G. K. Chesterton once commented that the most hidden thing about God is his laughter. Speaking of Christ in his book Orthodoxy he writes:
I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
Elsewhere he says,
We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
What follows are my cautious speculations about holy laughter.
Pure Happiness
I have often wondered why we see so little laughter and levity in the Bible. The kind of laughter I’m thinking of here is pure light and cotton candy. Pure happiness. There is hardly a mention of righteous laughter that I can think of, except Psalm 2:4 and 59:8—the LORD’s laughter at the foolishness of the wicked. There seems to be no lack of mocking in Scripture, but far less often do we find joyful laughter. Can we suppose the sons of God shouting for joy over the creation of the world in Job 38:7 might have included some laughter?
I wonder if in the new creation we will at times express our gratitude in laughter. Absurdity, the unexpected, and the incongruous very often provoke laughter. What fits that description better than God’s great mercy toward us? Is it perhaps peals of holy laughter that are most appropriate in response to this?
Joy and Gratitude
I think of two friends of mine from school at Azusa Pacific University: charismatic lads named Rob and Aaron. They were quick to laugh, at the smallest and silliest things. It seemed to come from them as a response to joy, in my memory. They would laugh if they stumbled and caught themselves on their longboards; they would laugh if one of them forgot a word when trying to make some point; they would laugh in the middle of singing songs of praise, their eyes closed and faces lifted up.
I can envision the holy assembly feasting with the Lord, laughing endlessly like Rob and Aaron, not at ribaldry or the scatalogical or other foolishness, since such things will probably all have passed away, but from sheer insurmountable gratitude at the fact that they were included in the feast. All those things may have passed away, but I can’t imagine laughter passing away. Paul does, after all, oppose gratitude to crude talk and joking (Eph 5:4); perhaps because one is the right, the other a wrong, source of laughter.
Equivocity
And it may be we can see this in the Saviour himself. In his essay “Laughter and the Between” Duncan Bruce Reyburn writes
Humor … requires what C.S. Lewis calls ‘a taste for the other’. It requires a protagonistic shift, a decentering of self, that the univocal does not allow. Against this undiluted univocity, Chesterton is often toying with multiple perspectives.[1]
Reyburn explains that univocity is a single way of speaking or seeing, as opposed to equivocity, which is two ways of seeing at once. It’s like a pun: I can say, “I got hit with a bat,” and only context will reveal if I mean a long piece of wood or an animal with leathery wings. To use a word in one way when we know our audience will hear another is one form of what we’d call equivocation. But equivocity doesn’t require deception or mistake; it’s a way of toying with perspectives. When done well, it is generous and hopeful of learning. With reverence, I speculate that the incarnation—the divine and the human joined in the person of Christ—may be the most glorious instance of equivocity in all of creation.[2]
The Ultimate Comedy
I wonder if everything was sadder and funnier to Christ than to any other human who has ever lived. He could see it all from our perspective and from God’s. He could feel the lightness of the angels and the heaviness of those who are bound to the earth. He came and lived what looked like a tragedy so that he could accomplish the ultimate comedy, the great happy ending. I want to see this way too, as much as possible.
And I will, when I see him face to face and become like him (1 Jn 3:2). If I partake of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4), perhaps I’ll be in on the divine joke and become a partaker in the divine laughter.
[1] Reyburn, Duncan. “Laughter and the Between: G. K. Chesterton and the Reconciliation of Theology and Hilarity.” (2015).
[2] The incarnation was possible because we are related to God by what some theologians call an analogy of being. God is different from us, he is the Creator not a creature. But he is not wholly other, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hear from him or know anything about him.
