Holy Laughter

Fairy tales do not deny the existence of…sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence if you will) universal final defeat….giving a glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

—J.R.R. Tolkien.

Warm–up: Genesis 21:1-8

It is a commonplace of Christian thought that joy is deep tranquility, yet it seems to me that biblical joy is something more: it is “holy laughter”—the laughter of Sarah, for example: “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” 

Behind Sarah’s laugh lay a promise. Twenty-five years before, a mysterious visitor, actually God in disguise, promised Abraham that he would have a son (Genesis 18:9–15). Sarah, eavesdropping on the other side of the 

tent flap, chuckled to herself in disbelief. 

Why did Sarah laugh? Was it a belly laugh over the naivety of men? Was it the self–depreciating laugh of one who considered herself unworthy of God’s grace? Was it a bitter laugh over the disappointment of past hopes? We're not told. What we are told is that Abraham’s body was dead, and, as the KJV text so quaintly puts it, “it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women” (Hebrews 11:12; Genesis: 18:11).

But, though it seemed impossible, the Lord did for Sarah what He had promised: Sarah “bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.” God created new life in Sarah’s dead body—the promised seed, the link to the One who would bring salvation to the world. And Sarah laughed again, this time the laughter of joyous surprise. 

Joy is akin to humor, which, they tell me, is the sudden perception of an incongruity. A story takes an unexpected twist, jerks our minds around and we laugh. A joke, in other words, is a “surprise.” 

The etymology of the word “joy” suggests a similar idea—surprise. (That’s the basis of the pun in Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy.) God sends a happy surprise and the emotion we feel is joy.

G. K. Chesterton claimed that joy, “which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian…and the dominant theme of Christian faith. By its creed (i.e., what we believe) joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special (occasional) and small.” In other words, certain things we believe lead us to laugh. We “get the joke.” 

Joy comes with a sudden perception of truth, when some word of God breaks into our minds. George McDonald says, “[The Christian] does not take his joy from himself. He feels joy in himself, but it comes to him from God.”  

Joy is an “Aha!” moment, a startling revelation, a sudden awareness, an abrupt remembrance of God’s goodness and grace. [1]

I think of a friend who spent four years and thousands of dollars pursuing a Ph.D. at a West Coast university only to be told shortly before graduation that his Christian pre–suppositions precluded the degree. For a moment Bob envisioned dollars and days sprouting wings and flying away. Then a truth came to mind, accompanied by the words of an old hymn: 

I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold,

I’d rather be His than have riches untold . . .

I’d rather have Jesus than anything this world affords today. 

And Bob laughed, a clear, ringing laugh—at which point his advisor thought he’d lost his mind. But this was not insanity. Bob just “got the joke.”

I think of another example, this time from C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The White Witch, with deep magic, had put Aslan to death on the Stone Table. The children, distraught at his death, wandered back to the table to mourn him, only to find that he had risen from the dead! (A deeper magic had brought Aslan back to life.)

[Aslan] stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads and landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn't know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round and round the hilltop he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs. It was such a romp as no one has ever had, except in Narnia! 

“The joy of the Lord is your strength!” Nehemiah chortled (Nehemiah 8:10). This is gigantic joy, a joy that only God and His people can know!

May our sides split with holy laughter!

[1] The devil hates our laughter. “Joy,” C. S. Lewis’s demon, Screwtape, writes to his nephew, “is a disgusting and a direct assault to the realism, dignity and austerity of hell.”

From, Out of the Ordinary, David Roper, Discovery House Publishing, 2015,