If you asked any of my family members to describe my grandfather, it wouldn’t take long for them to mention his laugh.
As an author and former preacher, Grandpa Hayden had lots of opportunities to practice the art of storytelling. As an instigator of shenanigans in his younger years, he also had lots of fuel for his tales. Some of my most treasured memories are of sitting with my grandparents, listening to Grandpa tell stories that only he could tell. There was the time when Grandpa and his friends put rubber-soled shoes on a greased pig and then released the animal into their college’s freshman gala. There was the time when Grandpa tried to extinguish a flaming car engine and ended up tripping and drenching himself with the hose instead. There was the time when Grandpa and a buddy woke up to find themselves driving through a cornfield, and Grandpa turned to his friend and said the first words that popped into his head: “So…do you come here often?”. And there was the time when Grandpa’s friend was traveling to meet his girlfriend’s family, and Grandpa gave him a lift on his motorcycle, only to have the bike malfunction on the way and spurt gasoline all over them, so that they pulled into the girlfriend’s driveway with their pants on fire. Inevitably, as Grandpa told these stories, he would start laughing – a warm, wheezy laugh that bubbled up from deep inside him like an undigested burrito, making his whole body shake. Often, he’d wind up laughing so hard that he’d be unable to finish the story. For my siblings and I, that laugh was an even better reward than the punchline.
What is it about stories like this that makes us laugh? While I’m no humor guru, I think the answer lies somewhere along the lines of this quote by James Bryan Smith, from his biography of singer-songwriter Rich Mullins: “A good joke is all about the surprise; we never see it coming. And humor is based on incongruity, about something being out of place…” Each of the stories above contains an unexpected scenario. Each of them also involves something out of place: a greased pig at a gala, a man spraying himself with a hose while an engine burns next to him, a car in a cornfield, and a grand entrance marred by flaming pants. The set-up is important, too: anticipation must be built for the punchline to land effectively. When all of these ingredients are present, a good joke pops and sizzles like a firecracker. When they’re absent, a joke falls flat, as sad and underwhelming as a deflated whoopee cushion.
When we think about the Christmas story, I’d be willing to bet that most of us don’t think about jokes or laughter. The narratives of Christmas are marked by many different emotions: fear on the faces of the shepherds, awe and wonder on the faces of the wise men, murderous rage on the face of King Herod, tender affection on the faces of Mary and Joseph. But in most of our storybook illustrations and nativity scenes, laughter is conspicuously absent. We may laugh during our Christmas festivities, but when we turn to Scripture, a demeanor of solemn reverence is often the order of the day. Describing the Christmas story as humorous may seem irreverent. Calling it a joke might seem downright sacrilegious. However, when we examine the accounts of Jesus’ birth in the gospels, we find that the ingredients of a good joke are all present there. In fact, they’re startlingly apparent.
Let’s look at the set-up. At the time of Jesus’ birth, the people of Israel were ready for a change. For centuries, Israel’s prophets had foretold the coming of a Messiah – a divinely appointed king who would rescue and redeem the Jewish nation. The Israelites had clung to these promises through wars and rebellions, through exile in foreign lands, and finally through subjugation at the hands of the Roman Empire. In earlier times, when their land was safe and prosperous, God’s promises of coming deliverance might have seemed superfluous, like sleep to a first-year college student. But after centuries of hardship, the Jews were waiting with bated breath. They yearned for a warrior king who could liberate them from oppression. Anticipation was so high that some people had begun claiming to be the Messiah, risking execution in their efforts to resist Roman tyranny. Tensions between the conquerors and the conquered had reached their boiling point. In terms of building suspense, God couldn’t have chosen a better time to deliver his punchline.
How about surprise? The gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John record six different angelic visits during the time of the Nativity, which usually scared the living daylights out of whoever was present to witness them (the shepherds in particular got hit with a heavenly spotlight that probably sent their sheep into a coma). We witness Mary’s shock at being told she’s going to have a baby, in spite of everything she knows about how human biology works. We see a caravan of magicians from the East, trekking after a star that most certainly wasn’t labeled in their astronomy textbooks. The gospel authors emphasize their characters’ bewilderment at these events, just in case we forgot that such things don’t happen on a typical Tuesday.
Then there’s incongruity. You might think that the long-awaited Messiah would come from prestigious stock – maybe royal family, or at least one of the wealthy and distinguished clans of Israel. Instead, Mary and Joseph are so poor that they can only afford the most meagre offering at their son’s temple dedication. You might think the Messiah would choose an impressive place for his grand entrance, like the royal palace or the Jewish temple. Instead, he’s born in a barn, surrounded by hay and manure and cows who, while intrigued by the scene, probably had less pressing matters on their minds. You might think the Messiah’s arrival would be heralded by fanfare – trumpets and crowds and dignitaries clambering for a photo-op. Instead, the first ones to visit him are shepherds, who no one (excepting, perhaps, their sheep) would ever picture as the creme de la creme of Israelite society.
Beyond these puzzling circumstances, there’s the greatest incongruity of all: the identity of the babe in the manger. In the prologue to John’s gospel, we discover that Jesus wasn’t just a deliverer sent from God, but rather God himself, come to deliver his people. In order to accomplish his rescue mission, God had taken on human flesh. Christians refer to this miraculous event as the Incarnation. Think about it: If you knew that the creator of the world was coming to save that world, what form might you expect him to take when he arrived? A blazing inferno, perhaps? A thundering voice to rattle the roots of the mountains? A majestic commander flanked by legions of angels? How about a baby – a helpless newborn flailing his arms, crying for milk, and soiling himself on the regular? As crazy as it sounds, this is the way that God Almighty makes his entrance into the world: with a poopy diaper. It’s an entrance every bit as startling as flaming pants. The more you think about it, the more laughable it becomes. James Bryan Smith summarizes this strange scene well when he writes,
The Incarnation is really God’s great joke, in the best sense of the word…Except for the cryptic words of the prophets, we could never have seen the Incarnation coming. It does seem an odd way to save the world. It is incongruous – God cannot become enfleshed, much less as a baby…crazier still, in a barn. The King of kings and Lord of lords is lying in a feeding trough between an ox and an ass looking on with furrowed brow.
What significance does “God’s great joke” have for our lives? Why is it important for us to glimpse the humor in the Christmas story? If we’re honest, we have to admit that our lives are marked by incongruity. Each of us lives with the tension between our hopes and our realities – the world we long for and the one we actually inhabit. Life as we know it is a constant tug-of-war between delight and heartache. In his book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, & Fairy Tale, Frederick Buechner argues that this struggle is visible in the similarities between laughter and weeping. While these responses center on different emotions, both of them well up from deep inside us, generate involuntary sounds, cause our bodies to shake, and bring us to tears. According to Buechner, these similarities are not accidental. Both laughter and weeping come from the deepest part of our hearts – the place of our most cherished hopes and our most palpable frustrations.
In the struggle between laughter and weeping, the odds seem stacked in weeping’s favor. According to Buechner, “To weep at tragedy…is to weep at that which is inevitable.” Despite our best efforts to make the world a better place, our daily news is still stuffed with tragic headlines: violence and viruses, death and disaster, corruption and chaos. Whether by our own hardships or the hardships of others, we’re trained to “hope for the best, but expect the worst.” For many, the year 2020 has only served to clarify and intensify this cynicism. Disillusionment and despair are the order of the day.
Like us, the Jews of Jesus’ day had many reasons to be cynical. Christmas carols have made much of the dark environment that Christ entered into – a context rife with political unrest, injustice, and brutality. Yet, in the midst of this hostile setting, we witness a response from the world’s maker that, in many ways, seems profoundly silly. Why would God concoct such a laughable plan in the face of the world’s great darkness?
For years, my favorite Christmas tune has been Rich Mullins’s song “You Gotta Get Up (Christmas Song).” The song opens with imagery of a kid shaking his parents awake on Christmas morning, eager to open presents. It’s a scene that, while warm and fuzzy for most of us, is also familiar and mundane. Christmas rolls around every year, sometimes joyful, sometimes busy and frenetic, sometimes gloomy, always filled with the same old traditions and decorations and foods. After anticipating his presents, the child in the song starts to ponder the Christmas story. Mullins narrates the child’s thoughts in his scratchy smoker’s voice, “Oh, I hope there’ll be peace on earth / I know there’s goodwill toward men / On account of that baby born in Bethlehem.” Suddenly, the folksy piano and guitar that have undergirded the song drop away, and we hear the otherworldly sound of a Celtic pipe, ringing high and clear over a tune that all at once feels quite unfamiliar. I’ve listened to this song dozens and dozens of times, and that little segment still catches me by surprise and tugs on my heartstrings every time I hear it.
By lulling us in with familiar Christmas imagery, then sucker-punching us with Celtic pipes (which, in my humble opinion, are the king of musical sucker-punches), Mullins challenges us to reexamine our familiar Christmas routines and to glimpse the magic there. It’s as if he’s throwing open the shutters of our houses and dragging us to the window, inviting us to see the glittering expanse of snow that surrounds us, if only we had eyes to see it. In a way, his song is an answer to the question posed above, regarding the silliness of Christ’s birth. Like the strange circumstances of the Incarnation, it invites us to stop and peer beneath the surface – to question whether, in our preoccupation with comfort and normalcy and outward appearances, we’ve missed something truly remarkable.
While I don’t think we’ll ever unravel the mystery of the Incarnation, I believe the infant Christ reveals that, despite all appearances to the contrary, goodness and innocence and delight are deeper and weightier truths than evil and sorrow and suffering. The candles of our love and laughter may seem pitiful against the tide of darkness that surrounds us. However, in the Incarnation, we see that they’re only reflections of a fiercer and holier light, which burns in the very heart of God himself. John describes Christ this way in the prologue to his gospel: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5). In the midst of suffering and sorrow, the God of heaven can laugh because he’s telling the story, and he knows the ending. He knows that the future which is coming – the redemption and renewal that Christ had come to accomplish for his people – is something so beautiful that the only proper response from us is incredulous laughter, laughter to the point of tears. He knows that the brokenness of this world is temporary – that, as Andrew Peterson sings, “all the death that ever was, if you set it next to life…would barely fill a cup.” The Incarnation is a window into the heart of things. Peering into that place, the place from which our laughter and weeping well up together, we discover that laughter wins the day. Frankly, it isn’t even close.
2020 has been a difficult year if there ever was one. We have lots of good reasons to be solemn and cynical. And yet, this Christmas (and every Christmas, for that matter), God invites us to laugh at the incongruous scene in the manger – to see it as the greatest of all jokes, designed to bring about our deepest delight. Like my grandfather, laughing himself to the point of tears before he even gets to the punchline, we can laugh in the here and now, because we know where the story is headed. In the end, maybe the joke shouldn’t be so surprising, after all. As Frederick Buechner writes,
I have spoken of tragedy as inevitable and comedy as unforeseeable and seen from the inside of each, that seems to me to be so…But seen from the outside, seen as God sees it and as occasionally by the grace of God man also sees it, I suspect that it is really the other way around. From the divine perspective, I suspect that it is the tragic that is seen as not inevitable whereas it is the comic that is bound to happen. The comedy of God’s saving the most unlikely people when they least expect it, the joke in which God laughs with man and man with God – I believe that this is what is inevitable…
Words for Wayfarers 