Christianity is Comedy, not Tragedy

cartoon by John Guido

What makes this funny? (If you don't think it's funny, just pretend.) A chastened spirit is the last thing you expect from a Viking. Yet Haldor, who is clearly just coming off a rampage or an outburst of Nordic wrath, is looking all sheepish and so-very-sorry. My eleventh grade teacher told us that humor is the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Think of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Airplane.

But for that reason, Haldor illustrates the gospel. That transformation, that new nature, that unnatural kindness and, on the other hand, that brokenness over the evil that lurks within and bursts forth, is what Jesus does with sinners.

Christianity, in that respect, is comedy, not tragedy. My wife, a Grove City College educated English teacher, tells me that comedies and tragedies are distinguished by how they end. Comedies end in weddings, whereas tragedies end in funerals. Consider Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing ends in a wedding; Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet end in funerals. The Bible ends with the hope and promise of a wedding. "The Spirit and the bride say, 'Come!'" Christ, the bridegroom, responds, "Yes, I am coming soon" (Revelation 22:17, 20).

I recall Patrick Downey (assoc. prof. of philosophy, St Mary's College, CA) saying something like that when I knew him at Boston College fifteen years ago. You will find something of interest along those lines in his book, Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition (Lexington, 2001).

Back to humor--cartoon humor in particular--if you are interested in this subject, you need to read The Naked Cartoonist by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker. He knows what's funny, and he explains why what works works and why what doesn't doesn't. On pp. 21-22 his advice is "just a little more inking--and a lot more thinking." He shows the magic of layering an idea over what otherwise is an ordinary picture, perhaps just by a caption. I always found that this is what separated Bizzaro from The Far Side (aside from off-putting pointy characters versus attractive round ones).

You can read this 2006 HuffPost interview with him.

For example, "If you're watching America's Funniest Home Videos you never say, "I don't get it." You're not saying, "Ok, a guy fell off a chair. Can someone explain that to me again?" But if you're looking at a Danny Shanahan cartoon in which there's two praying mantises -one male and one female and the male is missing his head and the female is saying "You slept with her, didn't you?" There's something to piece together. There's a slight delay where these different sort of competing ideas come together - mesh and produce laughter."

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Postscript:

Gregory Wolfe in his wonderful essay, "The Tragic Sense of Life" (Image, Spring 2009), firmly rejects this association of the gospel with comedy, and he cites Hans Urs von Balthasar in support of his position:

The notion that Christianity is somehow alien to tragedy—that it is simply and straightforwardly “comic” because the resurrection makes for a happy ending—could not be more radically wrong. In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out three essential elements of tragedy: that the good things of the world cannot sustain themselves and are lost; that this places us in a position of contradiction or alienation; and that this condition is bound up with an “opaque guilt,” in which individual moral responsibility cannot account for all suffering, leaving us subject to a mysterious “inherited curse.”

According to von Balthasar, Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God. Christ “fulfills the contradiction of existence...not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end,’ as love....”

David Bentley Hart appears to disagree in The Beauty of the Infinite, pp.374ff.

The Trinity and Harmony

Trinitarian teaching is usually presented as a bare but inscrutable fact one must simply accept. “We can’t understand it, but we must accept it because the Bible teaches it.” Or it is defended on consequentialist grounds. If God is not Trinitarian, and thus if Jesus is not God, then Christ’s sacrifice for sin was ineffective, and there is no salvation from sin.

But while it is true that the Trinity is ultimately incomprehensible, it is equally true that the world makes no sense without it. The deepest desires of the human heart make no sense without it. Or at least the Trinitarian nature of the Creator makes sense of those fundamental human longings in a way that no other religion or cosmology of any sort does.


When you reflect upon life, you can’t help but notice that there is conflict everywhere -- in marriage, between siblings, at work, on the road in government, between nations...even within oneself. It is inescapable. So how do you deal with that?

1. You can force everyone else to submit to your will. This is tyranny, and we have seen it in men like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and more recently in Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But people who deal with conflict this way end up entirely miserable.

2. Another way to deal with conflict is to preclude it by isolating yourself from everyone else. But this ends up in loneliness and self-absorption of a different sort. It is dehumanizing, and thus leads also to misery.

3. The third way, the one for which we were created, is to seek harmony through love. Because we were made in the image of the Trinitarian God, we were made for loving harmony, not for self-centered isolation, nor for self-centered domination. Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in perfect agreement without any one of them oppressing the others and without each one walling himself off from the others. They exist in eternal, loving harmony.

Handel's Messiah

We can understand harmony between one another by the example God the Creator has given in music. Each note is different; it has a place in the musical order that God has created. That order is fixed. Not even Congress can change the notes, not even if they appropriated $700 billion to do it. Notes are notes. Each note, considered on its own, is beautiful and glorifying to God. But it does not fulfill its purpose until it’s arranged with other notes, e.g. in a melody. Still more glorifying to God, however, is the arrangement of notes in harmony with one another. In a harmony, a number of notes form one sound. That is most glorifying to God because it most resembles the Trinity itself. In a chord of three notes, the three are clearly discernable within one sound.

Accordingly, when we, who were made in his image, live in harmony with one another, we glorify him. We live in harmony when we live as God created us and gifted us to be. Sour notes produce cacophony, not harmony. Sin is a spiritually sour note. That harmonious living involves respecting what God created and gifted others to be. I Corinthians 12 pictures the church this way--as the body of Christ with many parts, each doing its part and respecting all the others for their contributions. This requires knowing godliness in general, and your own gifts and calling in particular. It also requires knowing the other gifts and callings, and respecting what God does with them.

Thus, in Christ, people, like different notes, can come together—regardless of race, class, occupation—and, without surrendering their differences, can find beautiful, God-glorifying unity of purpose. This is not the moralistic, relativistic celebration of difference we hear trumpeted as gospel these days. Nor is it a libertarianism that stands formalistically aloof from distinctions between good and evil. Rather, it is the harmony-shalom-unity that does not deny difference, but honors it's glorious divine purpose.

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What others are saying:

David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite (p.276)

“The image of cosmic music is an especially happy way of describing the analogy of creation to the trinitarian life. Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.”

Robert Letham in The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (pp. 438f.)

“The whole idea of developing a theme, of moving progressively and purposefully to a goal, of returning after a myriad of complex modulations to a resolution, of a variety of instruments playing different notes that are all part of a single score, is based on the matrix of realities found in the created order, which the Holy Trinity put there in the work of creation itself, and which reflects who he is.”

Also in Letham, p. 446

“Only a God who is triune can be personal. Only a Holy trinity can be love. Human love cannot possibly reflect the nature of God unless God is a Trinity of persons in union and communion. A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person. And if God is not personal, neither can we be—and if we are not persons, we cannot love. This marks a vast, immeasurable divide between those cultures that follow a monotheistic, unitary deity and those that are permeated by the Christian teaching on the Trinity. Trinitarian theology asserts that love is ultimate because God is love, because he is three persons in undivided loving communion. By contrast, Islam asserts that Allah is powerful and that his will is ultimate, before which submission (islam) is required.”

Pray For Your Pastor

The pastoral ministry is an especially difficult calling. A good minister, like the Good Shepherd he serves, spends himself to exhaustion and gives himself sacrificially for the flock under his care. The labor is particularly demanding because not only is a gospel minister the special target of everything in this world, both seen and unseen, that hates Christ and wants to see his Kingdom fall (as if that were possible), but he also suffers from the assaults of the people whom he serves. He's too dull; he's too passionate. He preaches too long; he preaches to lite. Too much doctrine; too many stories. I just don't like him. He's not the man we had before, or the man I heard at the conference.

Bill Shishko, may pastor at Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is a thoroughly sound and remarkably pastoral preacher, and he recently preached on the importance of praying for your pastor (or, if you are a pastor, the importance of resting in prayer for blessing in your ministry).

Having cautioned the Christians in Ephesus to equip themselves spiritually with the full armor of God and to pray at all times for all the brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul adds a special request to pray for him in particular. He says to pray, "also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak" (6:19f. ESV).

I will not attempt to reproduce the sermon, or even the sermon outline, but only offer some wisdom that I gleaned from the message.

When you pray for your minister, you are praying for yourself. Paul instructed Timothy, "Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for in so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers" (1 Timothy 4:16). Your minister feeds your soul from the word of God. As he thrives, in due course you will thrive.

The minister's vices often become a virus in the church. When he goes astray, he takes a large part of the church with him into destructive error.

Pray for the minister in his preaching, research, devotional reading, broader reading, prayer life, thought life, counseling, local church government, wider denominational responsibilities, private encounters, family life, finances, worries and encouragement. He is not a rock. Christ is the Rock. He is a sinner like you, a broken vessel through whose weakness God manifests his strength and glory.

A minister's family faces special challenges. There are unique strains on his marriage and pressures on his children. Breakdown in his family has a profound effect through him on the church, on visitors to the church, and on those who are watching the church. Pray for them.

The minister feeds his sheep by his preaching; the flock supports the minister by their prayer.

Before you criticize your pastor, pray for him. No, first develop a history of praying for him.