Time for 'Easter Laughter'...thanks to the joke book of the Suffering Church!

Easter is upon us so it’s time to have a laugh…courtesy of the Suffering Church.

Yes, that’s right. The Suffering Church has a joke book waiting for you.

There is an ancient service called Easter Laughter, or in Latin it was named Risus Paschalis. Held on Easter Sunday morning, the aim was to join in with God’s laughter in fooling the Devil.

It was a common Patristic trope that the Devil was “tricked.” He thought by inciting people to put Jesus to death on the cross, he had succeeded in getting rid of the Son of God and spoiled God’s plans for the rescue of humanity. But of course, on Easter Sunday, Christ rises again and the Devil not only realises he has been out manoeuvred, but that in reality he assisted God’s plan to bring atonement. You could say, as some of the early preachers did to guffaws from their audiences that “in the end, God is so clever he makes even Evil serve him.”

In all my travels, I only succeeded in convincing one church to hold a contemporary Easter Laughter service, where we would line up figures of evil that had determined by their actions to close the churches and stop the growth of the Gospel, yet who only succeeded – through the providence of God - in sowing great revivals of faith instead, and much to their annoyance. So, bless you Northcliff Baptist Church, Johannesburg. This year it will be ten years since we held it! We laughed with God even in the midst of the horror, and lived for a beautiful time in the world of Psalm 2:4, “From his throne in heaven the Lord laughs and mocks the feeble plans of the kings,” and Psalm 37:12, ‘the wicked plot against the righteous…but the Lord laughs at the wicked, for he knows their day is coming.” We even basked in the beatitude, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (Luke 6:21).

It’s the ultimate hope injection for our times, which are dark. So many think evil is having the last word. Autocrats seem more entrenched than ever. Millions of refugees are on the move from widening war zones. Deescalation and reconciliation seem to be words of too many syllables for leaders to understand in places like Sudan, the Middle East, and Congo. Even this morning one wakened to the dismal news that Ibrahim Traore, who took power in a coup in Burkina Faso in September 2022, bluntly telling the people to “forget about democracy” and that earlier promises to hold elections were abruptly rescinded.

So, let’s start the service with a question: Who was possibly the most effective evangelist for Christ in the 1990s? Billy Graham? Reinhard Bonnke? Luis Palau?

How about this as a candidate? Osama Bin Laden?

If you had a little chortle at the absurdity of it, that’s Easter Laughter. I’m not saying that Billy Graham and the like are not the correct answer, but we are living through a period where huge numbers of Muslims have been turning to Christ. And one of the reasons was Bin Laden’s actions. Literally hundreds of thousands of Muslims looked in the mirror and seen his face looking back at them, and they say, “Is that my religion? Is that really my religion? I don’t want it! If Islam looks like him, I’m changing.” And, literally, hundreds of thousands have been making that move – even though Bin Laden did his worst, God brought good out of it.

Woody Allen, who knew a thing or two about comedy, once said, “Humour is tragedy plus time.” That’s actually a nice definition of Easter Laughter, because Easter is a sort of tragedy. There is a travesty of a trial, an innocent man is put to death in a very painful way. Yet out of tragedy comes resurrection – Christ walking out of an empty tomb and showing his glory. Three days, and a tragedy is turned into laughter. Sometimes in our own lives, it takes longer, but that’s what Easter is about. A travesty of injustice ends in joy. God Himself demonstrates that death is not the end. We are going to a place where the trees are always green, sorrow is unknown, the loving face of Christ is always seen. This is an amazing prospect. This is Easter; out of evil apparently triumphing, God has the last laugh and so do we!

In Sunday school a little children’s story was told to me, and I later heard a tape where the monk Thomas Merton used it. It starts with the question: ‘What’s the best and the worst nail in the ark?’ Noah is building an ark, and it’s the days before nails, so it was all wooden plugs that hold the ark together. Noah forgets to put a big nail at the bottom of the boat. So, if the rains come down the ark will sink. God tries to attract Noah’s attention to get him to put this nail at the bottom of the boat. But Noah is rather busy, and bit fed up actually, because getting all the animals two-by-two into the ark is a big job. So, he rushes around and he can’t really hear and God says: “We’ll see what happens.”

Well along comes the devil one day, and he sees this crazy man building an ark in the desert and says: ‘I need to take a closer look at that.’ But he can’t just wander up as the devil, he has to disguise himself. He turns himself into a snake, slithers up, quite close, sees the ark on stilts, and spots the hole where the nail should be. He sizes it up; “I just might be able just to get through that.” So, he squeezes himself in, quite a tight squeeze, and boom. The devil is in the ark, and he feels rather hungry from all his exertions, so he eats a couple of spiders and he’s looking around to do more mischief when he sees Noah closing the hatch and lifting up his arms to give all the animals a blessing. Not wanting to hang around for a blessing, the devil in his snake form finds the hole and starts to slither through it. Only this time, he’s fatter from eating all the animals. And his head gets out the bottom of the art and he can’t move. Suddenly he hears a sound. It’s the rain coming down. The ark stays afloat for forty days and forty nights, thanks to the devil who’s plugging up the hole. That’s why the story says he’s the best nail, because he’s the nail that saves the ark; but he’s also the worst nail, because he’s the devil. It’s just a children’s story with a rather dangerous theology. Because it’s basically saying: Even the devil serves God! God can even fold evil into his will.

Here’s a verse where Paul states it quite clearly: “We know that in all things God works for the good for those who love him, who have been called according to his purposes.” (Rom. 8:28). He can fold all things into His will, nothing stymies God, not even evil!

When Joseph speaks to his brothers, who had betrayed him, he says: “You meant it for evil (they surely did, eleven of them wanted him dead) but God meant it for good.” (Gen. 50:20) And this action becomes the means by how he is able to save Israel from famine.

How does Easter Laughter show up today, especially in a world where every time you see the news you are inundated with upsetting, depressing or catastrophic stories? It’s easy to think, “Where is the hope? Where is the good news?” But then, this is where the persecuted church can really help us, because persecuted communities, despite their suffering, are often full of joy and hope and happiness.

Let’s see if these stories enlarge your understanding of God this Easter day.

Here is the first story: It comes from China. It was six months after the Tiananmen massacre, June 4, 1989, where around 5,000 students were killed in the square of Beijing. I called on a pastor called Wu Mu Jian, professor of Greek and a very well-connected man. I arrived at his apartment at night, unannounced, and when he answered the door, I saw behind him four other men, very distinguished, very elderly. One of them I recognised from the newspaper, he was a very high-ranking member of the Communist Party. And I thought: “What are you doing here?” He gave me an elbow squeeze and said: “Call me Nicodemus, I have to come to Jesus at night, you see.” I assured him his secret was safe with me! Then they said: “Come and join us, look we are toasting the man who brought the world’s largest revival in the history of the church to China.”

I was delighted to join in. “Give me that drink and I’ll raise a glass.” I expected them to toast Watchman Nee or Wang Ming Dao or to Jong Sung. But they said: “To Mao Tse-tung.”

To Mao Tse-tung? I just about spat the mixture over their heads, spluttering, “Mao Tse-tung, he was a monster, wasn’t he? He closed the churches, he burned the Bibles, put the pastors in jail, some of them died there.”

“Well,” they said, “Yes, God has a use for monsters, too!”

This is the story they told.

“Chinese people are not very religious. We have Confucianism, which urges us never to think about God, because you can’t prove God, and you can’t disprove God. Instead, just concentrate on the moral law. It also contains ancestor worship, but it was never a major religion.” But Mao changed all that in 1949, when he stood up at Tiananmen Square and announced, ‘We are going to build heaven on earth.’ He even added, ‘We are going to build it with faith.’ He began to organise the whole society into ‘repentance’ meetings, small group studies and the little red book was their ‘bible’.

And then, at the height of it all, Mao would come out on his balcony. People would gather in Tiananmen square, millions of them would take the little red books and wave it. What was Mao teaching the Chinese people to do? The four men said and answered the question – he was teaching them to worship! Of course, he taught us to worship him, he was god.

But wait. Following the death of Mao in 1976, and under the leadership of Deng Xiao Ping from 1978 onwards, things began to liberalise a little, and the evangelists left were allowed to travel again from province to province. This included Wu Mu Jian. They would get to a village and begin to preach, and the people would stop them, saying, “We want to believe!” Entire villages would convert. Why are you so anxious to convert, asked the astonished evangelists. They would reply. Well, we thought that Mao was god, but he can’t be god because gods don’t die. You tell us that this Jesus is the Son of God and lives at the right hand of God forever? That sounds like the real God. We will turn from Mao to Jesus.”

And so, 50 million villagers turned their allegiances from Mao to Christ in the 1980s – the largest scale revival that has ever happened in 2,000 years of the church. Those four men said, “Mao is God’s fool.” He thought he was annihilating the church, in actuality he was God’s greatest pre-evangelist.

That’s Easter Laughter.

God has the last laugh.

And so do we.

Time to bring this more up to date. In Iran today huge numbers of Muslims are becoming Christians. The leader of the country until very recently was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was leading a meeting of the top Ayatollahs (high-ranking Shiite leaders) in the country just a few years ago, and one Ayatollahs came up to him and said, what are you going to do about the children of Ayatollahs who keep becoming Christians? My daughter has just become a believer.”

According to eyewitnesses, Ali Khamenei almost burst blood vessels on his face. “I am fed up hearing these stories again and again” he roared, “I’ll put a stop to this.” He cleared the television schedules a few nights later and spent an hour haranguing the people about the evil house churches. He ranted, “These house churches are evil. These house churches are terrible. These churches are Trojan horses for the CIA. If you attend one, they will feed you soup with poison. This is how you let the great Satan into the country. Don’t have anything to do with the house churches.”

Most of the population watching this turned to each other and said, “What’s a house church? What’s a house church? If he doesn’t like them, we probably will.”

The clerics in Iran are so unpopular with the people that anything they disliked the people welcomed. As a result, there was a huge spike in house church numbers. Furthermore, the son of the Ayatollah he put in charge of the movement to stop people converting became a Christians in a matter of months.

Easter Laughter! God has the last laugh, and so do we.

Another tiny one. There is a country in the world that claims to be 100% Muslim. Its very repressive. But there was a small, tiny church that was having a very hard time. However one day at the main mosque in the capital city the Mullah stopped after his sermon, reached into his robe, and pulled out a tiny SD card. “This is an evil piece of technology”, he thundered, “because it contains a complete Bible.” He told the shocked crowd, “I have reliable information that 50,000 of these have entered our country, and we do not know where they are. I want you all to find them and hand them in.”

None were ever handed in, but it spurred an unprecedented frenzy among people attempting to get their hands on it. Thousands succeeded.

Easter Laughter! God has the last laugh, and so do we.

I will share in a future post how this can work at an individual level too.

But this Easter Sunday, strengthen yourself in the truth that God is still in charge, and even when Evil appears to be triumphing, even acts of oppression can be turned to blessing through the Providence of God.

Martin Luther King Jnr used to quote the line, “the arc of history may be long, but it bends towards justice.”

Maybe. But we can be more sure of this: the arc of history may be long, but it bends towards harvest!

Time to join in with God’s laughter.