Don't let anyone ever convince you that Jesus is always serious. Granted, there are moments in the gospels when he is very serious: more often about money than anything else, despite the topics that we argue about on the basis that they matter greatly to Jesus. On a side note, it is worth correlating how much 21st century air time is given to any given topic against how many times the gospels have Jesus talking about the same subject. All too rarely do we spend our time in discussions and debates that were at the top of Jesus list of important topics, values or behaviours. But back to today's theme: Jesus jokes ..

The fundamental truth is that Jesus is a story teller. The gospels are peppered with stories that we, for some reason, possibly because we think of stories as fairy-tales of fantasy or obfuscations around the truth, call parables. But they are stories: the story of the Good Samaritan, the story of the Lost Coin, the story of the Sower.

These are accounts of events that happen on regularly, if not every day; but they are not accounts of an actual event. They are invented constructs to carry a message. 

None of this is news to you, I'm sure. But, push that ability to tell stories one step further and it's not difficult to begin to accept that Jesus could spin a yarn or tell a joke. After all, all this happened a mere two thousand years ago which is but a drop in the ocean of time: human being haven't evolved much, if at all, since then. We can fly to the moon and fall in love with someone on the other side of the planet, but (as Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago) "If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?"

We are, in essence, no different to the women and men gathered around Jesus hearing him tell the story of the Sower and the seed. And, I would imagine, at the end of the story there would have been a grown from the crowd as the realisation spread that he ended the story with a terrible pun: "Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!"

Comedians come in all shapes and sizes: not all of us find Victoria Wood funny; not all of us laugh with Alan Carr. You may not appreciate the jokes that Jesus tells, but for me it is another insight into both the humanity of Jesus and the nature of the divine who creates us, loves us and laughs with (and not at) us.

Dan Tyndall

14 July 2023