The second of three ruminations on Frederick Buechner’s, “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, & Fairy Tale.” Yesterday, I wrote on the Gospel as tragedy, and introduced the idea of Gospel as story, specifically as it relates to truth. Today, I’m turning my attention to a lighter side of the Gospel…
Gospel as Comedy
And of course, there is the comedy, the unforeseeableness, of the election itself. Of all the peoples, he chose the Jews, who as somebody has said are just like everybody else only more so — more religious than anybody whey they were religious and when they were secular, being secular as if they’d invented it. And the comedy of the covenant — God saying “I will be your God and you shall be my people” (Exodus 6:7) to a people who before the words had stopped ringing in their ears were dancing around the golden calf like aborigines and carrying on with every agricultural deity and fertility god that came down the pike. And yet it was this people who produced, as their greatest king but one, a king who danced another dance altogether: David the king stripping himself down to his fig leaf and to the unmixed horror of his aristocratic wife dancing like a madman before the ark of the Lord because more than most he got the wonderful joke of it. The comedy of grace as what needn’t happen and can’t possibly happen because it can only impossibly happen and happens in the dark that only just barely fails to swallow it up.1
Some may gasp at the above words… and I believe Buechner wrote them to incite such a gasp. Tragedy leaves a mark on our lives and an age-old remedy has always been comedy. We are a culture that makes fun of the sacred — we send comedians to war zones and draw caricatures of our leaders in precarious positions.2 In this sense comedy is communal — it is shared relief at the passing of danger. Laughter is a coping mechanism allowing us to recognize the danger of life and yet not be paralyzed by it… Just as tears of sorrow are outward release of our inward pain, the joy of laughter liberates us from the tension in our gut and lightens our shared reality.
So. In embracing the comedy of the Gospel, we are not making light of it, rather we are fervently endorsing the truth of it. Hope is the wellspring of laughter, faith is the expectation of the impossible and love is the root that binds us together. A threefold cord is not easily broken, and if our goal is to entwine our lives to these Gospel truths, we must see our life as comedy. We must laugh at our folly, find joy in tragedy and expect the impossible… the last of which is better said, “believe in fairy tale!” But that is for tomorrow.
__________________________
Photo: © ISIK5
1. Buechner, Frederick; “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale.” HaperCollins Publishers; 1977. pg 58.
2. Thomas Fluharty – is an artist that is also a Christian… His work can be found all over, mostly having to do with Political caricatures, he is one of the main cover artists for The Weekly Standard.
