God’s Lighter Side
Ken Bazyn
Jesting Angels
God’s Lighter Side
Copyright © 2015 Ken Bazyn. 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.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2057-6
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2058-3
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface
Proof Positive
If the proof is in the pudding,
whose sticky fingers will fetch it out?
Acknowledgments
ONCE AGAIN I OWE a special debt of gratitude to my wife, Barbara, whose love for poetry has rekindled my own, and to David Reynolds, who has raised important questions concerning style and meaning to improve my overall contribution.
Thanks also belong to Wipf & Stock for their willingness to offer yet another title to their ongoing line of first-rate Christian poetry and to Ian Creeger for his obvious typesetting craftsmanship.
Finally, deep appreciation is due to everyone who has helped to lift this fellow believer out of the downward pull of taking himself and his faith far too seriously.
The following publications deserve credit for first releasing these poems:
“I wish I were a soap bubble” in World of Poetry Anthology
“The Iowa State Fair” in Cresset
“Art Thou the One?” in Duck Soup
Introduction
Laughing Your Way to Heaven
“IF YOU WANT TO make God laugh,” goes a joke by filmmaker Woody Allen, “tell him your plans.”1 Tomorrow does seem to have a mind of its own. What did you want to be when you grew up? And what are you doing today? Life’s twists and turns have a way of overturning our expectations. When I was eleven or twelve, I became excited about the idea of becoming an architect—to make daring designs from the ground up. But I never realized how many skills you had to master: pouring cement, working with wood, brick-building, electrical wiring, heating and plumbing, and so forth. Then, having enrolled in a vocational agriculture class in high school, I was required to draw blueprints for several shop projects. I had the devil of a time gazing out at a three-dimensional world, then trying to reduce it to two on paper. The principles of perspective, well-known since the Renaissance, didn’t seem all that natural to me. Later, when our high school class took a series of aptitude tests, wouldn’t you know it, my score in spatial reasoning turned out to be below average. My career in architecture abruptly ended, since I obviously had no talent for it. Apparently God’s favorite teaching technique is trial-and-error.
Of all animals, Aristotle once observed, only man is capable of laughter.2 Indeed, there are three prominent theories that explain our human propensity for humor: one which emphasizes the release of tension, another that stresses the humorist’s feeling of superiority, and a third which highlights a shift in cognitive perspective.3 Freud thought humor a healthy defense mechanism that contributes to our overall mental health. Hobbes called laughter a “sudden glory,”4 in which we feel superior to those around us or to our own previous self. Schopenhauer believed laughter to be an immediate reaction to some incongruity just noticed. Think of the delighted surprise from that simple childhood toy, the jack-in-the-box, writes philosopher Henri Bergson: “As children we have all played with the little man who springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps up again. Push him lower, and he shoots up still higher. Crush him down beneath the lid, and often he will send everything flying.”5
So, of course, you’ll find humor in the Bible. Witticisms, for example, punctuate the Old Testament’s wisdom literature: “Like somebody who takes a passing dog by the ears is one who meddles in the quarrel of another” (Prov. 26:17). “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without good sense” (Prov. 11:22). “It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a contentious wife” (Prov. 25:24). “Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a foul odor” (Eccl. 10:1). “But a stupid person will get understanding, when a wild ass is born human” (Job 11:12). In the final chapters of the Book of Job, a voice from a whirlwind clarifies how laughable it is to compare human intelligence to God’s. Job is drolly interrogated as to whether he might catch the Leviathan with a fishhook or hang a rope through its nose; can he play with it like a bird or put it on a leash (Job 41:1–5)?6
On occasion, Jesus also resorted to preposterous (what G.K. Chesterton calls “gigantesque”7) images to convey his teachings. “[I]t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24). “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matt. 7:5). “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you” (Matt. 7:6). “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others” (Matt. 6:2). “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth” (Matt. 23:27).8 Such far-fetched imagery is particularly memorable and illuminating.
Early church fathers even turned the incarnation into comic relief, adopting a metaphor of Christ’s body as divine bait put on a fishhook (or in a mousetrap) to lure the unsuspecting devil to his demise.9 Like the white witch in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who thought she had bound and killed Aslan, the devil is confounded by a deeper magic which soon unravels his seeming victory.10 “The Devil exulted when Christ died, but by this very death of Christ, the Devil is vanquished, as if he had swallowed the bait in the mousetrap,” expounds Augustine. “He rejoiced in Christ’s death, like a bailiff of death. What he rejoiced in was then his own undoing.”11 Death couldn’t finish off the sinless Christ, for he subsequently triumphed over the forces of darkness