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September 07, 2003
What Did Jesus Have Against Laughter?
What Did Jesus Have Against Laughter?
Psalm 2 / Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-18
Luke 6: 25b
September 7th, 2003
A common perception of Jesus is that He did not laugh. Children loved Him, and He loved them. “Let the children come to me for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Children aren’t attracted to sour looks. But I’ve never seen a picture painted of Jesus in which the artist imagines a laughing Jesus. His face is thoughtful, even expressionless, like the Mona Lisa. So Jesus’ words in this brief statement seem to fit with the common portrayal of Jesus. “Woe to you who laugh now, because you will mourn and weep.”
But Luke has already quoted Jesus otherwise, “Blessed are those who mourn for they will laugh.” It’s a kindly promise. What do we make of this apparent contradiction? What Jesus said first points us in the direction of those promises of joy in the Hebrew Bible. “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” “You shall go out with joy and be led forth in peace.” So what do we do with “Woe to you who laugh now, because you will mourn and weep?”
Nowhere does Jesus or any New Testament writer explain these two very different things He said. So we have the choice of either ignoring this, chalking it up to one of those puzzlers we say is “inspired,” but don’t know what to do with. Or we can ponder it, and ask what Jesus meant.
We know that Jesus had a sense of humor. He could make people laugh. It appears often in His parables. “It’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven!” It’s a verbal cartoon. The desire for wealth can so preoccupy us that we say, “heaven can wait.”
Another time Jesus said, “Take the log out of your own eye before you worry about the splinter in someone else’s eye!” It’s another cartoon. How common a flaw it is to be very perceptive of other peoples’ offenses while being blind to our own.
Jesus most certainly knew the value of humor. When people see their flaws in a way that makes them laugh wryly it works much better than scolding them. Such laughter is good medicine for the soul. So why did Jesus pronounce woe on those who laugh now?
Someone has suggested that Jesus warned against the laughter that takes no thought for tomorrow. He is warning the businessman who laughs at quick but dishonest gain. He laughs all the way to the bank but he will be discovered—and then he will weep in shame. He is telling the college student who wants to party without inhibition, “Look out!”. She binge drinks, and everyone laughs at her drunken antics. She feels high and loves it. Jesus says, “You’re laughing now, but just wait; you’re going to cry you a river. There is a kind of laughter that we know will turn to tears of remorse.
A second kind of laughter that will change to tears is the laughter of the scornful, the kind of people referred to in Psalm 1:1. They laugh at the handicapped, at suffering people, and at sacred things. Their scorn for what is good, true, and lovely will accumulate as steam in a tea-kettle and eventually burst. “Woe to the ones who laugh with scorn for you will weep.”
Or maybe Jesus was calling attention to the attempt to drown out seriousness in life with laughter. A lot of people go to bed at night laughing their cares away. So first Johnny Carson, and then a string of other comedians have occupied network television spots at bedtime. Our beloved Ball State alumnus, David Letterman, has made a fortune making people laugh before they go to sleep at night.
There was a time when the evening was seen by Christians as a reflective time, a time to ponder the day or to ask God’s forgiveness for failures of the day. Many of us have used John Baillie’s devotional classic, A Diary of Private Prayer, to good benefit at evening time. On the tenth day he leads us to pray in the evening,
“I thank Thee for every evidence of Thy Spirit’s leading, and for all those little happenings which, though seeming at the time no more than chance, yet afterwards appear to me as part of Thy gracious plan for the education of my soul.”
And then, on the eleventh day, “O Merciful heart of God, in true penitence and contrition I would now open my heart to Thee. . . What did I not think shame to commit?”
But now very many Christians are more apt to drown out the cares of the day laughing at David Letterman’s jokes. Jesus says to us, “Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.” If we get rid of the opportunities we have for careful consideration of how we live, such as the opportunity that come at the end of the day before we go to sleep, we may well find ourselves in grief later on.
But if at the end of each day we recognized what we had done wrong, so as to correct our proneness to wander, the momentary remorse would guide us to enduring gladness. Maybe this was what Jesus was getting at when He said first, “Blessed are those who mourn, for you will laugh,” and then, “Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.”
There is an antidote to those four tragic words so many people say, “If only I had.” And that antidote is to use the close of the day to reflect on how we are living, and to confess our sins to God. Then we can begin the new day with freedom of conscience.
In the passage from the book of Nehemiah that we just listened to, we learned of the tears that overwhelmed the Jews who returned to Jerusalem after they heard the Book of the Law read to them. Why did they weep? It doesn’t say why they wept, but I wonder if it was because they suddenly realized why their nation had been rent in two by civil war, and then taken into exile—their beloved Temple destroyed. God had taught them in the Law of Moses the way to a glorious future—by living a glorious life before Him. But they had been too busy to listen to this teaching. “Like sheep they went astray, turning everyone to his own way,” as Isaiah put it.
One of the remarkable things about Israel’s history is that it begins with Joshua telling them, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.”
But then we look in vain for any mention of the role of the Book of the Law in the life of Israel. Only twice do we read of the people of Israel reading their Bible. And after both instances, people weep. Whereas we read in the longest psalm of the Bible 176 reminders of the delight found in God’s Word, apparently this was a joy seldom experienced in Israel. But then, after they wandered far from the ways of God, so that they fell apart as a people, they were confronted with God’s Word, and it hit them like a ton of bricks. They wept. Why? Because they were overwhelmed with a feeling of wasted life, wasted opportunity. “If only we had!” What might have been their delight became the reason for their grief.
I have the hunch that Jesus kept using the word “now,” in each of these woe statements because all people find it hard to look beyond the moment. Had Jesus seen our modern madness for quickness—fast food, fast profits, fast fame, and fast salvation—He would have warned us about our preoccupation with “NOW.” How He might have emphasized even more for us, “Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.”
This morning we will share the Lord’s Table again. Here we are reminded of Jesus’ foresight, “Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame.” Jesus looked ahead, not only to the joy that awaited Him, but to the joy that awaits us. The joy didn’t come quickly for Him, and it does not for us either.
The abundant life Jesus offers you requires a discipline of life to make it your own. Quick and easy doses of religion cannot provide what Jesus can offer only to those who come earnestly to Him.
There is a story about a Gentile who came to the grumpy Rabbi Shamai and said, “I will convert [to Judaism] on the condition that you teach me the Torah while I’m standing on one leg.” Rabbi Shamai drove him away with the tool he was using. The Gentile came to Rabbi Hillel who converted him. He said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah. The rest is its commentary. Go and learn it.”
As I have thought of this story recorded in the Talmud, that has Rabbi Hillel teaching an inverted form of the golden rule, it reminds me of how we’re taught to come to Jesus. Like the Gentile we come to Jesus and say, “I want to be saved now—fast—while I’m standing on one foot.” Jesus doesn’t drive us away with the carpenter’s tool He holds in His hand. But He says to us, “You want to be saved NOW? What I have to offer you is a life. You want security now. But what I have to offer you is a life.”
How important NOW is to us. Jesus warns us about our preoccupation with NOW. Now as we come together to share the Table of the Lord, I remind you that it stands for the goodness of God for our joy that worked out over a long course of time. Scripture speaks of Jesus as “the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” In the Lord’s Supper we remember the time when the Lamb of God was slain for us. But we also remember the marriage supper of the Lamb—which all these occasions when we take Communion together are reminders. We will sing, “Man of Sorrows” before and after we eat and drink together. But this sorrow of Jesus was followed by joy, His and ours.
Perhaps what Jesus most wants us to remember, we who put such value on laughter, is that there is more for us to be found in some wise sorrow than there is in laughter. To feel sorrow that Jesus had to die for our sins, to feel sorrow for our sins, may usher us into the joy of recognizing the forgiveness Jesus offers us at such cost. And then to accept the way of a life-time that comes with gratitude. It doesn’t come with that ease we might call “natural,” but it comes, if we indeed want to follow Jesus. And that’s what we say we are, isn’t it, “followers of Jesus?” Blessed are you who mourn now for you will laugh. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.”
Let us pray: O Lord, help us to understand what Jesus taught us, so as to live a righteous and joyous life to your glory. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at September 7, 2003 09:30 AM