A Laughing Stock
Solo: In a byre near Bethlehem (vv 3-4)
If Palm Sunday approximated in any way to the medieval Feast of Fools then Good Friday put the Fools in their place. Good laughter turned sour. A good joke back-fired. The crowd changed their mind. Authority got the upper hand and re-gained control. The centre of the merriment was soon turned into a Laughing Stock and put exactly where he belonged — in the Stocks on the Village Green, to be insulted and pelted by anybody who chose to come by, and in this case even mocked by the other victims, one on either side.
Cicero described crucifixion as ‘the most cruel and frightful of punishments’. ‘Naked and unable to move’, says Vincent Taylor, ‘the victim was exposed to pain and insult, enduring thirst and finally (sometimes after days) dying from exhaustion, unless mercifully his sufferings were brought to an end by a spear thrust or a shattering blow.’ To that may be added exposure to heat and insects, a painful and rigid immobility, and the degradation of nakedness at a time when the bodily functions were beyond control. Truly a Laughing Stock, and no mistake!
In Palestine at the time there were probably few who were surprised that it should happen to Jesus. It was almost an inevitable, if not a natural, end to much that had gone before. And if we are surprised it could only be because we have read the whole story so many times, and only ever through the eyes of his friends and followers, who anyway were writing it up years afterwards with a great deal of hindsight and heightened understanding. Dennis Nineham may rightly make the point that in the Laughing Stock we have echoes of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah but I doubt if anybody was thinking of Isaiah on the first Good Friday.
Of positive supporters there were not really all that many, whilst there were clearly very many who took a different view. Some of them had always thought he was a bit odd. They had difficulty believing some of those stories about his mother and his birth, but it was thirty years before and hard facts were hard to come by. Imagine the conversation at the dinner table.
He was a bit odd when he was 12 , wasn’t he?’
‘Hmm! And he really did say some funny things.’
‘I think he’s a bit of a trouble-maker!’
‘So do I. He’s a stirrer, that man.’
‘I think sometimes he’d be wiser if he knew when to keep his mouth shut.’
‘Well, you just can’t go round challenging the establishment and poking fun at respectability like that and expect to get away with it.’
‘They’ll get him one day, and when they do they won’t half be laughing’.
Yet in fact, when you look at the first Good Friday there is not a great deal of evidence of mockery, though over the years the effect has been heightened by the innuendoes which can so easily accompany certain passages, such as, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’
The stories fall into two groups. The first group relates to the Trial and the second to the Crucifixion. At the Trial Mark (followed by Matthew) has the soldiers lead Jesus away into the Praetorium, clothe him in a purple cloak and put a crown of thorns on his head. They also hit him with a reed, spit on him, kneel before him and say, ‘Hail, King of the Jews’. Then they mock him, take off the purple cloak, give him his own clothes back and lead him out to crucify him. John is content with two verses. Luke has one and changes the scene so that the mocking is done by Herod though the difference is probably not significant.
At the Cross the mockery relates to casting lots for his clothes, the inscription ‘The King of the Jews’, the humiliation of being crucified between two robbers who also revile him, the soldiers who offer him vinegar, the crowd wagging their heads and shouting, ‘You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross’, the lily gilded as so often in Matthew with the addition of the phrase, ‘if you are the Son of God’, and the chief priests and the scribes saying, ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself . . . he trusts in God; let God deliver him now . . .’ Such cold logic in such a highly emotional situation, for how could he ever talk of restoring the Temple when at the moment he cannot even restore himself?
The mockery is all, and out of all proportion to the number of verses allocated to it. Very powerful, and all the more so had you or I been the victim.
It may not have been the whole battalion of soldiers as Mark says. If it were it would have been between 500 and 600, but even if it was slimmed down a bit it was still enough to be unpleasant.
Being donned in a scarlet robe was more than just a bit of dressing up. It was being dubbed ‘an Emperor’ when that was precisely what he was trying not to be and must surely have harked back to Palm Sunday as if to say, ‘Sorry you couldn’t manage it last week but we’ll get it right for you this week’. And if the irony of Palm Sunday was that his faithful followers couldn’t grasp what he was after the irony of this was that his persecutors were turning him into the very image his followers appeared to want and couldn’t get but only as a prelude to disposing of him altogether.
The Crown of Thorns was then intended to emphasise the point for it was the poor man’s version of the garland which was given to the victor in the battle or the games. Again, they’re saying, ‘Great! you’ve made it — this week if not last week!’
The Cane is the sceptre and the saluting and the genuflections are the respects reserved only for Caesar, but then they are clearly mock because they strike him with their hand and scourge him which they never could to Caesar.
There are clear Old Testament allusions, to such an extent that it is not always easy to be sure what is fact and what is literary description based on Old Testament familiarities. But two allusions are significant for us.
One is the reference to Psalm 22, especially in the Gelineau version:
‘I am a worm and no man,
The butt of men, laughing stock of the people.
All who see me deride me.
They curl their lips, they toss their heads.
He trusted in the Lord, let him save him;
Let him release him if this is his friend’.
The other is the one already referred to by Dennis Nineham, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, there are four pieces of poetry embedded in Isaiah which are usually thought not to belong there but to have been written independently and inserted later. If you take them out and put them together you have four Songs (42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12) referring to a Suffering Servant and it is commonly thought that Jesus modelled his ministry on this person. There is also a progression of thought. In the first, the Servant sees his ministry in terms of bringing judgement (or the Gospel) to the Gentiles. In the second, he is to be a light to the Gentiles, through whom the salvation of God will embrace not only Israel but all the ends of the earth. In the third, he acknowledges that the fulfilment of his ministry will involve suffering. In the fourth, he perceives that his mission can in fact only be achieved through the suffering which others inflict on him.
So we have such familiar ‘Easter Words’ as,
‘I give my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting’ (50:6).
He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.’ (53:3-5, 7)
There might even be a third Old Testament allusion, for if Jesus knew his Bible well enough to recall Psalm 22 he might also have recalled Jeremiah 20:1, where we read that when the Priest hears the word of the prophet Jeremiah he ‘had him flogged, and put him into the stocks’, and Jeremiah complained,
‘O Lord thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and thou hast prevailed. I have become a laughing stock all the day; everyone mocks me. (20:7)
The Fourth Gospel, as usual, is different and, as you might expect, more theological. So John it is who tells us that the Chief Priests did not enter the Praetorium lest they defile themselves before the Passover. After all, if you are going to crucify the Son of God you would want to do it with clean hands.
John is also less historically accurate. The mockery on the cross is missing altogether and the mockery by the soldiers strange in that when Pilate brings him out in regal dress it seems to be with the idea of acquitting him. Or did Pilate, I wonder, have a sense of humour, albeit a cruel one?
I ask, because in John the taunting by Pilate is played up and he seems to have picked up more readily than the others that the trial was all about kingship. So we have that lovely sentence, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ The Greek places an emphasis on the ‘you’ — ‘You, a prisoner, deserted by your friends, a king, are you, really ?
For a moment the answer of Jesus suggests that he might have got a convert. ‘Are you saying this of yourself, or is it just what you have been told?’ Not that Jesus thought Pilate was becoming a disciple, but could it be that for one brief moment Jesus thought that Pilate had spotted and recognised what he had been trying to say and everybody else had missed. Perhaps the cry of a desperate man clutching at straws as he went down. Perhaps a hope that secularism had spotted what all the guardians of the Truth had missed — it often does. But no. Pilate is doing his job. Jesus has to tell him that his kingdom is not of this world and Pilate treats him like the rest. Maybe Pilate knew what he was doing all along. The cat had played with the mouse. The mouse was free, but not for long.
There was more to come. When Pilate offers to release him and the Jews object John says Pilate brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgement seat at a place called ‘The Pavement’ and said, ‘Here’s your king’. But the text is ambiguous. It is not crystal clear who sat on the Judgement Seat. It could be (as in the RSV and many other versions) that Pilate sat on it. But it could also be that Pilate ‘caused Jesus to sit on it’. Certainly Pilate did not make any judgement, which you might have expected him to do if he had sat there, whereas if he put Jesus there it would give force to the phrase, ‘Behold, your king’, and would pick up the earlier mocking references to kingship.
There are also references in the Gospel of Peter and in the Gospel Quotations of Justin Martyr to further acts of ridicule and to sitting him on the Judgement Seat and saying ‘Judge us’ or ‘Judge righteously, O King of Israel’ and if did happen, mockery or no, it would provide an interesting parallel to the incident with the blind man in John 9 where the blind man is being examined, though we all know that it is Jesus who is being tried and that the judgement is being passed on the Jews.
There are arguments against the view too. Perhaps the crucial test is what you choose to believe, what you think John may have wanted to convey, and whether you think Pilate had it in him to play such games. But in either case there can be no doubt that on this day Jesus was made into a Laughing Stock. The actual details may be few but their power is great and what they reflected was a whole atmosphere impregnated with the failure of one who was to have achieved so much.
Herod’s Song from Superstar
O sacred head sore wounded
To be made a Laughing Stock as a prelude to crucifixion was a sad end for a man who, in the words of Trevor Dennis1 , ‘came to teach the world to laugh’. And according to Dennis other people had begun to capture the atmosphere. Listen.
‘Those who shared his misery caught his glee. It drew them out from among the tombs, out from their hiding places in the hills. To keep company with that laughter was for them like being able to see again, to hear and to speak, to run and to dance, when once they had been blind, deaf, dumb, lame or paralysed. With that laughter they found themselves in Eden, no longer afraid, no longer despairing. They were lords in God’s garden, fine ladies walking his terraces. They had never known, never heard, anything like it in all their born days.
‘But there were others who wished once and for all to wipe the smile off God’s face, and put a stop to his nonsense. so they made a fool out of him . . . But it is the job of the fool, the jester, to make others laugh.’
We referred earlier to two sorts of laughter: the sort that is on the outside, looking at something and making fun of it, and the sort that is on the inside in order to handle it. Tonight, we might ask a different question. Are there two sorts of people? Those who can laugh and those who can’t?
It’s probably very unfair to the accountants, bankers, city gents and all others who spend their time with ‘the bottom line’, but surely we can chuckle over that final scene in Mary Poppins where Mary has had endless fun with two ‘naughty children’ whose relatively harmless jokes and pranks are the despair of their respectable ‘city gent father’. And at the end they are taken to meet the Board of the Bank where their father works, and a very solemn crowd they are. And the little boy tells the Chairman the story of two men, and one says to the other, ‘I know a man with a wooden leg called Jim’, and the other says, ‘What’s his other leg called?’ And the look of puzzlement on the face of the Chairman, who is totally unable to laugh, says it all.
If that eludes you, imagine two people sitting in a pub, independent and in separate corners. There is a party going on in the third corner. And as the evening goes on the party warms up. They are not drunk or disorderly. There is nothing obscene or improper. But they are having a great time of fun and if you are sitting by you can’t help but hear their jokes. And one person sits in his corner enjoying every minute of it as he eavesdrops on the event, his eyes twinkling and his lips slipping, almost to the point of embarrassment. And the other sits in his corner, arms folded and saying all over his face, ‘I don’t know what they’re laughing at’. But which of those two would be you?
Jesus came to teach the world to laugh, and it was the serious-minded people who were unable to laugh with him who turned him into a Laughing Stock, and still do.
What a debt we owe to Sydney Carter2 for taking the English carol, ‘Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day’ and setting it to a traditional Shaker tune to give us Lord of the Dance:
I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun;
And I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem I had my birth:
Dance then, wherever you may be;
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he;
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
I danced for the scribe and the Pharisee,
But they would not dance and they wouldn’t follow me.
I danced for the fishermen, for James and John —
They came with me and the dance went on:
I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame;
The holy people said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me on high;
And they left me there on a cross to die:
I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black;
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I’d gone.
But I am the dance and I still go on:
They cut me down and I leapt up high,
I am the life that’ll never, never die;
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me;
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.
Thank God, down through the years, there have always been those like the fishermen, James and John — a minority usually, a very small minority, a much misunderstood minority — but prepared nevertheless to teach the world to laugh even if in so doing they heaped on themselves shame and ridicule for the things they did and the claims they made. Sometimes people. Sometimes communities.
Communities like Calcutta. Dominique Lapierre, in City of Joy3, describes a street scene in Calcutta. Here’s the laughter of Jesus! A blind man sitting at the end of an alley, with a small boy suffering from polio sitting in front of him. The blind man is gently massaging the boy’s spindly calves, then his knees then his thighs, and the boy’s face expresses a gratitude the blind man cannot see. Then the blind man gets up and helps the boy to his knees, and then to his feet. Gently he prods him to take a step, and then another. Confidence grows as the lad moves off. And the blind man helps the child to walk, and the child shows the blind man where to go. ‘So remarkable was the sight of these two castaways’, he says, ‘that even the children playing marbles on the kerbstones stood up to watch as they passed’ (p 373).
The storyteller is a Polish Roman priest called Kovalski who goes to Calcutta not to exercise a Christian ministry like Mother Teresa but simply to get away from Poland after the death of his father and to achieve by other means what previously he had attempted to do by violence (pp 49). And in Calcutta he hears voices he has never heard before.
‘In these slums’, he says, ‘people actually put love and mutual support into practice. They knew how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to a stranger, how to show charity towards beggars, cripples, lepers and even the insane. Here the weak were helped, not trampled upon. Orphans were instantly adopted by their neighbours and old people were cared for and revered by their children’. (pp 44-5).
Yet Calcutta for us is neither joy nor laughter. We esteemed it stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. Yet while we live in gloom and misery, with a bottom line that gets lower and lower, an unemployment rate getting higher and higher, a housing market in the doldrums and a darkness so great that we cannot even see the green shoots, Calcutta, the city we despise to the point of a being a Laughing-stock, proclaims the gospel to the world.
Think of people like Simone Weil, who was born into a well-to-do family in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century and for some inexplicable reason seemed to want to spend all her time with life’s unfortunates. She wanted people to laugh . . . to embrace a different set of values . . . and they couldn’t! So they turned her into a joke because she used to do peculiar things.
During the First World War she had part of her rations sent to the soldiers at the front, and since they were not able to have any sugar she refused to have any sugar either. In the winter she would go without stockings, so as to know how to face the cold like the poor urchins of Paris who didn’t have any stockings. She took a year’s leave from teaching to go and work in a car factory, rented a small room in the district where the workmen lived and lived on her meagre earnings. And even whilst she was teaching she could shoulder a pick to help the unemployed, give them her wages and attend their protest meetings, which hardly pleased the parents of her pupils.
Then things got worse. When the Spanish Civil War broke out she went to fight on the side of the Reds, though they needn’t have worried. The records say that with a rifle she was more of a threat to her friends than to her enemies, so it was something of a relief to everybody when she spilt some hot fat over her legs and had to be invalided out.
In the Second World War her family managed to get a place on a boat to the States and took Simone with them, but that sort of life was no use to her. She got back to England, started working for the Free French and actually asked to be parachuted into France to join the Resistance. She wasn’t allowed, so she insisted on eating no more than the lowest ration allowances in France, and possibly this was what hastened her end. She died in a Kent sanatorium in 1943.
She never became a Christian, but she knew a lot about life, love and laughter, even if in the end she was its victim. She wanted to turn things upside down, and in a world and a community where Christians were pre-occupied with their souls and their eternal destiny, she said,
'It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.’
In a hard a serious world, she wanted to teach people to laugh, especially her fellow-sufferers who had small cause to laugh. Of them she said,
‘They do not turn to God. How could they do so when they are in total darkness? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless and waiting, they know not what for’.
But what authority is unable to understand it must turn into a Laughing Stock if only to cope, for if you cannot ‘laugh with’ then you must ‘laugh at’ and so people who wanted to wipe the smile off God’s face had to turn her into a Laughing Stock too. Yet, like Jesus before her, far from being a fool she was an activist who sought to bring a freshness to everything she touched.
Joseph G Donders4, a White Father who worked at one time in Nairobi, wrote,
Did you ever hear about that woman in France called Simone Weil? She was so tired of all kinds of Christians who prayed for justice and peace, while Jews and proletariats were persecuted and victimised and who did not Do anything to help their prayers to be heard, that she decided to live a life without that escape, to live as if God did not exist. (p 174)
When the Roman Catholic Church set out on a programme of reform following the Second Vatican Council Pedro Arrupe, Head of the Order of Jesuits for nearly 20 years, was instrumental in teaching the Catholic Church to laugh. He was a man of enormous charm and saintliness. In 1945, he was in Japan and saw the bomb drop on Hiroshima. He rushed out into the streets to care for the victims in spite of all danger to himself and it was probably this experience more than anything else that made him a new man and marked him off from the rest. It gave him a new commitment to the hungry, to the victims of injustice, and he became a firm supporter of the rebellious priests of liberation theology in South America. And that was what marked him off from the Vatican. He became the victim of one plot after another among the Vatican conservatives until eventually in 1983 they removed him from office. Too controversial for the head of an Order like the Jesuits. And he never recovered:
'I always used to be happy', he said. 'I used to speak seven languages. Now I can't even speak Spanish. Everyone treats me with affection, but I am alone, alone.'
No doubt he died feeling a failure if not a Laughing Stock. One more despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’.
Servants of God who want to put a smile on God’s face go back at least as far as Isaiah and the prophets, but are only too well aware that, like that Suffering Servant, they can only ever do it at the price of personal suffering — hardship, humiliation and rejection — because there have always been others who wanted to wipe the smile off.
Strike out on a different line, stand things on their head if you must, either to make people laugh or just to make them think, or to pull them up with a jerk and help them to see where they are going and where they are wrong, but don’t expect to do it without money and without price. Suffering is the price you pay for being different, usually inflicted by otherwise well-intentioned people who find that their only way of coping with you is by laughing at you till it hurts. It was a price Jesus paid. It is a price others have paid too.
And we don’t always know we are doing it. But Stevie5 knew when it was happening to her.
‘Everyone liked Stevie because she was a clown. I liked her too. I couldn’t help it. But someone forgot to turn off the laughter switch inside of Stevie. She would turn on without warning and then her eyes and face and heart and mouth would pop in all directions like corn bursting out of a bowl.
Stevie was a clown who loved life, and that meant pain. You can feel some of that pain in Stevie’s cry. Listen to her cry.
Do you know what it’s like to be a clown? Do you know what it’s like to suffer from too many laughs? Do you know what it’s like for a girl to be born a circus act? Do you know what it’s like to have a funny bone for a brain? Do you?
I don’t have any white paint on my face but I wear a mask. I have a silly smile that never changes. It’s always there and everyone expects it to be there. They like it that way. They enjoy a clown, and they use a clown, because they think a clown doesn’t care about anything.
I can’t enjoy a bad mood with other people. That’s a strange luxury. I have to be a clown. Whenever people tease me I turn into an act, a fool standing on my head. Then I look up, and I see a world full of upside-down people, trying to be what they aren’t.
I see so many people wearing strange colourless make-up, and the longer they wear it the harder it is to discover what kind of people they really are, underneath. I’m waiting for someone to step behind my face and find me! Not Stevie, but me!
Lord, when will this Stevie be free to be me!’
Here is a person compelled ‘to live out a part which is not her’ for the convenience of others, and it hurts. Yet so clearly through her suffering and pain other people are helped. They love her and feel better for meeting her. Perhaps it is always expedient that one person should die . . .
And if it is, the last word must surely go to the Jews — blamed for everything that went wrong, perhaps it is only through them in Christ that we can begin to appreciate how everything can go right, for just as God in Jesus laughed at the world by standing everything on its head, so the Jew has learned over the centuries to laugh in, and through, the desperation of his situation.
For Jews, laughter is not escapism, like watching your favourite 'soap', cheap 'sit-com' or even your favourite stand-up comic. It is learning to laugh in the situation by actually using the victim to change the perception, just as Jesus, the victim on the cross, changed the perception of the world for all time.
But changing perception is a very different thing from changing reality, as the Jews also know better than most, and Good Friday is not about changing reality. It is about learning to live with reality and to endure the pain it brings, which is all the greater when your perception changes.
It is also about refusing to rush into a fantasy world by hastening too quickly to Easter Day. That we must not do, because Good Friday is the story only of clownlike, stupid, suffering waste, without meaning, without purpose, without fulfilment, and tonight we have to go home with the Laughing Stock of a Jesus on our mind and on our conscience.
It would be satisfying to show how after the crucifixion the whole world became a different place, but we cannot, because it didn’t.
It would be satisfying to show how the city of Calcutta was transformed by a blind man and a boy, but we cannot, because it wasn’t.
It would be satisfying to show how Simone Weil became a Christian and how today the whole church proclaims her worth, but we cannot, because she didn’t and it doesn’t.
It would be satisfying to show how eighteen months (if not three days) after his death Pedro Arrupe has established himself as one of the all-time greats in the Vatican, but we cannot, because he hasn’t.
And it would be satisfying to show how Stevie did come through to discover her real self and everybody loved the new person, but we cannot, because Stevie’s story does not go that far.
In all these things we would love to show how God is always in control and how suffering always leads to triumph, only today we cannot. We cannot . . . we cannot . . . we cannot . . . we cannot . . . we cannot.
A Man there lived in Galilee