Funny Things Can Happen on Your Way through the Bible, Volume 2: Humor and Wit in the Catholic and Orthodox Canons

By Charles D. Barrett and John M. Bullard

"In these meditations upon Scripture, the author quickly, lightly opens up the sacred text to us in a way that--to my knowledge--has never been attempted in the entire history of the Christian faith. Through irony, pun, parody, spoof, and joke he reads Scripture with tongue in cheek, a rhyme in his pen, and a smile on his face. If you ever wondered what the Bible would sound like if it were written by Ogden Nash (and who hasn't?), here it is, Charlie Barrett's religious rhymes."
--William H. Willimon, acclaimed author and Dean of the Chapel emeritus, Duke University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jun 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781498275286

Charles D. Barrett

Charles D. Barrett is Peter B. Hendrix Professor emeritus of Religion at Wofford College and author of Understanding the Christian Faith (1980), God Under Our Skin: A Search for the Theological Jesus (2006), and Funny Things Can Happen on Your Way through the Bible 1: Scriptural Oddities and Odd Thoughts about Them (Wipf and Stock, 2010).

Book preview

Funny Things Can Happen on Your Way through the Bible

Scriptural Oddities and Odd Thoughts about Them in a Book of More Rhyme Than Reason

Charles D. Barrett

With a Foreword by William H. Willimon

The Lord who sits enthroned in heaven laughs . . .

(Psalm 2:4, NEB)

2008.Resource_logo.jpg

Funny Things Can Happen on Your Way through the Bible

Scriptural Oddities and Odd Thoughts about Them in a Book of More Rhyme Than Reason

Copyright © 2010 Charles D. Barrett. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-60899-393-2

eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7528-6

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Hein, Piet. Thoughts and Things, from Grooks 3. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1970. By permission of Hugo Piet Hein.

Howell, James. Excerpt from Myers Park United Methodist Church (Charlotte, N.C.) Pastoral Letter, April 6, 2009. By permission of the Rev. Dr. Howell.

Vallotton, Annie. Excerpt from interview with Paula Taquet-Woolfolk, published on Graham Kennedy’s The Bible Illustration Blog, September 18, 2008. By permission of Mr. Kennedy.

An index of topics and types of biblical humor, their location in Scripture, and their treatment in this book is available from the author’s blog,

grinnbarrett.wordpress.com.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: The Book of the Original Covenant

1—Torah

2—History

3—Wisdom and Poetry

4—Prophets

Part Two: The Book of the New Covenant

5—Gospels

6—Acts of the Apostles

7—The Letters of Paul

8—Letters General and Catholic

9—The Apocalypse

Notes

To my dear Sally,

Sandy and Thomas, Chris and Elise,

Caroline, Ian, Emma Ruth, Margaret,

and the other members of my beloved family

who have not only borne with my bizarre sense of humor

but have had the grace to respond in kind,

this book is dedicated.

Foreword

A funny thing happened to me on my way toward God this morning, namely, this book. All prepared for a serious, spiritual exercise to begin the day, earnestly searching the scriptures as John Wesley demanded I do, I was led to laughter. If you are able to read this book without laughing, then it’s a sure sign that you are beyond help, human or divine, well on your way to the fulfillment of Genesis 3:19b.

But of course as long as there is a God like the one who authored the Bible, Old Testament and New, then there is hope for help, even for (so far as I know) completely humorless people like John Wesley, founder of Methodism and progenitor of Methodist bishops. The ability to look upon the foibles and follies of the human race and smile, rather than to weep and wail, is surely a sign of the deepest grace. Laughter is a creative way of noting and enjoying, rather than cursing, the great gap between who we wish to God we were and who, honest to God, we actually are.

I think it was Reinhold Niebuhr (or was it Mae West?) who said that the essence of sin is to take yourself too seriously. Indeed all faithful Bible study has as its goal to take God a bit more seriously and ourselves a little less so. Laughter is not only a complex way of coping with the vicissitudes of life, but also (and here is where this book is deceptively light and funny) a deep way of thinking. The frontispiece says that the book is more rhyme than reason but I suspect that’s the author’s sly way of putting one over on us. This book is deep, serious theology and insightful biblical hermeneutics without your consciously knowing that’s what you are doing while reading it.

Charles Barrett was my teacher; Charlie, let’s call him, in the spirit of his book. Charlie led us undergrads into the thicket of Christian doctrine, periodically rescuing us from suffocation and despair with his outbursts of hearty laughter. As he does on many a page herein, Charlie saw humor where the rest of us didn’t. I remember some of his puns and ironic twists during classes on Medieval Christian Philosophy, and I’m sure others sailed right over our heads. Fortunately, Charlie only smiled. Anybody who gives his life to leading hormone besotted, boorish undergraduates into Christian theology had better be blessed with a sense of humor, and the good Lord blessed Charlie with more than his share.

Now, in these meditations upon scripture, Charlie quickly, lightly opens up the sacred text to us in a way that—to my knowledge—has never been attempted in the entire history of the Christian faith. (Erasmus came closest, taking several stabs at it, but without the extensive and intense attention to scripture found here.) Through irony, pun, parody, spoof and joke Charlie reads some of the most serious scripture with tongue in cheek, a rhyme in his pen, and a smile on his face. If you ever wondered what the Bible would sound like if it were written by Ogden Nash (and who hasn’t?) here it is, Charlie Barrett’s religious rhymes.

It’s a wonderful idea of Charlie’s to present this to us for reading each day. Take one of these each morning and then call me if you are still sick and tired of worshipping this God by evening. What sort of God would have had so much fun with us, would have put up with the rag tag clowns and knuckle heads in the Bible, except a God of love?

Did you hear the one about the God who set out to create a wonderful, beautiful world, only to have it messed up badly before the end of the story’s third chapter? And what did God do then? He who sits in the heavens laughs (Ps. 2). In a deceptively light hearted way, Charlie’s poems and reflections are what it’s like truly to look at the world sub specie aeternitatis, that is, as God looks at us. After reading Charlie’s Bible stories, retold in rhyme, I’m now sure that the good news is this: God has a sense of humor.

Cling to that as you ponder your eternal fate. I’m serious. What is your best hope in life, in death, in life beyond death? Answer: We all eventually go to God, not fearfully but gratefully, graciously, assured by Charlie and the whole of scripture that our destiny is not the fierce, wrathful judgment of a humorless deity, but rather the gracious, hearty laugh, the warm, generous smile of God. And the joke’s on us.

William H. Willimon

Student of Charlie Barrett and Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church

Acknowledgments

I must begin by acknowledging gratefully the inspiration and encouragement I’ve received, either by the incidental whetting of my sense of humor or by more deliberate interactions, first, from the members of my immediate family named in the Dedication but also from other family members (especially sister Betty, her husband Dave and their daughter Karen, who shares with me a birthday and a copy editor’s eagle eye for manuscript minutiae); then from friends and colleagues, especially Will Willimon, John Bullard, Bill Mallard, Jack Meadors, Melvin McIntosh, Gene Norris, and Gene Simpson; and finally from former students, other friends, and fellow Covenanters, particularly Covenant Study Groupers who have been tolerant listeners and occasional accessories to my chrymes, including Norma Ammen, Jack and Jan Banner, Sally Barrett, Joe and Dee Bowman, Steve Evatt, Beth Fricks, John and Doris McMakin, Fred and Toni Porter, Doris Prendergrast, Rip and Marsha Roper, Olyn and Sandy Shytle, Gene and Margaret Simpson, Sandy and Sue Whisnant, Barry and Kitty White, Beth Wilson, and Jim and Martha Wood.

Gratitude is also due each of the following:

Christian Amondson and Patrick Harrison of Wipf and Stock, who have seen me through the quandaries of getting the book published.

Karen Bell Carpenter and Sandy Barrett Moore, whose excellent copy-editing skills greatly improved the manuscript.

And, finally, Hugo Piet Hein, James Howell, and Graham Kennedy, for graciously granting permission to use materials to which they hold copyright.

Introduction

Perhaps it’s happened to you, too. Engaged in some serious reading on a serious subject, you come across an odd expression or a curious way of putting things that makes you laugh. Suddenly, you’re no longer just engaged in sober thought and a shared interest with an author—a.k.a. an authority. You’ve moved instead into something like a conversation with a person, a living, breathing individual whose felicity or eccentricity of expression has grabbed you below the brain level—at the level of the belly laugh or at least of the giggle box.

Some readers of the Bible have had similar experiences. I am one of them. Though not predisposed to allow room for impish spirits of wit and humor in Scripture, I have, over long years of reading it, been unable to exorcise or completely control those imps. The following pages reveal the degree to which they have come to possess me. And when, a couple of years ago, I set out to take a census of these odd occupants of Holy Writ, I quickly discovered that their number is legion. I’ve discovered, too, that the effect if not the purpose of these gremlins, in the Bible as in other texts, is to move us beyond issues of authority to acquaint us with the personalities—perhaps even, in Scripture’s case, the Great Personality—behind the writing.

As a rule, the wit and humor we find in the Bible seem more incidental than intentional, more a product of the writers’ character, their personal eccentricities, or the situations they describe than of their art and skill as narrators. The net effect of such artlessness is to disarm, charm, and move the reader far more effectively than authorial cunning could hope to. This effect may be one of the reasons many careful and regular readers have come to consider these writings inspired.¹

On occasions when the use of humor or wit in Scripture is obviously intentional—Jotham’s fable lampooning his brother Abimelech’s ambition, for example, or Elijah’s mockery of the priests of Baal, or the dry sarcasm of Jesus’ cutting comments to Nicodemus—the narrative retains its power to inspire because of its humor’s aptness to the dramas it describes and the insight it brings to the issues dramatized. Such examples alert us to the revelatory or spiritual value in humor—its ability to shine through facades or help us see around corners to bring the truth to light. My intentional attempts to bring into clearer focus the veiled, often incidental humor I find in many biblical texts are pale imitations of intentional uses of wit like the examples cited. I will be very pleased if, at least occasionally, they have comparable effects.

• • •

Despite the considerable evidence supporting it, many readers of Scripture are likely to resist the claim that humor is an important or very significant element in the sacred texts. Such a claim may seem both irreverent (an insult to the texts’ dignity) and irrelevant (a sidetrack diverting readers from their sublime themes and purposes).

Such objections represent important concerns. Without attempting to exhaust their number or complexity, let me address briefly two specific objections based on humor’s presumed irreverence and irrelevance. The first—the reverence issue—raises what could be called the Giggles and Guffaws don’t Gee-Haw with God objection. In Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., the play’s God-figure Mr. Zuss expresses this objection’s main point when he says of his biblical counterpart, "God never laughs! In the whole Bible!" Though it’s quite wrong on the facts, this statement summarizes a widely held opinion about the Bible’s depiction of God. The roots of the opinion lie almost surely in a respectful reverence, which should itself be respected. Unfortunately, the content of the opinion, as opposed to the attitude it expresses, betrays a completely unrespectable ignorance of Scripture, refuted not only by this book’s scriptural epigram but also by the Bible’s first joke (see Adam’s Nickname below), not to mention the witty, if not exactly jocular, exchanges that go on later in Genesis between The Lord, Adam, and Eve (e.g., Just us Trees) and the same Worthy, Abraham, and Sarah (Jehovah the Jokester). Reverence is one thing, meaning-obstructing opinionation something else, and it should give champions of humorless theologies pause to discover that the Bible’s first book sets out, almost as if intentionally, to debunk excessive solemnity. Moreover, the textual evidence should silence such folk completely when later books continue what Genesis starts, using humor and wit to reiterate and reinforce its presentation of the universe’s Creator as something of a practical joker, unpredictable and full of surprises.

But, though a steady habit of reading Scripture provides ample evidence to justify Voltaire’s judgment that God is a comedian playing to an audience that’s afraid to laugh, that very judgment may seem to lend credence to our second irrelevance or Mirth vs. Meaning and Morality objection. This is especially true if finding humor in Scripture becomes an end in itself, producing the feared effect of obscuring the sacred themes and religious and moral purposes of the text. As noted above, however, humor generally reveals far more than it obscures. When Elijah mocks the Baal prophets, his wit exposes the folly of their idolatry and discloses that only the God beyond nature can control nature. And when a beneficiary of the healing ministry of Elisha, a proud Baal-worshipper named Naaman, takes two mules’ loads of soil home to Syria so he can pray to his Healer, we can hear ancient Israelites joining the Creator in uproarious laughter at so primitive a theology. Similarly, in Jesus’ exchanges with Nicodemus and with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, we may see the misconstruals and moral deficiencies of Pharisaic and Samaritan theologies and lifestyles held up to ridicule. The mirth that stories like these generate is a means to or byproduct of their meaning, not an obstacle obscuring it.

• • •

The humorous notes sounded in the Bible can have a positive effect beyond their value as correctives to humorless theologies. Though King Solomon’s sages are not responsible for the adage A laugh a day keeps the doctor away, they approximate the thought it expresses. A near-echo of the saying is in fact found in Proverbs 17:22: A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones. This proverb could serve (with Psalm 2:4, the one I have chosen) as an epigram for this book.

The wisdom and truth in the ancient association of laughter with health now seem beyond doubting. They are confirmed by sources as different as Norman Cousins’ personal testimony to laughter’s healing effects in Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient and the more formal conclusions of scientific researchers. One of the latter has written, in summary:

Laughter involves the entire physiology of the body. When researching its effects, lab experimentation has been done on the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system, the muscular system, the central nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system. Laughter releases endorphins, the body’s natural painkiller, and so is a pleasant act, producing a general feeling of well-being. However, more than this, laughter has been shown to considerably benefit one’s health and even battle disease. Laughter brings about an increase in the number and activity level of natural killer cells that attack cells infected by virus and some types of cancer and tumor cells."²

Given the interchangeability of biblical words meaning health, wholeness, and salvation, the presence in Scripture of occasions for laughter as a means to such ends should not surprise us.³ For biblically inspired laughter to prove fully therapeutic, however, readers of the Bible must engage its stories much more actively and imaginatively than they often do. The trouble with words on a page is that they fail to convey the body language—the wink, the shrug, the wry smile—that go on between a speaker and a hearer. Unless we assume a wink or smile accompanies it, Jesus’ ethnocentric rejoinder—It’s not right to give the children’s bread to the dogs —to the foreign woman who wants him to heal her daughter comes across as crass, even cruel. When such body talk is assumed, it is easy to see how she can take his jest in good humor, as she does, and celebrate through their shared laughter the healing he intends for her child.

The attainment of my objective in what follows will depend then, dear reader, on your willingness to go with me where imagination leads. Doing so will entail a certain degree of trust, for I can’t guarantee that all of the imps I blame/credit for the humor or attempts at humor in this essay actually reside in the biblical texts. Country comic Jerry Clower once made a distinction between comedians and humorists. Comedians, he said, tell funny stories while humorists tell stories funny. There are a number of stories in the Bible that are funny in their own right. There are many, many more that are told in funny (quaint and sometimes witty) ways or that are fun to paraphrase in such ways. Paraphrasing is what I have often attempted to do here. I am confident that my attempts will not succeed with people of all tastes and temperaments and can only ask the reader’s patience and tolerance, for, to paraphrase a famous Latin proverb, Among funny bones there is great diversity.

Note on Inclusive Language

In this book I have tried to be faithful both to a sense of obligation to history and valued traditions, on the one hand, and to the contemporary cries of conscience for inclusiveness on the other. In theology, the point at which doing this poses the greatest problem is in the use of the divine name. From their moments of origin, Judaism and Christianity have had to fight the pagan practice of treating God or the gods as sexual beings. In my view, the early Church’s use of masculine pronouns and nouns (Father, Son) was a matter of linguistic convention, not a surrender to pagan or patriarchal sexism. Today’s translator is obliged to preserve the intention of the texts, not their form. In the absence of an inclusive pronoun, I have accordingly tried, wherever straightforward, clear language will permit, to avoid the use of pronouns when referring to God. When doing this would require awkwardness or a distracting redundancy, however, I have changed the traditional poetic He to (S)He and retained the traditional Him, His, etc., trusting the use of the capital to remind readers that no reference to gender is intended.

Part One

The Book of the Original Covenant

The Yeast

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples.

Deuteronomy 7:7

Does it not seem funny to you

that the Creator

uses the small

to bless all?

Yet it seems a virtual law

that the One-beyond-flaw

is not as taken with hosts who number most

as with the fewest and least.

It appears that the plan of Heaven

is to raise the loaf through the leaven,

providing by means of the least

the all-pervading yeast

to make the Bread for the kingdom feast.

1—Torah

Genesis

January 1

Setting the Stage

(Genesis 1:1—2:7)

Clearly the Bible’s opening creation story was not intended to make us laugh. Just as clearly the creation it describes sets the stage and establishes the conditions for laughter. Later chapters in the biblical epic provide ample proof that the seeds of creaturely possibility planted in the creation include the seeds of humor, wit, and their happy child, laughter. The following crhyme or cheesemaker rhyme, a genre of insult to Erato inspired by a Monty Python line,1 looks back on the creation story from the vantage point of the larger biblical narrative, which is full of intentionally and inadvertently funny incidents.

On the first Day of Creation the Word causes to be form-enabling light and creative energy.

On Creation’s second Day the Word fashions a medium pliably permanent, using, say the Notes, a water-restraining firmament.

On Creation’s third Day the Word sculpts a plant-bearing orb composed largely of water and clay.

On the fourth Day of Creation the Word hangs lights in the light sublime—sun, moon, and stars to define time.

On Creation’s Day five the Word supplies sea and sky with fish to inhabit the waters and birds the heights to fly.

On Creation’s sixth Day the Word speaks into birth animals of all sorts to roam the earth.

On the sixth Day too the Word, in its inscrutable way,adds to this zoo the creation’s feat of clay.

On the seventh Day of Creation, convening for first Sabbat the celestial staff,the Word must surely anticipate future occasions to laugh,sensing that the sixth-day wonder, source of much grief,will become a source as well of comic relief,casting humor’s telling light on matters great and slight.

January 2

Adam’s Nickname

(Genesis 2:7—3:19; Romans 1:22–23)

A clear scriptural hint that God has a sense of humor shows up in Adam’s nickname. In a play on words, the author of Genesis 2 connects adam, Hebrew for humankind (i.e., all of us), with adamah, from the dust of the ground (2:7). The text thus suggests that nowadays Adam might bear the nickname Dusty. This sets up the not-so-funny divine judgment near the end of Genesis 3, Dust you are, to dust you shall return.

If we followed the Genesis writer’s lead today, we might connect the word human with the word humus. We might even go further and connect these two with humor. It is a rather common proverb, isn’t it, that having a sense of humor keeps people down to earth.

The Genesis account defines us as mixtures of dirt and the divine breath (2:7). When we consider that Adam is the Hebrew word for generic humanity, the story’s clear implication is that when we, like Adam and Eve, forget the dirt part and choose to define ourselves as divine (as gods, 3:5), we too get into trouble. The ills that result may include the sticky conundrums posed by a second crhyme of a low and aggravating nature:

Mirror, mirror, after the Fall do we reflect our Maker’s image at all?Having turned from the Light toward the Dark,does our mirroring race retain even a trace of our Creator’s trademark?

Can we hope to escape this house of diminished fun where our mirrors reflect the Many instead of the One?

And would we require clothing —shirt, trousers, skirt—if we’d chosen to reflect the Deity instead of our native dirt?

January 3

The Zoo Wouldn’t Do

(Genesis 2:18–21)

"Be very careful if you make a woman cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man’s rib. Not from his feet to be walked on. Not from his head to be superior. But from the side to be equal—under the arm to be protected and next to the heart to be loved."

—The Talmud2

As dating services go, Eden’s animal park was no match for eHarmony.com. None of the animals Adam names is worthy of sharing his own.

The teaching of rabbis of old had it that God drew Eve from Adam’s side, not from his head or his feet, to show she is neither his superior nor his inferior but his equal and, as such, the only fellow member of the animal kingdom suited to serve as his companion.

To the extent that