Easter Sermon
April 1, 2018
by: Jennifer Garrison Brownell
According to Miles Townes, the last time Easter fell on April Fools’ Day was in 1956. Due to the quirks involved in dating Easter against the Gregorian calendar, the two coincide only intermittently. After today, the next one is not until 2029.
The two only coincide intermittently, since the 325 Council of Nicea decided that Easter would be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox.
I am a fan of Easter. Both our faith family celebration and its secular manifestations – bunnies and eggs and baskets. I am not, however, a fan of April Fools’ Day. Maybe this is because I don’t love being surprised, at least not in the spider-on-your-pillow-oh-haha-it’s-just-a-plastic-spider way. In my experience, life has enough adrenaline rushes without manufacturing them.
Maybe because “Geez it’s just a JOKE” has been too often used to brush off actions or comments that are in fact quite hurtful. In comedy, they call this punching down, instead of punching up. Humor is found in the difference between calling the powerful to account and bullying the weak.
Kira Schlesinger says, “But, going beyond pranks or practical jokes, there is something in humor that can reveal truth and help call power to account. The role of the court jester or “fool” was not only to entertain with dance, music, and comedy but also to give bad news to the ruler.
In Shakespearean plays, the jester is often the voice of common sense and honesty, pointing out the follies of those in higher stations. As the lowliest member of the court, the jester could make political observations and judgments that would land a higher nobleman in jail.
In the Middle Ages, Death was often portrayed in jester’s garb as one who has the last laugh and who humbles everyone regardless of standing, just as the jesters made fun of everyone. In other words, he was ALWAYS punching up.
In our celebration of Easter, in our encounter with the empty tomb, in our experience of the Risen Christ, we know that Death does not get the last laugh. If anyone should be in the jester’s garb – telling truth to power in the way only he can – it is Jesus.
The poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” — a kind of guiding principle for a jester or fool. There are ways in which we can call the abuses of power to account by means of joke or satire that we cannot say directly. And no one was more skilled than Jesus in telling it slant.
When Miles Townes recounts his first encounter with Kurt Vonnegut’s essay “Palm Sunday” he says, “Kurt Vonnegut (another slant-master) was not a Christian, yet he was invited to preach at an Episcopal church on Palm Sunday, 1980 (alas, March 30). Vonnegut takes on Matthew 26, in which Jesus says, “For you always have the poor with you” in response to Judas’ complaint that money spent to anoint Jesus should have been given to the poor —a text that is notoriously problematic for all sorts of Christians.
Vonnegut argues that Jesus is not dismissing Judas’s concern for the poor, but rather making a joke at Judas’s expense. To make the joke clearer, Vonnegut paraphrases it: “Judas, don’t worry about it. There will be plenty of poor people left long after I’m gone.”
This, Vonnegut says, is a “divine black joke, well suited to the occasion. It says everything about hypocrisy and nothing about the poor. It is a Christian joke, which allows Jesus to remain civil, but to chide [Judas] about his hypocrisy just the same.’”
Unlike the plastic spider in the bed prank, “A joke need not be frivolous or false, and in fact the best jokes are neither.
In John 8, when Jesus tells the mob preparing to stone an adulterous woman, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,” he is both deadly serious and also making a joke.
One reason we miss jokes in the Bible is our Puritan tradition of disdain for levity, which tends to frame the things Jesus says as pithy ripostes or clever aphorisms—but not jokes.” (Townes)
But Jesus knew that “telling good jokes (and getting them) is deeply tied to our moral imagination. See, jokes have structure, usually a premise and a conclusion held in tension. A good joke depends on our ability to see the difference between the world as it is and as it might be.”
For a while when I was a kid, whenever I was called up to perform at talent shows (which for preacher’s kids happens surprisingly often) I would contrive to slip on a banana peel. Because there! On the ground! Where no banana should ever be! A banana peel!
A good joke in the moral sense, then, depends on our ability to see the difference between is and should. A good joke can light up the dark between the two, can help us see one from the other. The banana peel is old and tired, but a good joke helps us see the distance between who we are and who we should be.
Towns also says, “Who but Jesus ever saw so clearly the distance between is and should? Who else had the imagination to grasp fully the gulf between heaven and earth?
The jokes Jesus tells show us our predicament: made in the image of God but separated by our own brokenness from God’s grace. Laughter is both human and humane, an essential tool to help us cross the distance to God.
Therefore, it is neither stretch nor slight to say that the resurrection was a joke—and a good one. What more could Jesus have done to mock the world that killed him than rise from the dead? When we say we are Easter people, we say we live in the light Jesus brought to the darkness between what is and what should be. We say that we follow Jesus. Jesus, who went so far into what SHOULD BE that even his own dearest friends could not recognize him.
“Jokes can be noble,” says Vonnegut. “Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears.”
We so often encounter the Jesus who wept. This Easter, this April Fools’ Day, We celebrate with the Jesus who laughed. Who laughed and lived, that we might live. Amen.