At the anniversary celebration a couple of weeks ago, someone asked me, “Do you think that Jesus had a sense of humor?”  My immediate response was to say yes. After all, Jesus was comfortable mingling with all sorts of people, and he had friends like Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, where he could just be Jesus and not Jesus the miracle worker. Someone as perceptive as Jesus must surely have gotten a good laugh at the foibles of the day and with whatever funny stories were going around in those primitive days before the internet. But when it comes to the scriptural basis for claiming that Jesus had a sense of humor, the evidence is a bit thin.

Nowhere in the Gospel do we read that Jesus told a joke or that Jesus laughed, or that Jesus had an opening monologue that he used to warm up the crowd. In fact, the one time that Jesus refers to laughter, it is in a negative context, “Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:25). In context, though, Jesus is not condemning laughter per se, but   those who simply enjoy life and do not care about their sisters and brother. It is laughter at someone else’s expense.

I suspect that a crowd hearing some of Jesus’ sayings for the first time might have let out a belly laugh at some of them. For example, Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle that for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt19:24). Picture some pour soul trying to push a camel though the eye of a needle. Condemning hypocrisy and being judgmental, Jesus said, “First take the log out of you own eye first and then you will see clearly take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matt 7:5). Picture someone trying to perform a delicate surgical procedure in someone’s eye with a big log in one’s own eye. We have heard Jesus’ sayings so often, they have lost their punch.

Personally I think Jesus is being humorous when he says, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it would obey you” (Luke 17:6). In a hot dry climate, the last thing anyone would want to do would be to toss a mulberry tree into the sea.  Just prior to this statement, the apostles had said to Jesus, “Increase our faith.” Jesus knew that faith could not be handed over like a package. It is a relationship that grows over time. The absurdity of their request deserves an absurd answer.

I may be reading too much into this, but I detect some humor in Jesus’ initial exchange with the apostle Nathaniel. When Philip tells his brother Nathaniel that he has met the long-awaited one, Jesus from Nazareth. Nathaniel replies, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Jesus says nothing directly about this obvious insult. Instead he says, “Here is a true Israelite. There is no duplicity in him” (John 1:47). The original Israel (Jacob) was full of duplicity. He took advantage of his blind father and cheated his older brother Esau out of his birthright. Nathaniel, on the other hand, does not even bother with being politically correct.

Whatever you may think of this scant evidence, the question of humor does bring up a deeper and more universal issue in religion. How is it that we sinful and limited human beings dare to speak to God as if God were our neighbor from whom we want to borrow a cup of sugar? How is it that we sinful and limited human beings try to orchestrate a perfectly performed liturgy or ritual for God, as if by so doing God would be impressed with us.  Is there not something absurd about the idea that if we do everything correctly in worship, then God will be fooled about who we really are? This is why in many ancient religions, including many Native American religions, there was a trickster or a joker. The joker did not originate in the tarot deck of cards and certainly not in the Batman universe (a brief aside, during the filming of the 2008 movie The Dark Knight in downtown Chicago, the Batmobile was parked in the church lot where the 311 Building now stands). Jokers were symbols of chaos and disorder and disobedience. They poked fun and punctured the pride of those who set themselves up as better than others. They essentially humanized the ritual by acknowledging our own frailty, our own pride, and own presumptiveness in talking to a powerful and knowing deity as if we were on equal terms. The truth is that we could never come to God if God did not choose to come to us. That is the reality of the Incarnation and it is the reality of the Eucharist that we share at Mass. God is humble enough to come to us and to take us seriously even when we do not always take God seriously.

                  Fr. Joe