Telling The Truth: The Gospel As Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale (an excerpt from a great book that feeds my imagination) The place to star is with a woman laughing. She is an old woman, and, after a lifetime in the desert, her face is cracked and rutted like a six-month drought. She hunches her shoulders around her ears and starts to shake. She squinnies her eyes shut, and her laughter is all teeth and wheeze and tears running down as she rocks back and forth in her kitchen chair. She is laughing because she is pushing ninety-one hard and has just been told she is going to have a baby. Even though it was an angel who told her, she cant control herself and her husband cant control himself either. He keeps a straight face a few seconds longer than she does, but he ends by cracking up, too. Even the angel is not unaffected. He hides his mouth behind his golden scapular, but you can still see his eyes. They are larkspur blue and brimming with something of which the laughter of the old woman and her husband is at best only a rough translation. The old womans name is Sarah, of course, and the old mans name is Abraham, and they are laughing at the idea of a babys being born in the geriatric ward and Medicares picking up the tab. They are laughing because the angel not only seems to believe it but seems to expect them to believe it too. They are laughing because with part of themselves they do believe it. They are laughing because with another part of themselves they know it would take a fool to believe it. They are laughing because laughing is better than crying and maybe not even all that different. They are laughing because if by some crazy chance it should just happen to come true, then they would really have something to laugh about. They are laughing at God and with God, and they are laughing at themselves too because laughter has that in common with weeping. No matter what the immediate occasion is of either your laughter or your tears, the object of both ends up being yourself and your own life. They had had quite a life, the old pair. Years before, they had gotten off to a good start in Mesopotamia. They had a nice house in the suburbs with a two-car garage and color TV and a barbecue pit. They had a room all fixed up for when the babies started coming. With their health and each other and their families behind them they had what is known as a future. Sarah got her clothes at Bonwits, did volunteer work at the hospital, was a member of the League of Women Voters. Abraham was pulling down an excellent salary for a young man, plus generous fringe benefits and an enlightened retirement plan. And then they got religion, or religion got them, and Abraham was convinced that what God wanted them to do was pull up stakes and head out for Canaan where God had promised that he would make Abraham the father of a great nation which would in turn be a blessing to all nations, so thats what they did, and thats where their troubles started. They put the house on the market and gave the color TV to the hospital and got a good price for the crib and the bassinet because they had never been used and were good as new. Abraham wrote an eloquent letter of resignation to the president of the company and received an equally eloquent one in reply, assuring him that there would always be a job waiting for him if he ever changed his mind and came back. If he ever regained his senses and came back was the way the president expressed it in his first draft because though he thought religion was a good thing, like social security and regular exercise, he didnt think it was something to go overboard about like Abraham, but in his final draft he settled for the milder wording. So off they went in their station wagon with aU-haul behind and a handful of friends and relations who, if they didnt share Abrahams religious convictions, decided to hitch their wagons to his star anyway. Among the people they took was their brother-in-law Lot. It turned out to be a bad mistake. The Yiddish word schlemiel has been translated as the kind of person who is always going around spilling soup on people and a schlemozzle as the kind of person he is always spilling it on, and by that definition Abraham was a schlemozzle. The first thing that went wrong on their journey took place when the Egyptian pharaoh was struck by Sarahs beauty and made a serious play for her. Abraham, fearing that if Pharaoh discovered that she was a married woman he might decide to get rid of her husband, advised her to say she was his sister instead of his wife and let the chips fall where they might. This led to a complicated domestic situation which almost cost Abraham the woman who was to be the mother of the great nation and from which he was finally able to extricate himself only by admitting hed lied and thereby sustaining a considerable loss both of face and of credibility. The next thing that went wrong took place when they finally limped into the promised land and a nasty situation developed between Abraham and his in-laws. Lot and his crowd claimed that the place wasnt big enough for both of them, and Abrahams crowd said they couldnt agree more, so, as a way out of the impasse, Abraham proposed that they divide the land in two and each take half. He then made the mistake of telling Lot that he could have first choice, and of course Lot chose the half that was fertile pastureland around the Jordan River and Abraham was left with the disaster area around Dead Mans Gulch. In other words, all of Canaan was the Promised Land, but some parts were more promising than others. The next thing was the worst. Chosen by God Himself to be the prospective father of a great nation, Abraham made the discovery that he didnt stand a chance of becoming the father of anything because after extensive medical examinations all the leading authorities agreed that Sarah was as barren as most of the real estate Lot had stuck them with. So the years rolled by like empty perambulators until finally when Abraham was one hundred and Sarah was ninety, the angel arrived to make his shattering announcement. He said that when God made a promise, he stuck to it, and Sarah was going to have a boy. Then they laughed. One account says that Abraham laughed until he fell on his face, and the other account says that Sarah was the one who did it. She was hiding behind the door of their tent when the angel spoke, and it was her laughter that got them all going. According to Genesis, God intervened then and asked about Sarahs laughter, and Sarah was scared stiff and denied the whole thing. Then God said, No, but you did laugh, and, of course, he was right. Maybe the most interesting part of it all is that far from getting angry at them for laughing, God told them that when the baby was born he wanted them to name him Isaac, which in Hebrew means laughter. So you can say that God not only tolerated their laughter but blessed it and in a sense joined in it himself, which makes it a very special laughter indeed-God and man laughing together, sharing a glorious joke in which both of them are involved. It is perhaps as important to look closely into the laughter of Abraham and Sarah as it is important to look closely into the tears of Jesus. When Jesus wept over the dead body of his friend Lazarus, many things seem to have been at work in him, and there seem to have been many levels to his grief. He wept because his friend was dead and he had loved him. Beneath that he wept because, as Mary and Martha both tactlessly reminded him, if he had only been present, Lazarus neednt have died, and he was not present. Beneath that, he wept perhaps because if only God had been present, then too Lazarus neednt have died, and God was not present either, at least not in the way and to the degree that he was needed. Then, beneath even that, it is as if his grief goes so deep that it is for the whole world that Jesus is weeping and the tragedy of the human condition, which is to live in a world where again and again God is not present, at least not in the way and to the degree that man needs him. Jesus sheds his tears at the visible absence of God in the world where the good and bad alike go down to defeat and death. He sheds his tears at the audible silence of God at those moments especially when a word from him would mean the difference between life and death, or at the deafness of men which prevents their hearing him, the blindness of men which prevents even Jesus himself as a man from seeing him to the extent that at the moment of all moments when he needs him most he cries out his Eloi Eloi, which is a cry so dark that of the four evangelists, only two of them have the stomach to record it as the last word he spoke while he still had a human mouth to speak with. Jesus wept, we all weep, because even when man is good, even when he is Jesus, God makes himself scarce for reasons that no theodicy has ever fathomed... Then a strange and unexpected sound is heard. It is like the creaking of a rusty hinge. It is like ice starting to crack up in a pond in March. It is like the sound of hens cackling, of the old Ford trying to turn over on a winter morning. It is the sound of laughter, of an old woman and an old man knocking themselves out in a tent. It starts out dry and small and ends so uproarious and big that to preserve his dignity even the angel has to turn his face aside. Before we ask any questions about it, we should first just listen to it. It starts with a startled catch of the breath because the last thing either of them expected to do was to laugh, and it takes them by surprise as much as it takes us. It wells up in their throats like sorrow, only it is not sorrow, and contorts their old faces like tears, only thats not what it is either, or at least a different kind of tears. Their shoulders shake. Their faces go red. Their teeth slip a notch. She will be ninety-one on her next birthday, and the angel says she will celebrate it in the maternity ward. Sarah stuffs her apron to her mouth. Abraham gasps for air. Then the question: Where does their laughter come from? It comes from as deep a place as tears come from, and in a way it comes from the same place. As much as tears do, it comes out of the darkness of the world where God is of all missing persons the most missed, except that it comes not as an ally of darkness but as its adversary, not as a symptom of darkness but as its antidote. The laughter of Abraham and Sarah at the angels extraordinary announcement does not eliminate the darkness, because through the long, childless years of the past, darkness has already taken its toll, and in the long years that lie ahead there will be darkness for them still as, for instance, when Abraham is asked to take the child of the promise and offer him to God as a burnt offering. They both still have to face the darkness both of death and of life in a world where God is seen at best only from afar, through a glass darkly; but with their laughter something new breaks into their darkness, something so unexpected and preposterous and glad that they can only laugh at it in astonishment. To weep at tragedy as Jesus wept is to weep at that which is inevitable. Given the vulnerability of man and the pitiless storm of the world, tragedy is bound to happen. Given the sinfulness of man and the temptation of the world to sin, tragedy is bound to happen. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, Job says, and there is an inevitability to the tears we shed over it. They are part of what it means to be human. But the announcement of the angel is just the reverse of that. They are going to have a baby after all. It is just what was bound not to happen. The old schlemozzle is going to be the father of a great nation in spite of everything. It is just what was not inevitable. If anything was inevitable, it was that the soup would be spilled on him again. The stranger who appeared at their tent door turned out to be not a man to read the meter but an angel. Who could have possibly predicted it? Who could have possibly made it happen, grabbed an angel by the wing and pulled him down out of the sky and contrived for him to give such astonishing news? It all happened not of necessity, not inevitably, but gratuitously, freely, hilariously. And what was astonishing, gratuitous, hilarious was, of course, the grace of God. What could they do but laugh at the preposterousness of it, and they laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks. Fredrick Beuchner
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 11:33:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015