Easter Ironies
One day, someone should make a book that simply goes through and lists all the jokes in the Bible. There are many of them, from the subtle to the gross, the large-scale to the fine-grained, the architectonic and metaphysical to the literally obscene. And they are sadly neglected.
I once read the story of a filmmaker who said that when approaching a story, the first thing he looked for was the jokes. This strikes me as fundamentally sound. After all, the main function of humor is to highlight the connections and relationships among things, events, characters; and it is in these relationships that a story most essentially consists.
In the case of the Bible, the relationships are manifold and nearly infinite: for what are the Scriptures if not a written record of the act of Divine Revelation, by which God enters into relation with the totality of created and human reality, and then reconfigures that totality based on this new relation?
As I write this, it is again the Easter season, and I have once more taken part in the central rites of the Church: the Triduum culminating in the great Easter Vigil. The Easter Vigil especially serves deliberately as a kind of summum of the whole liturgical year and hence of the history of Revelation, beginning with Genesis through Abraham and Moses to the Resurrection, a narrative encapsulated both in the long sequence of readings and in the rite of the Paschal Candle, as a new light is kindled in and out of the detritus of created being and spreads and illuminates and transforms all things.
This is without a doubt my favorite rite of the Church, and not merely because I entered the Church at such a vigil. It simply is the Revelation of God, arising in darkness to herald new life, the washing away of sins in Baptism, the anointing with Chrism in Confirmation, and the fulfillment of all mysteries in the Eucharist. Every year, and with every reenactment, I learn something new about this revelation, and it takes on new aspects, as I bring my own life and all that it contains, it's narratives and victories and defeats, once more within this one great Narrative.
Irony and Revelation
This year, I was struck more than ever by the irony contained in the readings and the events, the humor of a revelation arising in history. For while there are many definitions of irony, for my present purposes perhaps I might say that by irony I mean the effect of a deliberate and sudden reversal of position and expectation: a man expecting to step on a mat and instead stepping on a banana peel, a man expecting his head to be on top and instead finding his feet there. Irony in this sense is, I would argue, one of the chief methods of Revelation.
The irony begins with the creation of the world, which in the Genesis account takes place, as it were, as a riot of unexplained and seemingly inexplicable creativity.
Many ancient systems featured a cosmogenic account of deity overcoming chaos embodied in water or monstrous beings, laboriously bringing about a protected realm of order amidst it. The God of Genesis does indeed approach the waters of chaos and order them, dividing and subdividing and making an island oasis called the earth. Yet he begins his creation not with a battle against a monster or even a turning back of the tide, but with the creation of light--inexplicable and fundamental, to illuminate and and engender and give life. As the account goes on, it is God who not only orders the world, but brings forth life both on the land and in the water, including all the monstrous inhabitants of the sea, ordering it to be fruitful and to multiply and deeming it all good, and ending with the great and inexplicable monsters man and woman.
The literary complement, as it were, of this account is the monologue of God in the book of Job, in which he describes in glorious detail the mythic monsters Leviathan and Behemoth, not as his rivals to be overcome, but as his creative works to be delighted in and even played with. The point of this account of Job is, from the perspective of ancient cosmology, confusing to the extreme. Those elements of the world hostile to man and human, civilizational order are generally treated as things to be overcome by divinity and civilization--or, at worst, things to be worshiped and placated in the absence of higher divinity. The God of Job, on the other hand, emphasizes and indeed exults in the indifference of Leviathan and Behemoth to human command and order, and treats this not as a threat or exception to his transcendent power, but precisely as a manifestation of his own creative, transcendent goodness. Faced with the monstrousness of creation, man is called to wonder, to acknowledgment of God's transcendence, and to worship of him alone.
While hard to sum up simply, the divide between the God of Israel and his rivals can be put to a certain degree in the difference between a God who is a slayer of monsters and a god who is their creator. Chaos and order, after all, are somewhat equivocal concepts--chaos is always relative to some order, and order to some end, and for human beings both are naturally centered not so much in moral good and evil or metaphysical being and privation, but simply in human desire and its obstacles.
Man sometimes struggles to overcome and order the monstrousness and chaos of nature; man sometimes worships it in the hope of placating it. The one truly transcendent God does neither; he creates the sea serpent, and delights in it.
The God of Genesis and of Job, then, is not merely an embodiment of cosmological order overcoming chaos; he is rather the free, creative artificer of reality itself, including all that seems most strange and inexplicable within it. Or, in other words, he is a God that makes jokes: including the universe.
Covenantal Ironies
In the Exodus account of the Red Sea, likewise, I was struck more than ever before by the deliberate irony of the story, in which God confronts, not a monster of chaos, but rather the great embodiment of cosmogenic order in the ancient world: the Pharaoh of great Egypt.
The Egyptian cosmic worldview was perhaps the purest and greatest of the political-theological systems of antiquity. The gods overcome and throw back the forces of chaos on every side, water and monsters and marginal peoples, and establish the realm of the world, and amidst the realm of the world the divine-human mediator the Pharaoh to create an even more perfect and orderly ream of Egypt, in which the divine order is instantiated in its near-fullness and eternal life made possible.
The Exodus account, it seems to me, is constructed in direct opposition to this system, and hence as a series of deliberate ironies and transformations of it.
In Exodus, the transcendent God who made the world and ordered it appears in the story not, as one might expect, as protector and patron of the great divine-human unifier Pharaoh, but rather as the shepherd of a marginal, oppressed people--who constitute emphatically not a protected realm of order, but rather a rebellious and chaotic and largely leaderless rabble of slaves--precisely the sort of rabble that would be shown in Egyptian art as conquered and overcome by Pharaoh or offering him obeisance, thus manifesting the cosmic overcoming of chaos by order.
The transcendence of the God of Exodus, however, is demonstrated not by his endorsement of a cosmological-political unifier, but rather by the freedom with which he chooses and loves his particular marginal rabble, leading them out of slavery and creating them as a people. This is in a sense an instantiation and repetition of the act of creation in Genesis: not God overcoming or conquering a monstrous embodiment of chaos, but God forming a creative order out of and within it. The God who created sea monsters and makes of nomadic slaves a nation with a homeland has no need of the Pharaohnic cosmic order and its human and political machinery: he surrounds and protects his chosen people not with horses or chariots but in fire and cloud, and his mere glance drives the human machinery of order into a chaotic rout. Pharaoh, orderer of the world, sounds the retreat before Israel, the one who wrestles with God.
This God once again in a mysterious way transcends the cosmogenic division between order and chaos--a reality demonstrated even further by his mastery of the waters of the Red Sea. God does indeed again overcome and divide and order this chaotic element, like an Egyptian or Near-Eastern deity--but at his will, as a means to protect his chosen people and allow them to pass in safety. Then he just as easily undoes this order, and plunges Pharaoh and his army into roiling destruction. The divine-human embodiment of order is finally killed by the chaotic water he claimed to be able to overcome, chaos wielded as tool and weapon by a higher God in mysterious love with a people of slaves.
The irony, as they say, is delicious.
The account of the Sacrifice of Abraham is again a riot of unexpected humor; from the multiple reversals of expectations leading to the birth of Isaac to an elderly couple to the sudden command to sacrifice this only son to the sudden, last-minute reversal of this plan in turn. When Isaac asks where the animal for the sacrifice is, Abraham answers that God will provide it: as indeed in one sense he already has, by providing for the birth of Isaac, and in another and more ironic sense (which even Abraham does not expect) he will by saving Isaac and substituting a ram in his place. These reversals serve in this story at once to demonstrate Abraham's faith, a trust and fidelity that follows every twist and turn and reversal to safety, and also the fact that the Lord of Israel is a God who sees: not merely a distant cosmic entity, but one who actively observes the hearts and actions of men and intervenes in their destinies, a God, in other words, who knows the expectations of individual people enough to confound them, and does so, not capriciously or at random, but in the service of love and relationship. Through the Sacrifice of Isaac and its twists and turns and convolutions, Abraham and God have cemented a relationship of trust that can in at least one important sense overcome even the confounding distance of transcendence. It is this relationship that in the context of the Torah underlies and contextualizes the choice of Israel revealed later in the Exodus account.
In Isaiah, too, the Suffering Servant Song is constructed likewise out of a series of ironies, or deliberate subversions of expectations. "Who has believed our report?" or in other words: "Who could have seen this coming?" The Servant of God appears to be unexceptional, cursed, doomed--but in fact is ultimately revealed as chosen, blessed, and with a glorious future and inheritance awaiting him. The people of Israel understand this sort of person, and what this sort of person suffers, and why, and what inevitably follows from their sufferings: and they are entirely wrong. The Servant has borne the sins and suffering of Israel, not his own.
God has again confounded expectations--but now, above all else, those of his own people. And this confounding of expectations comes again with a purpose: to save his beloved people, who like sheep have gone astray, from their sins. Blinded by their own sinful expectations, only this stark surprise and reversal of God could reveal those sins to them and enable them to turn from them. The people rejected and despised the Servant of God, and in so doing made him bear their sins, and so were saved.
Paschal Ironies
Perhaps it takes a thorough grounding in Jewish tradition to see the irony of the New Testament account of Jesus: who is above and before all other things a confounding figure. In Mark especially, people are continually astonished, surprised, shocked by Jesus, and continually and repeatedly ask themselves, and others: who is this? As with Job and Leviathan, the main note of the account of Jesus in the Gospels is astonishment. Nor is this comparison as strange as it might first appear: for there certainly is something monstrous or apparently monstrous about Christ in the Gospels. Far from a unifying figure of order, he appears at times practically as an embodiment of chaos.
Again, it is perhaps only with a grounding in the Jewish tradition that can one feel the full force of the perceptions of Jesus in the Gospel as a blasphemer, a revolutionary, a false prophet, possessed by demons. The strangeness and apparent power of his miracles only adds to this confounding picture. For what is to be made of a man who stills the seas, makes lepers clean, smears spit on the eyes of blind men and makes them see, forgives sins, and in so doing claims the authority to overrule even the Law of Moses?
Yet in full perspective, the argument made by the Gospels is quite simple and compelling: that this confounding nature of Christ is not the sign of demonic evil, but rather the last in a long line of ironic reversals by the God of Israel, appearing at last on stage in person. The God who overthrew Pharaoh in the waters of the Red Sea once again demonstrates his transcendence precisely through the free choice of his love.
Nowhere, of course, is this reversal of expectations so extreme than in the central mystery of Good Friday: the Messiah is crucified as a blasphemer, and dies. And then of course, as the culmination of the Easter Vigil, he is suddenly alive; and expectations are confounded once again.
All the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection are constructed to a large degree out of ironies and the confounding of expectations, as the disciples and others involved are forced by the unexpected event of the Resurrection to entirely reconsider and relearn the meaning of Christ, his life, and his death. This year, however, I was struck by the particularly political ironies of the Matthean account of the Resurrection, which differs from the other Gospels in its focus on the guard set on the tomb. Hearing it this time, I realized for the first time the immense and deliberate irony of this account, which to a large extent gives the Resurrection not from the perspective of the faithful, but from that of Pontius Pilate, the chief priests, and their lackeys. The chief priests are worried about the possibility of the disciples of Jesus stealing his body, and so go to Pilate and receive permission to set a guard on the tomb--a guard to prevent theft the fiction of a resurrection. Again, political and religious order asserts itself against religious and political malefactors, order against chaos.
And then, of course, in a stroke of brilliant humor, we see that the heavenly polity has decided to send its own guard to the tomb: and an angel descends like a bolt of lightning, shining like the sun, rolls back the stone, and (in a glorious touch of humor) sits on it. The human guard, faced unexpectedly with a supervailing angelic counterpart, is rendered superfluous, and driven by terror to unconsciousness.
Yet while the human guard was set to protect the tomb from violation and theft, the purpose of the angelic guard is nearly the opposite: not to protect the body of Christ, not even to make way for the risen Christ (for in all the Gospels Christ is raised in secret and departs the tomb in secret--thus creating another layer of irony, as the guards set to keep a corpse from being stolen fail to realize that the corpse has in the meantime unaccountably stolen itself), but rather to make way for those who are coming to see it.
And then, in a final irony, those coming to see the tomb are not his disciples trying to steal his body, or indeed his disciples trying to honor his body, or do anything in particular. Those making this journey are a group of women. It is to enable access to the tomb for these women that this angelic horror has been sent from heaven, as a sort of escort, to drive away the human guard of the chief priests and Pilate. The women do not expect to see an angel at the tomb; they expect to find Jesus' body in the tomb; and they meet the living Jesus, not at the tomb, but unexpectedly on their way back from it. And he is alive.
God has again intervened in history, not in service to Pilate and the chief priests, but rather in contradiction to their assumed power and attempted order and intentions and expectations, and in favor of his particular love for his particular, despised people, allowing them to come to his tomb and see it empty, to greet them, and give them thoroughly unexpected joy.
All of this, I would argue, is not random, but reflects a coherent concept of the deity. God is transcendent, truly transcendent, not merely a conqueror or a rival to a particular cosmic entity or principle, but the full, creative source of all we know of reality--and God, the Trinitarian God, is love. A transcendent, loving God who desired unity with his people could lead them by no other path than the reversal of their expectations, no other path but that of relationship and faith and trust and love and unexpected joy.
This, at least, is what I think. God is a master of irony; and Easter the last and best of his jokes.
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