The Bible Is Funny

“ ‘Aslan! Aslan! Have I made the first joke? Will everybody always be told how I made the first joke?’

‘No, little friend,’ said the Lion. ‘You have not made the first joke; you have only been the first joke.’”

C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (1955)

One thing I think we often don’t realise about the Bible is how extraordinarily funny it often is.

 

A Bible. Open to the Psalms, which are, admittedly, probably not the funniest bit.

I mean, I don’t exactly blame us for that; several obstacles to our getting the jokes have been unfortunately cast before us. First off, we’re in a totally different cultural context to those in which the books of the Bible were written. In addition, the text has been squeezed out of the original languages where it was at home and at ease, into English renderings that have inevitably left wordplay and clever linguistic structure and nuance of meaning in the dust, and on top of that frequently sound ungainly and archaic and theologically dense. On top of that, when it’s read aloud, that tends to happen in a measured, solemn sort of tone that would be hard to laugh at in any circumstances.¹ And then we immediately set about trying to pull the thing apart and understand it, without pausing to discern any more primal effect that it’s had on us. Taking all that together, we’re probably only going to catch uncertain glimpses of the funny bits – like, is that a joke? It sounds as if it might be, but I’m not totally sure. And if you’re not totally sure whether or not the God and King of the universe, your Lord and Saviour and Commander and Judge, is joking, well, you’re probably not going to do something so risky as laugh at what might not actually be a joke.

But please be reassured that God does have a sense of humour. In an attempt to demonstrate as much, I’d like to spend the rest of this post narrating you through a few of my favourite funny episodes from the scriptures.

Exodus 23

So Moses has just come down from his very important meeting with God on Mount Sinai to find that in his absence, the people of Israel have persuaded his brother Aaron, the High Priest, to make them a golden calf-shaped idol to worship – a plan he acceded to readily enough. Moses is, consequently, Not A Happy Bunny.

“Aaron, what were you thinking? You’ve made the people commit a horrific sin! God was all set to destroy them for it before I pleaded with him to keep his promises to our ancestors! What did the people ever do to you that you’d bring that on them?”

“Don’t be cross, Moses!” Aaron begs him. “It’s not my fault! It’s the people! They’re downright evil. See, they asked me to make them gods, because they weren’t sure what had happened to you after you disappeared up the mountain.” Well, that last sentence is true enough. “So I told them to give me any gold they had, and they did.” OK, that’s true too. “And then I – well, I took the gold and I threw it straight in the fire like a good High Priest, and, blimey, Moses, would you believe it, out of the fire came this calf here!”

Yeah, that last bit wasn’t true, oddly enough.²

Judges 8

So Gideon the judge has just led a very successful military campaign, and the people of Israel are keen to make him king over them.

“Oh no, I couldn’t possibly,” says Gideon. “I won’t be your king and neither will my heirs after you. Don’t you know that the LORD is supposed to be your only ruler?”

Wow, well done, Gideon, how very righteous and humble of you! Now please don’t ruin it by going and doing something like –

“I tell you what, though,” continues Gideon, “there is one thing I’d like you guys to do for me. Can I have all the gold earrings you took from the enemies we defeated as spoil?”

“Sure you can,” say the people.

“Oh, and I’ll also take the jewellery that we nabbed off the kings of Midian,” Gideon goes on. “And their royal purple garments.”

“Um, sure. But, um, Gideon, we thought you said you didn’t want to be a king?”

“Not a king! Definitely not a king!” insists Gideon, busily making an ephod (for priestly service of some sort, presumably, which was only supposed to happen in Jerusalem³) and setting it up in his own city, Ophrah.

“Right … but you are kind of making your own city into a religious capital, which does seem a bit like the sort of thing a king might do…”

“Totally not a king!” repeats Gideon. “I’m totally not a king! The LORD is your only king! By the way, have you met my son? His name is My-Father-Is-A-King.”

*Sigh.* Something like that.⁴

 

Gold earrings.

Esther 6

King Ahasuerus of Persia can’t sleep. He needs a bedtime story. And what better bedtime story than the official account of all his own great achievements? He has someone read it to him. They get to a bit where a Jew called Mordecai foiled a plot against him.

“Hey, how did we reward this guy for that?” Ahasuerus asks those attending him.

“Um … we didn’t,” they reply.

“Well, that’s no good,” reckons Ahasuerus. “We should definitely do something for him.”

At this point, into the court comes Haman, one of the king’s top officials. He’s on his way to ask the king about having Mordecai hanged on a gallows he’s had specially built for the purpose, because Mordecai doesn’t bow to him or pay him homage like the other officials, and that really annoys him.

“Haman’s outside,” the king’s attendants tell him.

“Let him in,” says the king. “Hey, Haman! Can I get an opinion on something? What should I do for someone I want to honour?”

Hmm, thinks Haman, I wonder who the king wants to honour? You know, surely there can’t possibly be anyone he wants to honour more than me?

“How about this,” suggests Haman. “Dress him in royal robes that you’ve worn yourself, and put him on a horse you’ve ridden, and give him a crown, and have your most noble officials lead him through the streets proclaiming that this is what you do for those you honour.”

“What a great idea!” agrees Ahasuerus.

Haman’s dead pleased with this turn of events: it’ll be great to be honoured like that. Now if only he can enact his plan to get rid of that annoying Mordecai, life will be pretty much perfect.

“Go right away and have exactly what you described done for Mordecai the Jew,” orders the king.

We’re not told about Haman’s facial expression at that point, but I bet it was priceless.⁵

Acts 19

Paul and his missionary buddies are busy preaching the gospel in Ephesus. A silversmith called Demetrius is none too pleased about this, because Paul’s preaching against idolatry presents a bit of a threat to his business selling silver shrines to Artemis, so he gets together the people in the city who work in similar trades and makes a stirring speech denouncing Paul’s gospel activities. Everyone gets very het up and starts yelling, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” They manage to get hold of a couple of Paul’s companions and drag them to the local theatre, which served as a general sort of venue for public assemblies.

“Brilliant!” exclaims Paul. “I do love a bit of being dragged before pagan authorities to give testimony! Hold on, give me a mo and I’ll be right with you guys-”

“Um, no you won’t,” interject the other Christians. “Like, could you maybe this once stay put and keep out of trouble? It’s total chaos in that theatre.”

And it is total chaos, because most of the people there have no idea what’s happening or why they’re all there. They’re all yelling over one another. After a bit, a Jew called Alexander gets shoved to the front to say something, but when the crowd realises he’s Jewish, they prevent him from addressing them by yelling, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” again. Solidly. For two hours.

Eventually, a town official gets them to shut up, and basically says, “Guys, we know, OK? We all already know Artemis is great. Nobody has been suddenly enlightened of that fact by the past two hours of yelling. Plus, nobody here has done anything sacrilegious. Now, if Demetrius and his colleagues have an actual lawsuit to file against anybody, there are the usual court procedures. But there is literally no reason for us all to be gathered here right now, and if we keep this up, we’re going to be accused of rioting. For literally no reason. So for goodness’ sake, go home, all of you.”

And with that, they all went home. And bear in mind that most of the crowd had no idea what they were doing there in the first place, and that nobody had actually managed to deliver a speech to them except that last one telling them what a waste of time their being there was. What an anticlimax. I bet Paul was glad he agreed to give it a miss.⁶

A few of my favourites, as I say; there’s plenty more to be found in the scriptures in the way of hilarity. Try Genesis 31, which surely has to constitute the first recorded instance of a woman using her period as an excuse to get herself out of a sticky situation; Exodus 8, where Pharoah’s magicians respond to the plague of frogs by proving that they can make frogs come up on the land too – hey presto, even more frogs, what a helpful development; Judges 3, where King Eglon’s been stabbed to death but his officials think he’s just taking a really long time on the toilet; 1 Samuel 5, where the Philistines attempt to assert their military victory over Israel by putting the ark of the covenant in the temple of their god Dagon, only to find that the statue of Dagon keeps prostrating itself in front of the ark whenever they’re not looking; Isaiah 44, which is a stunning bit of satire exposing the ludicrousness of idolatry; I could go on.

The Bible is funny, folks. I mean, not all of it, granted, but a lot more of it than I think most of us realise. Laughter is not automatically irreverent; on the contrary, it can reflect the heart of God. A healthy sense of the ridiculous can help keep us humble. Satire and amused scorn can be amazing weapons against sin.

Take your sense of humour and dedicate it to the glory of God. The Bible is funny, folks. Laugh.

Footnotes

¹ If I recall rightly, a lot of similar points were made by the speaker in an evening comedy session I went to at Word Alive earlier this year: https://wordaliveevent.org/. Sadly I can’t seem to remember or track down the chap’s name. He was very funny, though, especially about John’s excessive emphasis on the fact that he reached the tomb first in the twentieth chapter of his gospel.

² Here’s the original account, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+32&version=ESVUK, in case you want something a bit more infallible than my paraphrasing.

³ As per Deuteronomy 12, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+12&version=ESVUK, and, ooh, try 1 Kings 11, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings+11&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Again, here’s the chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges+8&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Honestly, my paraphrasing for maximum comic effect felt pretty pointless with this one; it’s so neatly amusing already: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=esther+6&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Last one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+19&version=ESVUK.

The Ugly Truth (as a Motive for Murder)

“Jake still won’t talk to me, and I miss him so much, it’s like I’ve been hollowed out by a nuclear blast and there’s nothing left but ashes fluttering inside brittle bones. I’ve send him dozens of texts that aren’t only unanswered; they’re unread. He unfriended me on Facebook and unfollowed me on Instagram and Snapchat. He’s pretending I don’t exist and I’m starting to think he’s right. If I’m not Jake’s girlfriend, who am I?”

Karen M. McManus, One Of Us Is Lying (2017)

So the premise of the novel is this: five assorted high-school stereotypes walk into detention one afternoon, and only four walk out alive. Investigators deem the death suspicious, and each of the four survivors has a disturbingly plausible motive. If you think it sounds like The Breakfast Club with added murder, great: that’s apparently exactly what Karen M. McManus was going for.¹ I won’t spoil the dénouement (which is pretty guessable anyway): what follows confines itself, assuming I remember rightly, to events revealed in the first few chapters.²

 

Added murder.

The four plausible motives stem from the fact that Simon, the unfortunate deceased, ran a gossip app that regularly disclosed devastatingly sensitive – and unfailingly accurate – details of the personal lives of his fellow students at Bayview High. Simon had drafted, but not yet published, a post dishing dirt on all four of those held in detention with him that afternoon. He was about to tell everyone that Bronwyn – the nerd, never broke a rule in her life, her heart set on upholding the family tradition of studying at Yale – had cheated on her Chemistry exams the previous year; he was about to tell everyone that Cooper – the jock, star baseball player, offers of university sports scholarships and contracts with minor-league teams flooding in from all sides – had enhanced his athletic performance using less-than-legitimate means; he was about to tell everyone that Addy – the homecoming princess, Little Miss Popular, permanently hanging off the arm of her equally popular long-term boyfriend Jake – had recently had a one-night stand with one of Jake’s good friends; and he was about to tell everyone that Nate – the delinquent, a criminal record under his belt already, one slip-up away from doing guaranteed jail-time – had been at his old habit of dealing drugs again.

Essentially, in each case, what’s at stake is the maintenance of some sort of façade of virtue. Bronwyn, Cooper, Addy, and Nate are all making themselves out to be better than they really are. Indeed, they have built entire identities on the foundation of people thinking they’re better than they really are. Check out my opening quotation, for instance: the narrator is Addy, at an absolute loss after Jake finds out about her betrayal. He’s pretending she doesn’t exist and she’s starting to think he’s right. She built her whole sense of who she was on the fact that Jake thought well of her, and now that he doesn’t, she can’t find anything left of herself except a figurative nuclear wasteland. Granted, murder is an awfully long way to go to keep a secret, but when there’s that much at stake … well, as I say, all four motives seem plausible enough. If you’re that heavily invested in the perpetuation of a falsehood about what you’re really like – if every hope you have is reliant on it – then anyone who’s poised to expose the ugly truth represents an incalculable threat.

And so someone plotted to kill Simon. And so the Pharisees plotted to kill Jesus.

It’s instructive, isn’t it, that Jesus identified the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’ as hypocrisy. According to Luke’s account of the gospel, he’d just been to a Pharisee’s house for a meal, and while he was there, pronounced a series of depreciatory ‘woes’ against said Pharisee and his faction. (So, extensively insulting your host at a dinner-party is one you can add to your list of technically legitimate What Would Jesus Do? options.) He cut through the Pharisees’ façade of virtue – their ritual washing before eating and so forth – and exposed the ugly truth about what they were really like: their greed and their neglect of justice and their love of human praise. At that point an expert in the Law cut in with a suggestion that Jesus was (inadvertently?) insulting his own group as well, to which Jesus rather hilariously responded with something that I’m pretty sure was to the effect of, Oh yes, now you mention it, that’s a very good point; I’ve been leaving you guys out: woe to you too! The scribes and Pharisees responded not by conceding that he might have a point, of course, but by stepping up their attempts to catch him saying something compromising, which was ultimately part of a plot to get him killed. The next thing Luke records Jesus as having said is: “Be on your guard against the leaven – which is hypocrisy – of the Pharisees. And nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known.”³

There’s a chapter division slap bang in the middle there, but don’t let that stop you taking it all together. Jesus identifies the Pharisees’ problem as hypocrisy, that is, that they made themselves out to be better than they really were. They were so heavily invested in perpetuating that falsehood about what they were like – that they were achieving righteousness through their own deeds – that they were ultimately prepared to plot the death of the man who threatened to expose the ugly truth (part of the ugly truth being, of course, how very hypocritical they were). Beyond identifying the hypocrisy, though, Jesus also warns his disciples to be on their guard against it; they’re certainly not immune from falling into committing the same evil. To do that, they need to hold fast to the knowledge that nothing concealed will remain concealed in perpetuity: every façade of virtue will be shattered eventually, hence why it’s no good trying to put such a façade up in the first place.

Being on our guard against hypocrisy means refusing to make ourselves out to be better than we really are. It means holding up our hands to the ugly truth our Lord tells us about what we’re like. It means refraining from building our identities around other people’s good opinions of us – as did Bronwyn and Cooper and Addy and Nate; and as did the Pharisees, who loved the respect they got from others in the form of greetings and best seats and so forth; and as I wish I could say I never do, but, let’s be real here, that would be just another slice of hypocrisy. I am, far too often, downright obsessed with trying to make people think well of me. And I hold my hands up to it. The only other option, after all, is to strive ever harder to perpetuate the falsehood that I’m better than that – a course of action that runs a severe risk of ending up wishing death on the one who threatens to expose the ugly truth. Not in quite so many words, perhaps, but given that everything God says and does is a direct result of who he is, to refuse to acknowledge what he says about me is, in essence, to wish that he didn’t exist as he does. Now there’s a sobering thought. God forgive me.

Here’s the good bit, though: whereas when Simon threatened to tear down his classmates’ façades of virtue, leaving them floundering and hopeless was basically the end of the plan, when Jesus tears down our façades of virtue, he offers us something much, much better to build our identities around: the actual virtue gifted us by his sacrifice on our behalf. Every sin, including hypocrisy, is forgiven at the cross. That being so, there’s no real terror any more in even our worst secrets being revealed. God has absolutely all the dirt on us – even about what goes on in the privacy of our own thoughts, which takes devastatingly sensitive to a whole new level – and yet he chooses to lay the blame on Jesus, the one human being who never made himself out to be better than he was (he kind of couldn’t have done, being literally perfect and all). God has absolutely all the dirt on us, and yet he chooses to think well of us. He chooses to love us with an infinite love. There is no new information that could be revealed that could cause him to change his mind on that.

So the best way to be on our guard against hypocrisy is to constantly remind ourselves that, before God who knows everything, there can be no façades of virtue, but that we don’t need any to guarantee his good opinion of us: Jesus already guaranteed that by exchanging our sinfulness for his very own righteousness. If we refuse to acknowledge the ugly truth about ourselves, we’ll end up functionally wishing him dead as the Pharisees did; but if we accept what he says about what we’re like, we can also accept his having willingly given himself up to death on our behalf, to transform the ugly truth into a thoroughly beautiful one: we who are in Christ are the very righteousness of God.

Footnotes

¹ As she confirmed in a comment on her Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/questions/844407-is-this-kind-of-like-a-retelling-of-the.

² It’s a pretty good read. Here it is on Hive if you’d like to get hold of it: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Karen-McManus/One-Of-Us-Is-Lying/20668158. Although I read it on the Libby app, recently introduced to me by a good friend to whom I am consequently most grateful: https://meet.libbyapp.com/. If you have a public library card and like the sound of being able to borrow ebooks and audiobooks for free, I unequivocally recommend Libby.

³ Here’s Luke 12: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+12&version=ESVUK. You’ll have to click back a chapter for the bit about the dinner-party.