Scripture: John: 20:19-29
I’ve been weighing an important theological question this week.
Basically, I’ve been wondering: is God funny?
I know it’s not uncommon for someone to say: God must have a sense of humor . . . but that’s typically about something coincidental happening — I’m more curious about God’s laugh-out-loud humor: the role of levity in religion, and humor in healing, and comedics in community.
The question came to me from two different directions.
As we have learned by now, Pope Francis passed away this past Monday. In his prominence as the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis had a huge impact on Christianity everywhere, even outside of Christian Catholicism. Francis elevated aspects of Christianity by giving public support for poor and displaced peoples; he cultivated interfaith dialogue1 and published theological documents about global climate change.2 And he did all of this with lots of laughter and a healthy sense of humor.
To Pope Francis, laughter was essential. He said that those without laughter have “given up their own humanity.”3 Without true laughter, he said, we cannot help society or religion. That’s quite a statement! To Francis, cultivating humor was not decadent; it was necessary and important.
And what’s even better, Francis’s favorite jokes were of the self-deprecating sort. As one Jesuit priest put it: making fun of one-self brightens others, deflates our own egos, and reminds us not to take ourselves with deadly seriousness.4
Pope Francis told a joke about himself that he introduced as “the one about Pope Francis in America”5:
It goes something like this: When he arrives at the airport on his visit to America, Pope Francis finds an enormous limousine waiting for him, and he is embarrassed by the huge stretch limousine. But then he starts thinking, it has been a long time since I drove any car, and never a limousine; he thinks to himself: I will never get another chance . . . He goes up to the driver and says, “You couldn’t let me drive it, could you?” The shocked driver replies, “Look, I’m really sorry, Your Holiness, but I really can’t, you know, there are rules and regulations.”
And the pope almost left it there, but you know what they say, how the pope is when he gets something into his head — and so he insists and insists, until the limo driver relents. And so, Pope Francis gets behind the wheel and takes it out on one of those enormous highways . . . and he begins to enjoy it, pressing down on the accelerator, going 50 miles per hour, 75, 120 . . . until he hears a siren, and a police car pulls him over. A young officer comes up to the darkened window. The pope rather nervously lowers it and the officer gulps. “Excuse me a moment,” the offices says, and walks away to call headquarters. “Boss, I have a problem.”
“What problem?” asks the chief.
“Well . . . I stopped a car for speeding, but there’s someone in there who’s really important.”
“How important? Is it the mayor?”
“No, boss . . . more than the mayor.”
“Who’s there? The governor?”
“No, no, more.”
“But it can’t be the president?”
“More, I think.”
“Who is more important than the president?”
“Look, boss, I don’t know exactly who it is, but all I can tell you . . . is that the pope is their driver!”
Pope Francis was a unique global leader. As this joke playfully points out, Francis never shied away from a life of service. He would often lower himself in stature, by asking other people to pray for him, and making confession to other priests.6
There are so few global leaders like him who publicly make a point of elevating others, and loving “the least of these our sisters and brothers,” of cultivating joy and humor as important spiritual matters. It’s why the title of one of his most recent books is I Want You to Be Happy.7
While reading worship materials this week published by the United Church of Canada, I saw that they were calling today, the Sunday after Easter, “Holy Humor Sunday.”
While many of you may have known this, this was a revelation to me: that in many churches around the world the Second Sunday in Easter is all about joy and laughter as a way of reveling and punctuating the miracle of Easter.
Many churches around the world this morning are reading the scripture of two disciples on the Road to Emmaus8 — it’s one of the lectionary options. After the resurrection, Jesus encounters two of his friends walking together away from Jerusalem after Jesus’s death. They don’t recognize him, and he asks them what they’re talking about. They reply with some incredulity: “Are you the only one in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what has happened in these days?”
Then Jesus — who has just been arrested, betrayed by and taken from his friends, stood through multiple sham trials, been crucified on a cross, and has overcome the power of death over the course of three days — flatly replies to the disciples: “What things?”
That’s a pretty funny line.
I think God has a sense of humor.
Humor can also bring our attention to realities of the world that are harder to face directly.
Like the one about a church that has a terrible problem with bats, which swoop over people’s heads during worship. When the bats first settled in the rafters, the pastor bought a cat to scare the bats away. But the bats remained. The next pastor hired the services of a professional exterminator, who fumigated the entire building. But the bats would not be moved. Finally, a new pastor was called, and in a few weeks the bats were gone. All the parishioners were delighted. They asked her what she had done to get rid of the bats. “It was easy,” she said. “I baptized and confirmed them all, and I knew I’d never see them again.”9
That’s a joke with a kernel of truth that might help us to think about how to make a home for bats in the church.
We know that Jesus wept.10 We can be most sure that he laughed too. He invited us to see the world like children, to center curiosity, and delight, and laughter.
On this Holy Humor Sunday, on which we remember the kind, laughing Pope, we can remember the group of disciples we read about in today’s scripture, locked away in their house on the day of Jesus’s resurrection — too scared to go out, too scared to talk loudly — they sit and wait for time to pass.11
And then Jesus appears among them in the house and their fears are put to rest. The story does not end with them locked away from the world. The story goes on, through the Book of Acts, and all the way to us today.
God is funny like that.
God wants us to be happy.
In the words of Pope Francis’ namesake, St. Francis of Assisi: “preach the good news at all times, use words if necessary.”
May it be so for all of us.
Amen.