In His Sleevies

Every office has its 3:00 slump. Ours gets ambushed at 2:30...... right about the time that half the world is reclining in a dentist's chair...... A few of us gather around two dueling joke calendars for thirty seconds of the worst humor known to man. Yesterday's: What did one hat say to the other?... You stay here…. I'm going on ahead. It's not funny. That's the point. It's so unfunny it loops back around to hilarious, and for a few seconds the group emails of deadlines and headlines gets interrupted by something dumb enough to make everyone laugh together.

And when someone can't be at the group joke time, nobody minds repeating them to whoever missed it. They tell it again, happily, like it's the first time, because it was never really about the joke. It's about wanting somebody else in on the thing that made you feel lighter for a second.

I have a hunch Jesus knew that feeling. In Mark 3:17, He's assembling His inner circle and hands James and John the nickname "Sons of Thunder." Most guesses say it was because the two of them were loud, hot-tempered, quick to want to call down fire on people who annoyed them. You don't hand out a nickname like that in a solemn ceremony. You hand it out with a grin, in front of the other ten, and everybody snickers. James and John included.....eventually. Jesus wasn't only a teacher of parables and a bearer of sorrows. He was fully present with the men He loved, and that included laughing with them.

"A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person's strength." (Proverbs 17:22) 

Solomon wasn't writing a comedy bit, he was making a medical claim three thousand years before anyone ran a study on it. Joy isn't a break from the work of being human. It's part of the treatment plan.