God’s Comic Flair

Life is hard. I concede the point. But life is funny too, and that is not an accident.

God made everything everywhere. He made the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets. He made every kind of animal on this planet, and he made men and women in His image. "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." (Gen. 1:31). This refrain confirms that God was enthusiastic about the harmony and perfection of the whole creation project. God's action in and reaction to creation provide clues to God's personality. Some clues often missed or ignored by practitioners of austere religiosity point to God's humor. Consider for example the giraffe's neck, the elephant's trunk, the kangaroo's pouch, the flamingo's legs, the monkey's antics, the donkey's bray, the duck's quack, or the classic, elegant-yet-functional styling of the duck-billed, web-footed, fur-bearing platypus.

God, therefore, has created with comic flair, and—among many gifts—He has given us laughter, a gift with demonstrable therapeutic value (Prov. 17:22). The problem, of course, is that God's good creation, including our sense of humor, has been tainted by sin and must be reclaimed and redeemed.

The first recorded instances of laughter in scripture are in Genesis 17 and 18. The story is familiar. God called Abram, gave him a new name (Abraham), and promised Abraham that He would give him a son by Sarah, and they would be the parents of “nations” (Gen. 17:15-16). "Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, 'Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninty?'(Gen. 17:17). When Sarah heard the news, she had the same reaction: she "laughed to herself" (Gen. 18:12). Their laughter was the laughter of disbelief. Based on their common sense, pragmatic assessment of the hard facts in the "real world," they doubted God's ability to keep His promise.

God is not mocked, but He is funny. He told them to call the son Isaac, which means "laughter." "Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised (Gen. 21:1)." She became pregnant, and Laughter (Isaac) was born (Gen. 21:2). Sarah celebrated the blessing: "God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me" (Gen. 21:6). This is the laughter of grace.

God kept his promise to Abraham through laughter. Ultimately, that promise is fulfilled in Jesus, who calls us to grace-fueled, joy-filled participation in God's Kingdom. That Kingdom offers hope to brokenhearted people in the bogus world system. That hope includes a promise of laughter (Luke 6:21). Why, then, have many Christians throughout history treated the world as a no-laugh zone? The problem, I think, may be a chronic failure to distinguish between the laughter of unbelief and the laughter of grace, compounded by a failure to recognize that the Kingdom, although not fully consummated, is a present reality for those who follow Christ.

Two supposed anti-laughter texts are illustrative. In Luke 6, Jesus describes the impact of the Kingdom, the great reversal of fortune. Those who are self-satisfied in the bogus world system, those who “laugh now,” will "mourn and weep" (Luke 6:25). James reinforces this point, warning self-indulgent "friends of the world": "Change your laughter to mourning" (James 4:9). Note that the problem is not laughter; the problem is the rejection of God's grace, the delusion of autonomy, which produces the laughter of disbelief.

Christians, by grace, "have shared in the Holy Spirit and tasted . . . the powers of the coming age" (Heb. 6:4-5). We have been rescued from the domain of darkness and transferred into the Kingdom of the beloved Son (Col. 1:13). We are Kingdom people. Therefore, we are free to laugh, and we ought to laugh, provided that our laughter is consistent with our duty to love God and love people. With cheerful hearts, we look forward to the fullness of God's Kingdom, the New Jerusalem, where “He will wipe every tear from [our] eyes” and there will be no more “mourning or crying” (Rev. 21:4). But there will be laughter (Luke 6:21).