The Last Laugh

"The Last Laugh"--April 12, 2017

"Then the soldiers led him into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters); and they called together the whole cohort.  And they clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him.  And they began saluting him, “Hail, King of the Jews!”  They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him.  After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him." [Mark 15:16-20]

Voltaire once famously said that God is a comedian playing to an audience afraid to laugh.  I think something like that isn’t too far from the truth.  Or at least you could say that the world is forever missing the upside-down hilarity of God’s divine comedy, and instead tries to replace it with its own twisted, dark, and cruel sense of humor.  The sinful world is just missing the real punch line.

The Roman soldiers here—who really do epitomize the worst of human wickedness here—think they are being cruelly funny with Jesus.  He is charged with calling himself the King of the Jews (a charge that has completely misunderstood what Jesus intends by a “kingdom” but which is the closest thing to a crime he can be charged with), so the soldiers decide to make a mockery of him as a king.  They think it is hilarious fun to humiliate Jesus and to ridicule him, the way every bully thinks they are brilliantly funny when they pick on their targets.  They get a kick out of dressing him up as a pathetic satire of a king, then laughing and pointing at the grotesque game of dress-up they have put together with Jesus.  We have seen their faces and their actions throughout history, too, in places with names like Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib.  We have seen all too well the way the ones in power try to puff themselves up and flex their dominating muscle by degrading the prisoners in their charge and rubbing their faces in it.  Seen only from the perspective of the soldiers and their frame of mind, it is all a sick joke they think they are playing on Jesus.

Of course, we Christians see things from a different perspective, too.  We see a certain dramatic irony to the whole thing that the soldiers cannot understand.  We see a glimpse of God’s preposterous divine comedy through the darkness.  To be a Christian, after all, is about learning to appreciate God’s sense of humor, the way you grow to know the same in a friend or acquaintance over time.  It takes time, but eventually you come to recognize their own unique brand of comedy.  And God’s is absolutely hilarious, once you know how to recognize it.

The soldiers, remember, think that it’s funny to dress Jesus up in a purple robe with a crown of thorns because they think he isn’t really a king.  They think they are mocking him for what he claims to be, but is not.  But we know better.  We know that Jesus is precisely who he says he is—not only God’s long-promised Messiah, but the very Son of God, and the bringer of God’s own Kingdom.  And even more outlandish is that suffering and weakness are exactly God’s way of reigning and redeeming that kingdom.  The soldiers think they are making a mockery of Jesus, when in fact they don’t know how right they are!  Jesus does in fact reign from a cross.  He really does exercise his authority by laying down his life.  The grand and cosmic punch line for us is that the soldiers don’t realize that Jesus has come precisely for the cross, and that their cruel actions are not truly hindering God’s rescue of creation, but are precisely the way our God chooses to save:  through suffering, self-giving love that lays its life down for us.  The soldiers just don’t get it.

In his book Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that “…The mockery of the Roman soldiers misfires when they dress Jesus up…. The soldiers are not, as they suppose, just ridiculing a poor, distraught, and deluded man about to be crucified, but holding up to ridicule all who exercise power, thereby making power itself derisory, so that henceforth thorns will be woven into every crown, and under every scarlet robe there will be stricken flesh.”

Like Rome itself, the soldiers miss that part of God’s grand joke, because they cannot possibly fathom power being used to serve, or victory that doesn’t come about by putting your boot on someone else’s face.  They cannot understand the blessed hilarity of God’s kind of comedy.  And so they miss the fact that, in their attempt to mock Jesus, they are really mocking Rome’s own thick-headedness.  It cannot even recognize that God is using Caesar (who likes to think he is almighty and divine) and his armies to rescue the world from the clutches of its own twisted sense of humor.

And that, truly, is what makes God’s kind of comedy divine.  It’s not that the world doesn’t suffer from a sick and twisted sense of humor.  It’s that God refuses to let this sinful world’s cruelty get the last laugh—even if it means using the mockery of the crucifying soldiers as raw materials to build an even bigger cosmic punch-line: the redemption of the world.

That is the great and grand joke we are let in on as the followers of Jesus: that even when evil does its damnedest to humiliate and mock the good, God pulls the rug out from under evil itself and throws a pie in death’s face by using suffering love to rescue us.  And love that like… well, that is downright hilarious.

O Lord our God, give us to us the vision to see your great divine comedy, and to trust that you are able to weave together all our loose ends into your grand design to mend a broken world.