear from them. But the crowd feel differently and when Jesus goes back to the scene of the crime, the home of Mary and Martha, the crowd get wind of it and off they go after him. Plan A of the Pharisees is foiled. Things are running out of control and they can no longer hope to procure his death easily.
John then follows the incident with the arrival of the Greeks who have come to see Jesus and make their wishes known to Philip. This may be interpreted as a provocative move because it clearly indicates to the Jewish hierarchy that if they don’t want him there are others who do, but it also enables Jesus to spell out the kind of Messiahship he has in mind, summed up in his reference to the grain of wheat which must die if it is to bear fruit. More a dying Saviour than a conquering hero. ‘He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life’, says Jesus.
Two other features of John’s account may be significant. The first is the introduction of the palm branches. In Mark and Matthew we simply have branches. and as we noted earlier palm branches would not readily be available in Jerusalem, but that is not the main point. The main point is that palm branches are a symbol of rejoicing and victory after war and in Revelation those with palm branches are all those who have triumphed through the risen Christ over the worst that life could bring (7:9,16). They also belong more to the Feast of Dedication or Hanukkah than they do to Passover.
The other is the introduction of the quotation from Psalm 118:25-26, ‘Hosanna! Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord’, with John’s addition of 'even the king of Israel’ (12:13). This too relates to Hanukkah when Psalms 113-118 were recited in procession and the Hosanna verse intoned. In fact, the palm branches were called ‘Hosannas’. What is more, the Hanukkah would also lead naturally to the Cleansing of the Temple because Hanukkah was the Festival instituted by the Jews to mark the re-dedication of the altar by Judas Maccabeaus on December 25, 164 BCE. Admittedly John does not make this connection. For reasons best known to himself he puts the Cleansing of the Temple right at the beginning of the ministry, but Matthew and Luke both proceed straight from Entry to Cleansing whilst Mark implies it took place a day or two later.
There is one other problem apart from the fact that Mark’s dating of this event has always been suspect. If the Entry were so splendid and caused such aggravation it is strange that the event forms no part whatsoever of the Trial where it is not even mentioned.
So what are we to make of this? Could it be that the Triumphal Entry originally took place not at Passover a week before the crocifixion but at Hanukkah three months earlier? If it did it would have a different emphasis . . . more joyful and celebratory . . . elements which are certainly found there in the story but which have got missed from our usual interpretations because we have always related it so closely to the Passion. And it wouldn’t then be a cause of conflict . . . more a cause of Celebration . . . those who were present at the raising of Lazarus and those who heard the news marching through the streets with joy . . . because true celebration belongs to those who have an experience of new life. And others, who were trying to be nationalistic, being challenged lightly by Jesus, and the Greeks, to recognise that the net has to be widened to include everybody because true celebration requires a worldwide acceptance of life and people.
You may well reject that idea. But if you do, at least the introduction of the palms and other Hanukkah elements might be interpreted as expressing issues and giving vent to emotions not normally thought to be taking place between Jesus and the crowd . . . a crowd wanting to hail him as a messianic king after the fashion of Judas Maccabaeus, and Jesus trying to tone it down and take the heat out of it by capturing something of the Carnival spirit of Hanukkah to avoid the growing tensions of Passover. In that case the meaning is not 'yes . . . but’ (yes to Messiah, but no to the sort of messiah you are thinking of) but rather, ‘Not messianic at all . . . much more a joyous celebration of life and international brotherhood. And that would also explain why when they got to Jerusalem nothing happened, as Mark suggests. It was all over.
Anyway, we will leave the procession there, with all its familiarity and uncertainty, and as in the theatre ring down the curtain and sing.
Ride on, ride on in majesty
Scene Two opens with a blaze of lights and the sound of trumpets. The language and costume are different. The streets are full. They are all laughing and talking. It must be a public holiday. Some of them are in funny dress too. You could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled by accident on the Notting Hill Carnival. But you haven’t. This is January 1, somewhere in Europe. The time? About 1200 AD. It is the medieval Feast of Fools.
This was the day when ordinarily pious priests and serious townsfolk donned bawdy masks, sang outrageous ditties and generally kept the whole world awake with revelry and satire. Minor clerics painted their faces, strutted about in the robes of their emperors and mocked the rituals of state and church.
Sometimes there was a Boy Bishop who actually celebrated a parody mass. No custom was immune, no tradition too sacred and even the highest personages of the land must expect to be lampooned. The fore-runner of Spitting Image!
Naturally it was never popular with the high-ups. High-ups always find it difficult to laugh at themselves, never mind being laughed at by others. It was regularly condemned and criticised. Fidgety ecclesiastics hated it most of all, and in 1431 it was condemned outright by the Council of Basel though it persisted into the 16th century. It died finally in the days of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, puritanical seriousness obviously taking over, though traces of it linger in Halloween and on New Year’s Eve.
It is true, it had a bad side to it. Lewdness and debauchery sometimes took over. But at least whilst it lasted one thing it did was to demonstrate if only for a day that there was another way of living: a culture
— able to make sport of its most sacred, royal and religious practices
— where the last were first
— where accepted values were stood on their head
— where fools could be kings and choirboys could be prelates.
Perhaps the Notting Hill Carnival is the nearest we can get to it in 21st century Britain.
It died because of the emergence of a society which took itself too seriously and no longer had the stomach for social parody, but Harvey Cox,1 to whom we are indebted for that description and indeed for the revival of the idea, says it had two important components:
1 Festivity. The Feast of Fools put work in its place and showed Festivity not as a means to enjoyment but as end in itself. Meat and drink to a Jesus who loved fun and festivity and took a dim view of serious people who were too busy and high-minded to accept an invitation to a party.
2 Fantasy and Social Criticism. Unmasking the pretence of the powerful always seems to make them less powerful. Meat and drink to a Jesus who challenged the authorities to the extent that they hated him enough to kill him.
Like the procession into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday the Feast of Fools helped people to see that things need not always be as they were. Power did not have to be overweening and weakness could be strength. But the people who were in power were afraid of it. Fun, Festivity and especially satire can so easily get out of hand. And it is perhaps significant that when the Feast of Fools died the divine right of kings, papal infallibility and the totalitarian state all flourished.
Harvey Cox therefore invites us to consider the high price we have paid for western opulence
— partly by the poor nations of the world
— partly by the poor destined to live and sleep
on the streets of our western cities
— partly by the beneficiaries of the opulence who, like the man
with his barns, have laid up their treasures and lost their souls.
But even all that can be paid out of petty cash. The much higher price we have all paid is the loss of those two qualities which are essential for a full life: Festivity — genuine revelry and joyful celebration — and Fantasy — the sheer capacity to see that there is an alternative.
And the solution may not lie in a stringent Lent, with lots of spiritual sinew stiffening (that’s the clergy solution), nor in an Easter Holiday blow-out followed by a series of cheap spring weekend breaks (the worker solution); nor in a spending spree (the commercial solution) nor in more emphasis on the family (the politician’s solution) but in a more genuine festivity . . . a daily celebration of life and love . . . with helpless babies and whatever seems appropriate. It’s a call for singing and dancing, for telling stories as well as for prayer. For man is not purely homo sapiens or homo arduans, he is also homo ludens (not just a thinking being or a working being but a playing being).
It is now 50 years since Sister Corita2, a Roman Catholic nun, produced Footnotes and Headlines with the sub-title, ‘A Play-Pray Book’ and a foreword by Daniel Berrigan. It is a book of ‘games people pray’, praying through words and phrases in headlines and footnotes that surround us every day of our waking life, a ticket to the transfiguration of the ordinary, ‘a serious book for people who refuse to take themselves seriously’. I found it in the States in 1967 and when I tried unsuccessfully to find someone to publish it in the UK they thought I was mad.
But then Harvey Cox came up with a quotation from Hugo Rahner3 which describes play, but in language that might be prayer. Listen:
'To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic, to enact to oneself the absolutely other, to pre-empt the future, to give the lie to the inconvenient world of fact. In play earthly realities become, of a sudden, things of the transient moment, presently left behind, then disposed of and buried in the past; the mind is prepared to accept the unimagined and incredible, to enter a world where different laws apply, to be relieved of all the weights that bear it down, to be free, kingly, unfettered and divine'.
Play suggests fun and laughter. Laughter is a greatly under-rated, under-used asset of the Christian community. The Jews can knock us into a cocked hat! ‘We may be dead’, said the Jews, ‘but by God we can be cheerful!’ You can only say that if you know what it is to laugh.
But then there are two sorts of laughter. The first is the laughter of the comedian, the big funny man with all the tricks of the trade and the capacity to have people rolling in the aisles, but who when he is not performing may be a very sad individual indeed. The second is the serious person who all the time has a deftness and a lightness of touch which enables him to laugh at anything as he goes along.
The first is the priest who can fool with anybody at the social on a Saturday night and is as dull as ditchwater on Sunday morning. The second is the priest who may never be described as 'a bundle of fun' but who can make your eyes twinkle whatever he does. The first is the musician who gives it all he's got at the party-hop on Saturday night and then is as heavy as lead on the church organ on Sunday morning and the second is the one who can tickle the ivories enough to make the stewards want to dance down the aisle.
Both have their place but the second sort is closer to the Laughter of God and two quite different writers have recently alerted us to it.
First, a light-hearted piece in which Norman Habel4 wonders whether God ever doodled.
Lord, did you ever do something silly, just for the fun of it?
For example, did you ever sit and doodle in the air, floating somewhere, before you had this heavy world upon your hands?
Did you ever take the time to pause, and laugh with all of us?
Are the platypus and kangaroo a couple of favourite jokes you kept for laughs?
Are the monkeys in the zoo a kind of sacred comic strip on how mankind was made by you?
Come on, God!
Join us in a wild spree across the city with the wind blowing sunshine in our faces. Let’s float a thousand enormous red balloons in every court, cathedral, and park we find. Let’s set fire-crackers under every preacher and banker in town.
Let’s paint on every single street that this is resurrection day and anyone who doesn’t sing for joy is just a silly fool.
Let’s turn the land into a fair and throw confetti in the air to celebrate that you have come to join us here.
Come on God, let’s go.
The other, somewhat more seriously but no less revolutionary, is when Trevor Dennis5 questions how to understand ‘the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the waters’ in Genesis 1? Is the Spirit brooding over the waters of chaos before creation or is it that those waters are being shaken by the wind of God? Or, says Dennis, might it be something else? Listen.
‘What if the chaos was shaken into order by the gale of God’s laughter? What if the fish and the whales were made to swim in the depths of that laughter, and the birds to float on its upcurrents and tumble in eddies as jackdaws do about a cathedral spire? Why, then, human beings, made in God’s image, modelled upon him, came from the heart of his laughter. Why, then, we were made to bring a smile to the face of the earth, to bring the blessing of laughter wherever we go.’
If this were so, he asks, how might it have continued? Adam and Eve, standing there in ‘the altogether’, might have laughed at each other with holy laughter and she might have greeted him with words from the Song of Songs, but too soon the laughter of God was turned into bewilderment and fear through disobedience and acquisition and the whole creation was drowned in the floods of God’s tears (the Flood). After that God laughed again, showed man how to plant vineyards and produce wine ‘that maketh glad the hearts of men’; that turned sour too. So he enabled Abraham and Sarah to laugh in their old age and Isaac was the child of laughter. He called Moses to the top of Sinai and told him all his jokes and before Moses could get down again to make the people laugh they had created for themselves a god who ‘told no jokes, had no funny stories . . . the centre of stern-faced, pompous ritual, where there was no laughter, only hysteria’.
Similarly, Palm Sunday. Alwyn Marriage6 tentatively suggests that once we enter into the humour of Palm Sunday that too could be an attempt to focus laughter as we come to see that ‘the whole gospel has elements of a practical joke in the simplicity and difficulty of what it demands’. The Jews had been having a terrible time with their leaders and they wanted a change. And God looks down from heaven and says, 'All right, if you want a change have a change. If you want a king have a king. Only it may not be like you think’. Central to the joke is the clown, the harlequin. At Christmas he came as a baby, in the synagogue as a teacher, in the home as a healer, at a wedding as the guest, on Good Friday as a victim, on Easter Day as a new creature and always as a judge — but on Palm Sunday, he comes as a Clown, ‘a harlequin to touch our jaded consciousness’. Or, if you prefer, a Clown to make us laugh.
How the early Christians, facing the lions in the arena must have loved that picture of Jesus, satirising existing authority by riding into town replete with regal pageantry when he had no earthly power. They had no power. They knew what fools they were. They knew, that because of what they were doing, not only they but the whole church of which they were part was being ridiculed. And yet they knew that like Jesus on his ass, with a crown and sceptre made of thorns and wood, they were saying something desperately vital to the world that the world not only failed to understand but never even wanted to hear.
To see that is to catch a glimpse of heaven. Harry Williams7, in Tensions, says that in Pilgrim's Progress the place from which you see the Celestial City is the Delectable Mountains, and then goes on to add that laughter is the Delectable Mountain experience from which you glimpse the Celestial City, or the laughter of heaven.
And for those of you who find theology difficult, let's put it in more human terms. The whole of Hugh Walpole’s8 Herries Chronicle is the history of the tension within the English between the good, reliable, stiff-upper-lip class and the gypsy in us all which makes us individualists, dreamers, island people and rural people who want to spend all day sitting on a haystack sucking a blade of grass. It's the difference between the yuppies of he south east and the rural folk of Scotland, perhaps even between the pro-Europeans and the Little Englanders as well. The Herries family have got both streaks too and from time to time they meet and when they do they spark like electricity.
Vanessa has a strong streak of the gypsy in her and from an early age she falls in love with a kindred spirit called Benjie. Every time they are about to marry something prevents it and eventually she goes off and marries respectability. It doesn't work and in middle life (even at the end of the 19th century) she leaves him, sets up house with Benjie and they have a child. But gypsies being gypsies, and Benjie being particularly difficult and unreliable, life is still tortuous, and at the end one of her friends asks her why she loves him so much, and she says,
'Oh I don't know . . . He's everything I want in a man. I can see his jokes . . . Benjie and I find one another amusing. We are comic to one another. That's a good reason for love.'
There you have two people on the Delectable Mountains who have glimpsed the Celestial City.
Might that help to exlain why the people who have nothing can laugh most? They find life comic? They see everybody else going mad to protect the useless things they haven’t got and will never have. And they know that every time they are given something it will wipe a smile off their face because as soon as somebody comes to take it away they will have to get serious in order to defend it. These are the ones who defy the notion that the more you succeed the happier you are, and the more you acquire the more important. And in doing so they point to a world which is different — where weakness is strength, suffering is the gateway to life and death is perfect freedom. And in laughing at themselves, they point the way to God.
Like persecuted Christians . . . like the Clown . . . like Jesus . . . they are constantly tricked, humiliated, trampled upon and given scant justice, but never, never, NEVER are they defeated, for Laughter is God’s Last weapon.
All my hope on God is founded
.