The shortest verse in the bible is not "Jesus laughed" or "Jesus smiled", but "Jesus wept."And He is not known as a laughing deity, like some buddhas are, but rather, as "the Man of Sorrows."
Looking for an image that I could use to illustrate this post, I was unable to locate one that showed Jesus laughing, or even smiling, that I felt was not irreverent.
Is it any wonder, then, that people have a hard time imagining that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, could have a sense of humor, or enjoy many other things that regular human beings enjoy. Why is this?
It's a form of latent Gnosticism, isn't it, that Christians in all times and ages have had a difficult time getting used to Jesus as a Man with all that it implies.
Jesus Christ is the θεανθρωπος, theánthropos, the "God-Man" as we call Him in the Greek Orthodox Church. We're eager to confess Him as Lord and God, but we sometimes don't know how to be comfortable with Him as Man. I notice that many of the trends in modern evangelical worship tend to make the experience not far removed in atmosphere from a club or coffeehouse. This shocks the Orthodox, but we return the favor by shocking our liturgically antipodal brethren with our over-the-top ceremonialism. Touché!
Worship is how we relate to the God half of the indivisible God-Man, but everything else about our Christian life needs to proceed from our relationship to the Man half of that same, unique Being. Why? Because He has somehow taken up our humanity with Him into the Godhead, so that the Holy Triad should no longer seem alien to us, as we are indwelt by Him and live in Them.
Jesus the Man had a sense of humor, as we can see if we read the gospels without a religious predisposition. In fact, His attitude toward religion itself was sometimes quite humorous.
It's because the Church throughout much of her history has been in bondage to religious spirits rather than in manly relationship with the Saviour that all kinds of atrocities have been committed in His name—wars, persecutions, tortures, you name it. Nothing that satan hasn't tried outside the Church hasn't also been tried inside her—not by Christians, of course, but by the bad seed that the enemy has planted there.
When we meet the saints of today, those who, as Martin Luther said, "canonize themselves," we find human beings who are fully human and yet partake of the Divine Nature in some way we cannot quite fathom, but whatever it is they have, we want, that is, if we really want Jesus. Otherwise, the saints are merely an annoyance at best, or an embarrassment and conviction at worst. "Just ignore them. Maybe they'll go away!"
Following Jesus, we can laugh at the world and its schemes and threats, because He defeated it on the Cross and He defeats it in us who believe and follow Him every day.
There is a time for laughter, and a time to be serious, even solemn. And there too, let Jesus the God-Man show us the way. Let's worship Him as did His disciple John the Revelator, in fear and awe, but let's also walk with Him as did His disciples on that road to Emmaus, except, unlike them, let's hope we recognize Him right away.
11 comments:
Romanos,thanks again for your knowledge, insight and balance which never ceases to amaze me! If I was an Orthodox Christian I would want you to be the Patriarch!
Amin!
As my background is Baptist/Evangelical, all I can say is that you speak the truth concerning the apparent "club scene" of modern contemporary churches. It is a sad reality. The diagnosis is that almost all across the board, (save most Orthodox, Fundamental or Amish communities) church denominations are forgetting where they came from and don't know where they are going, throwing away their history for favors of honor, name, and wealth, whether they be 100, 400, or 1 year old traditions.
Tradition is important, especially if there is nothing wrong with it. Without it, we have few connections to the previous generation. Only when there are wrongs and errors within it (which is why the Reformation happened in the first place, as well as every turning point in biblical history, when Shof'tim, Melachim & Neviim turned the nation back from error and idolatry) does tradition become like stale bread in the mouth.
Such are the times! Visible Christendom's progression cannot be stopped; the Whore of Babylon with eventually absorb her too...
Patriarch Romanos! I don't know if that would make Jesus laugh or weep!
I recall that the movie of Matthew with Bruce Marchiano portrays Jesus as good-humored. I don't tend to like movies of the life of Jesus, but appreciated that aspect of that movie.
Thanks, Jim. I will have to look that movie up, and watch it.
Romanos:
I appreciate this post (as many/most of yours).
When I think of Jesus with a sense of humor - I suppose I think now of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ in the scene where he portrays Jesus as finishing a table for a "rich man" and he teases his mother, who can't imagine sitting in a chair at a high table. Recognizing the flaws, and the speculation of that film, the moment rang true to me - sorry if that seems silly.
In our Orthodox worship, I often think that the reverence and ceremonial is not simply of the God, but of the King of Kings. I am in the throne room (Revelation). We receive the King of All Who Comes Invisibly Upborne by the Angelic Hosts. His train fills the temple and smoke rises and Holy, Holy, Holy! rings in the air.
This King is my King, but has deigned to call me "friend' and "brother." I think of Shakespeare's Henry V who tells his men:
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
Indeed the gulf between me and our King is so far greater than gulf between King Henry and his rough soldiers - He being my creator and I his creature. But none of Henry's soldiers would have, being called brother, treated their King with less respect, he being yet their Sovereign - and this is how I think of why we worship as we do, with great State.
In thinking of Jesus as a man, I recently thought about him "reading" Isaiah in the Synagogue - probably he chanted that. God made flesh . . . sings!
Excuse my poor thoughts, and thank you!
Eric John
Thank you, Eric John, for your comments, all very well put, insightful and true. How I appreciate them! And thank you, brother, for reading my humble blog.
"Indeed the gulf between me and our King is so far greater than gulf between King Henry and his rough soldiers - He being my creator and I his creature. But none of Henry's soldiers would have, being called brother, treated their King with less respect, he being yet their Sovereign…"
Amín, adelphé mou agapité, amín kai amín! Kai axioi oi logismoí sou! Kaló Páscha!
No film about Jesus Christ is perfect in all respects. How could one be? But each has its merits.
After reading what brother Jim wrote, mentioning a film of the Gospel of Matthew that he likes, I went and watched the 3 hour version of The Gospel of John. (Actually I watched about the first half, and listened to the second half until very near the end when I got up and watched again—I was resting for the night.) As soon as the film started, I remembered why I like this film: Jesus is portrayed with more than the usual dose of humanity. He smiles, He even laughs (though never very loudly or lustily) and shows evidence of every nuance of His inner thoughts as He teaches, praises or rebukes—all shown without (for me) a hint of irreverence or flippancy. I could almost take a movie still shot from the film and use it to illustrate this post, but I won't. The detail of the portrait of Christ by Rembrandt stands well for what I had intended.
The folk song Lord of the Dance just came to mind as I write this just before midnight. So we do have, in our Christian culture, reminders of this aspect of Christ's humanity.
Then, too, one of the first scenes in the film I just watched comes to mind: the wedding feast at Cana, where Jesus performed His first irrefutable miracle, changing water into wine. Jesus was there with His mother and the disciples—what a merry gathering! And how can we not imagine our Lord sharing in the joy and "jollification" that must have taken place?
We know what human laughter looks and sounds like. How happy the mother of Jesus and the disciples must be to have known, seen and heard the laughter of the eternal and living God of Israel, living bodily in their midst for those thirty-some years, and once more, after He had returned from His descent into Hades, as He met with them on the beach after that catch of 153 fish!
Thank you for this reflection. The subject is something I have been pondering for a while: holding God in awe and yet having a joyous personal relationship with Him. We need to have both awe and joyful familiarity.
I just checked a concordance and there were 45 references to joy from Deut. 28:47-"because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart for the abundance of all things..."
to Jude 24. "Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy,..."
Joy, it seems, is an indication of the presence of the Lord and yet it is also our response to His presence in our lives.
I'm afraid I won't be joining the crowd that wants to elevate you at the Phanar just yet.
Romanos, have you examined any patristic sources about this, or have you just kind of "shot from the hip" on this one?
I would encourage you to check out more stuff from the saints and fathers. "Humor" is not a sin, but loss of sobriety is. I think you'll find some classical Christian authors who gave this subject more than 10 seconds of thought and came up with some good reasons as to why the Savior may NOT have laughed. For example, risibility. Look it up. It's the capacity to be surprised, and is often the basis of our laughter-- but the Lord wasn't surprised. He "knew all things" and even saw into the hearts of men. Another example, absurdity. We laugh when we find things unexplainable or inconsistent. The Almighty knows very well the explanation for everything, however. It is funny how we project onto Christ whatever it is that is common to our age. In our society, when amusement and entertainment have been pursued obsessively, we want Him belly-laughing in a stupor of amusement because this is how we often become, unaware that the Lord himself speaks of such laughter: "Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall weep." We're so obsessed with maintaining our delusion-based light-mindedness that we've come up with special "happy pill" drugs in case someone's not spewing forth inane giggles at every waking moment.
Light humor, irony, etc., are surely not out of place in the Christian life, as means for waking us up from the world's stupor, for encouraging us by ridiculing the deceptions of the devil. Seeking laughter for laughter's sake, or joking to show how clever we are... these are just symptoms of the passions of pride and vainglory. The Lord refused to do such things and we should follow His example.
This bears little relationship to genuine joy. Christ IS joy, and was certainly often joyful, as His saints often are, and as we should be. I wonder though, if you aren't projecting onto the "lack of laughter" historical tradition a hasty judgment of religiosity when in fact it might be more closely related to the sober joy which comes from the Cross of our Lord.
Isaac,
I am neither learned nor a lawyer as you are, and I only laugh at the gentle gibes of being punished by being elevated at the Phanar—Did you perhaps mean elevated like Patriarch Gregorios V was elevated by the Turks in 1821? Perhaps I should read the church fathers more, but as for shooting from the hip on this one, I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. Thank you, nonetheless, for your erudition and the additional details you bring to this discussion. Go with God, dear brother.
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