The Gospel as Comedy

The place to start is with a woman laughing. She is an old woman, and, after a lifetime in the desert, her face is cracked and rutted like a six-month drought. She hunches her shoulders around her ears and starts to shake. She squinnies her eyes shut, and her laughter is all China teeth and wheeze and tears running down as she rocks back and forth in her kitchen chair. She is laughing because she is pushing ninety-one hard and has just been told she is going to have a baby. Even though it was an angel who told her, she can’t control herself, and her husband can’t control himself either. He keeps a straight face for a few seconds longer than she does, but he ends by cracking up, too. Even the angel is not unaffected. He hides his mouth behind his golden scapular, but you can still see his eyes. They are larkspur blue and brimming with something of which the laughter of the old woman and her husband is at best only a rough translation…

…No matter what the immediate occasion is of either your laughter or your tears, the object of both ends up being yourself and your own life… One thinks of ourselves, who do not need to be poets or philosophers or kings or Christs to know these things too if we will speak what we feel and not what we ought to say. As much as it is our hope, it is our hopelessness that brings us to church of a Sunday, and any preacher who, whatever else he speaks, does not speak to that hopelessness might as well save his breath.

Then a strange and unexpected sound is heard. It is like the creaking of a rusty hinge. It is like ice starting to crack up in a pond in March. It is like the sound of hens cackling, of the old Ford trying to turn over on a winter morning. IT is the sound of laughter, of an old woman and an old man knocking themselves out in a tent. It starts out dry and small and ends so uproarious and big that to preserve his dignity even the angel has to turn his face aside.

-from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale by Frederick Buechner