Uplifting Laughter
Have you ever noticed that when looking at pictures of the great men and women of God that they’re never laughing? In fact, it’s rare that they are even smiling. What do you make of this? Did they not know joy?
Their biographies indicate they knew deep joy, abiding joy, and knew it better than most of us do.
The same seems to be true of Jesus, too. There were no belly busters from him! No head-thrown-back-in-laughter! No back-slapping, joke-swapping, rollicking humor!
Harry Emerson Fosdick tells us that Jesus “let the ripple of a happy breeze play over the surface of his mighty deep.”
He was never yucking it up with the disciples, or trading jokes with rowdier ones in the crowd.
Jesus frequently asked questions, but never one beginning, “Did you hear the one about …?”
As with Jesus, it is also difficult to imagine God grinning—Buddha, maybe, but not God.
The guffaws of a goofy God? Never ever!
The chuckles of a cackling Christ? Won’t happen!
The hilarity of a hooting Holy Spirit? Don’t count on it!
I can imagine each member on stage in Heaven, but not to do a comedy routine.
So is there a place for laughter in Kingdom life? Yes, there is. According to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus prophesied, “They shall laugh.”
Once the great battle with Satan is over and none of his work is left on the scene, the impulse of laughter will find its place and need no imposed restraints.
In his book, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, D.E. Harding said that “… heaven is lighthearted and merry … the skies are one broad smile, and the galaxies are even now shaking their fiery manes with laughter ….”
Thomas Carlyle noted that often: “True humor … issues not in laughter, but in still smiles which lie far deeper.” According to Louis Sabatier, the nineteenth-century French theologian, in Jesus alone “optimism is without frivolity, and seriousness without despair.”
This is not the same story with Satan. G.D. Watson observed: “… Scripture never reveals Satan as a being of levity in himself. The starless gloom of eternal night is fastened upon his awful malignant nature, and his very laugh would indicate a fiendish misery.”
It seems ironic that with many comedians, the longer their routine goes, the greater this sense of a descending darkness manifests. For all their jokes, they’re not happy people—a fact their biographies later confirmed.
Perhaps this is because they crossed the line into flippancy. Flippancy is the ability to see the funny side when there isn’t a funny side.
The Bible cautions us to avoid jesting. One of the reasons for this being: Jesting makes a play on words, and in so doing disinvests our belief in our own words. When making a faith transaction with God, it is critical that we believe in the words we speak. However, that belief gets eroded the more jesting occurs.
Charles Kingsley spoke of “the sacred duty of being happy.” Not a shallow happiness that has more to do with favorable circumstances than it does with a radiance emanating from a transformed life.
Can a Christian enjoy a joke just because it’s funny? Sure, there are good jokes like that. I don’t have a formula for funny. Nor am I making any attempt in this post to catalogue the types of humor in the Bible, or cite the virtues of humor itself.
Of course, laughter has its place! Ecclesiastes reminds us there is a time to laugh.
But that time is not every time. And what we think is funny may not be funny to God.
“Oh, don’t be a kill joy,” some people will say. Yet much laughter does precisely that. It numbs the mind, dulls the soul, and deadens our capacity to experience real joy.
One could slap the knee and say, “Oh, that’s a good one!” But have you ever noticed how quickly we forget the jokes we hear?
There may be a reason for that. Perhaps we forget because it’s not important enough to remember. So how good was it, really?
It is uplifting laughter we want, not a laughter that degrades others, blurs truth, and desensitizes the soul to the higher purposes of life.
The laughter that friends share, drawing them closer together is uplifting.
The laughter that shrinks ego and keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously is uplifting.
The laughter that flows from a godly gladness is uplifting.
It is not that difficult to distinguish uplifting humor from the unkind, unfriendly, or even unimportant humor that offers nothing which edifies.
