"We're Off on the Road to Jerusalem!"

When I first entered college, I had four majors I was very much interested in: philosophy, English, film, and Religion. I eventually went with English because I figured that was a vague enough degree to ensure me a job at any type of institution after graduation. Throw that assumption into the pile of "Wrong Fucking Answers". You'll notice that next to it stands another pile that is also very tall; this is the pile of theological questions, and it was the impetus for my interest in Religion as a major and a subject matter.

I was raised in the (Protestant) Church; as a child I went to Sunday School and Church; did bible readings; I went to Vacation Bible School (VBS represent!) during the summer, and later Christian Camp when I was a preteen. Around age 15 I went to the Covenant High in Christ (CHiC) youth gathering in Fort Collins, CO; surrounded by the teeming masses of hormonal teenagers with giant hard-ons for God, I gave myself over to Christ. Turns out I just loaned my soul to him for a weekend. To be fair, he didn't fuck it up or anything, and it came back in relatively the same fashion as before. It wasn't a bitter divorce betwixt Jehovah and myself, but instead an amicable separation: I still believe in (lower case "h") him, just not as the son of god; I believe that his message (Love thy neighbor) is pure and true -- I believe that the majority of his messengers, however, are judgmental pricks who wouldn't know the gospel if they were beating a black gay man with it. In exchange, Jesus gets to smite and curse me occasionally. We laugh and enjoy a few beers, a sort of love/hate relationship built on mistrust and anxiety. Good times all around.

The reason why I bring this all up is because it's important to not only show my background in Christianity, but that I'm also not about bashing people's religions. Whatever you believe in is fine by me, Kool Breeze -- just don't force it on me, and don't hurt other people. (Simple as that, really.) And all of this background, studying and digesting Christianity and its texts, always lead to so many questions. As long as you're nominally intelligent, not easily placated, and unsatisfied with the life around you, organized religion acts as one of the greatest springboards for Existential Questions. That's one of the great things about other religions, like Judaism where Rabbis are encouraged (sometimes forced) to ask questions about the Talmud and the Torah. Or the meditative koans of Zen Buddhism that are meant to exercise the mind and soul like a spiritual Thighmaster. Even Jesus, in the Gospels, fielded a few questions in his day, and asked a bunch of his own to the Pharisees and the Romans. So questioning is good, without it we'd never know how to get someplace, or what the other person is having for lunch, or new and fun ways to better please our sexual partners.
Well, one of my many questions has really come back to me in recent days. Can't think of any good reason for its return, but it just keeps repeating, like a loop of a 5 year old on a cross country car ride that demands to know "are we there yet?" So I thought to myself, "why not fill up precious finite cyberspace with this query?"

How come Jesus never laughs?

He smiles at people. He (famously) weeps. He curses God, Pharisees, money changers, Wealthy people, sinners, demons, and the Romans. He screams. He sings. He preaches. He lectures. He tells stories and performs miracles. He saves lives and shows the power of God. He resurrects a dead man and rescues the souls of countless sinners about him. He even goes batshit on the moneylenders. But not once does he laugh. What up wit dat?

So God becomes flesh. Okay. He wants to experience life as a person; all of the ups and downs, he needs to feel pain, and love, and see the misery, and feel the nails in his wrists, and the blood from his crown of thorns. I get it. But isn't part of the human experience laughter? Was Jerusalem and Bethlehem and everything else on the "Jesus & The Disciples 0000 A.D. Tour" really so depressing that no one ever makes a joke? Was he just that lame?

I'd like to think my God has a funnybone; at least, that's really the only justification for most of the absurdity and cruelty of this world. The church calls it "mysterious ways," but I call it a dark sense of humor. And even if he doesn't, even if all of the universe and existence does follow a plan and it's all superserious and important -- still, you gotta laugh every once in a while. Then again, this was the God that was really jealous about other idols and had a whole thing against pork. Maybe he is that cold and anal. I guess when you have to decide the fate of every soul, whether or not it's pure or damned, a few giggles every now and then might seem like a big deal. After all, most of the funny people I know tend to be really big sinners -- that's why they always have the good stories. You sin, you fuck up, you laugh about it and tell an interesting story over some runny eggs. It's hard for an infallible God to sin and/or fuck up, so really there's no jokes coming there.

But what about the Disciples? Could you follow and constantly hang out with someone that didn't laugh? "He can raise the dead but he can't ask for directions? Oh lighten UP, Christ!" That's probably why when we're fed up with bullshit we scream out "JESUS CHRIST!" Because that's exactly what the apostles did: "Yo, son of god -- howzaboot you miracle us up some women? Hahahaha...It was a joke, Jesus. Yes, I know sex before marriage is a sin. It was a joke! Jesus Christ!" Maybe the Crucifixion wasn't a party that got out of hand, as Lenny Bruce asserts, but instead a practical joke that went BOINK! Judas was trying to teach his mentor a lesson about letting his messianic hair down and having a good time, and then oops! "Hey, Jesus -- you just got Punk'd! Jesus? Jesus? Oh crap. Someone jab him with that spear, see if he wakes up. Not good."

Fine, he never laughs in the Bible. There's a lot of miniscule action that Jesus probably did that never got recorded. There's no writing of his developing hay fever, or a bunyon from all the walking, or burping after The Last Supper, or farting and blaming it on Peter. But how about tell a joke. How come Jesus never tells a funny anecdote or an amusing analogy to his followers? Mustard seed this, shepherd that, it's all very Martha Stewart Living. Almost every great speaker knows that you need to use humor now and then; all the great leaders show softer sides of their personas, especially if they're trying to humanize yourself (which I'm pretty sure that's what the immaculate conception was all about...or it was a football thang, I always forget). I mean, I don't expect the Sermon on the Mount or that time in Gethsemane to be a barrel of laughs, you got a T shaped noose hanging around your head. Stress like that tends to kill any party. But how great would it have been to see Jesus in front of a huge people, proclaiming to them all:

"I am the way, the truth, and the light. He who believeth in me shall live eternally in the kingdom of Heaven....And what's the deal with airline food? Am I right people? It makes Communion wafers look like Girl Scout Cookies! Hi-yooooo! I tell ya, Galilee crowds are the best in the world!"

Even though I'm a sworn agnostic, who reaches more often for Sartre & Camus than for the New Testament, I tend to be the one that defends Christianity to my friends. Whenever a new Church scandal breaks out, or some Konservative Kristian Koalition gets together to boycott some trivial bullshit, I chirp up and say "Well, that's not really 'what Jesus would do'. That's the church, not Christianity." He would spread love, tolerance, and understanding. My take on Jesus is always summed up by his own eleventh commandment, the one commandment he wanted his disciples to follow:
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-5)
And love is harder than laughter. To inspire people is more important than to get a chuckle at a poop joke. To change the world is probably a more pressing matter than to finely hone your "You might be leper..." routine. And I know there's a lot of inconsistencies and falsehoods in the Bible, and maybe this is just some ecumenical proofreading or something. But still, it would have been nice if the writers of the Bible had given Jesus a couple of zingers. Or at least a giggle or two. I tend to think that Humanity is more exemplified when we're doubled over in laughter than when we're doubled over in pain.

But then again, I drink a lot. So there's that...