God’s Last Laugh!
December 13th, 2006 | by Ed |A pregnant virgin…God in diapers, sleeping in a feeding trough…front row seats for dirt-poor shepherds at the premier performance of God’s celestial symphony…pagan soothsayers who found Jesus by observing the stars…
Have you ever thought about the incongruity, the preposterous absurdity of Christmas? Probably not. Christmas isi either secularized by society or sanitized by the church. We love to romanticize the Christmas story and bathe it in the soft glow of warm sentiment. And we fail to hear the sound of laughter from heaven.
Laughter is the celebration of incongruity, dissonance, and the oxymoronic, the putting together of discordant elements in surprise combinations. What could possibly be a more incongruous and surprising combination of discordant elements than the Christmas story? In the words of Brennan Manning, “Jesus is God’s final laughter.”
Many years previously, the birth of Christ was prophetically foreshadowed in the birth of another child. His name was “Laughter.” You probably know him better as Isaac. When his mother Sarah was told she would bear a child (a highly incongruous act for an elderly woman) she did what any of us would do at the thought of such incongruity, she laughed–a mirthless, bitter laugh of unbelief. But her laugh of despair became the Father’s laugh of love and triumph. God has the last laugh!
A pregnant virgin and a God in diapers! What is Christmas but a celebration of the divinely absurd that transforms mankind’s bitter laugh of despair into the Father’s triumphant laughter of hope. Jesus is God’s last laugh, and a Christian’s laughter is the echo of the Father’s joy in us, the joy of Christmas.