![]() This last one was in the temple, where a coin with a head on it was considered an idol.). ![]() “Let he who is without sin, through the first stone” and “show me a coin”. They happily denounce others and make the opposition look silly, and therefore objects of humour. I heard many captivating Muslim preachers, and they rarely used what we would call humour. The use of humour in public speaking is also a lot less. Verbal humour and word play was much less a part of the culture. a doctor dressing as a sweeper and sweeping the floor) and the Jester figure (e.g. I lived for 17 years in Bangladesh and saw 3 main types of humour: slapstick people acting out of social position (e.g. The gap from 0AD Palestinian Culture to today is a lot bigger than the gap between German and English. Humour is one of the hardest concepts to understand in crossing cultures. In an earlier discussion on this subject, Colin Edwards makes this observation: Having had lunch at a local cafe one day, I went up to the owner to ask if I could pay, to which he replied ‘Yes, if you want to!’ The teasing humour of our driver on a trip to the desert did not go down well with a Dutch family we were travelling with, who interpreted his joking comments as rude insults! If it is hard for humour to travel from one modern culture to another, how much harder must it be to interpret humour from the ancient world? A couple of years ago, we went on a short trip to Morocco, and we discovered that Moroccans have quite a distinctive, teasing sense of humour. ![]() So can we find humour in Jesus’ teaching? Can we identify it with confidence, and how might it affect our preaching and teaching? Understanding humour across cultural boundaries is notoriously difficult. And Christian preaching and theology has generally resisted C S Lewis’ dictum that ‘joy is the serious business of heaven’. ![]() He was clearly thought to be a party animal, and it is hard to imagine this without some laughter being involved.ĭespite all this, I think it is fair to say that Jesus is not often described as laughing-there is no equivalent ‘Jesus laughed’ to the Johannine ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11.35). Another strong clue comes in the accusation by his opponents (recorded in Luke 7.34 and Matt 11.19) that Jesus was ‘a glutton and a wine drinker’. If someone is full of joy, looks to heaven, and talks of praise, it is quite hard not to imagine this person laughing. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.” The most obvious is in Luke 10.21:Īt that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. We get a glimpse of this in Job 38–41, where God’s account of creation does focus on God’s power as creator-but also on God’s playfulness in the strangeness and variety in the creation.Īnd there are some direct clues about Jesus’ joyfulness, and so we might infer his laughter. It has been said that playfulness is the hallmark of intelligence, so we might expect the ultimate intelligence behind the universe to be ultimately playful. And this accords with our own experience-that we often find people who are funny are the most alive, and that there are times when a good laugh can restore our sense of humanity.Īnd if Jesus is the embodiment of the divine, that might also lead us to expect him to be funny. In his 1971 book A Rumour of Angels, sociologist Peter Berger argued that humour was one of the seven signs of transcendence in human life. If Jesus was fully human-indeed, the perfect embodiment of humanity-then we might expect him to be funny since this is a hallmark of humanity. There are many prima facie reasons why we might suppose Jesus was funny. In his teaching, did he tell what we might call jokes, and did his listeners find themselves laughing when they listened to him? ![]() For some time, I have been intrigued by the question of whether Jesus was funny. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |