The Divine Comedy: the Gospel as Parody

Today is Palm Sunday. This is one of those blessed and relatively rare years in which the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) calendars are in harmony. We celebrate Holy Week and Pascha together this year. As the Universal Church always should.

During Lent I've been going almost daily to mass, and reading the psalter.


One of the things that keeps on striking me lately, is how funny the Bible is.

He rides in on an ass. He's making fun of us, of our pretensions.


When the French took Damascus from the Turks in 1920, the commanding General Henri Gouraud rode his charger into the tomb of Saladin in the great Ummayad Mosque, dismounted and planted his boot on the "Sword of Religion's" (that's what Salah al-Din literally means in Arabic) grave and declared, "Réveilles-toi Saladin, nous sommes revenus. Ma présence ici consacre la victoire de la croix sur le croissant!"

Get up Saladin, we've returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent!

That's how we like to do it. Charge in on a warhorse, all glory, then crush the enemy's head and spit on his grave. Then consecrate it all in pride and vanity.


We like to put boots up asses, see. That's definitely the American way.

(I love how this video of Toby Keith's immortal poetical expression of that sentiment begins with the image of a puppy wrapped in a flag.. Irony is dead.)


But God rides in barefoot, on an ass. And then goes to the religious and political authorities and allows them to slaughter him. He takes the boot upon himself.


The Gospel - in fact the entire bible - is rife with such inversions as God coming in glory on a donkey.


He's always making the most unexpected entrances, and turning our expectations upside down.


He shows up as a baby, is worshiped by donkeys and gets put in a box for feeding grain to asses (called in English a manger, from the French "to eat.." Taste and see..)

(there's great iconography of the animals in the stable worshiping him..)

Then he goes up on a hillside by the sea of Galilee, and preaches the "Sermon on the Mount," which is where he parodies Moses, and reveals himself to be God. See the sidebar, I've posted the Beatitudes he taught there. These are the Christian answer to the Ten Commandments.


I think they're really funny. Blessed are the poor? Says who?

Jesus, that's who.


And he sat down to teach them. He did not stand in the presence of the Lord as a rabbi does proclaiming scripture in the synagogue, or Moses did coming off the mountain with the written word. He went up and sat.


I've been to the "Mount," it's actually a great grassy hillside right next to Lake Tiberius (also called the Sea of Galilee, but it's not much of a sea at all, actually).. When I stood on it, I laughed. Not at all like majestic solemn old Mount Sinai.

Not exactly what I'd expected. Very gentle. A good joke.


He calmed that sea one night when his disciples were stuck out fishing in the middle of a storm. They were terrified by the storm, then terrified that he'd calmed it. He walks out onto the lake, and calls to them to come to him. Peter (our dearly loved pope) hops out, takes a few steps and sinks.


That my friends, about sums it all up. Very funny.


Stick your finger in me, Thomas. It is finished.


In the Name of the Rose, one of my favorite books, Emberto Eco tells this beautiful story about a Franciscan monk and a novice (played in the uneven late 80's movie version by Sean Connery and Christian Slater) who come to monastery where there's been foul play. The plot revolves around an newly discovered manuscript of Aristotle's ("The Philosopher," as Thomas Aquinas dubs him in the Summa) on laughter. The bad guys are bent on keeping this text from ever seeing the light, because the concept of laughter is so subversive to authority. They eventually kill almost everyone and burn the monastery down along with the book, because they can't handle a joke.

One of the characters (I think it's the arch-badguy, the abbot) makes the observation that in the Gospel Christ never laughs. He cries at the tomb of Lazarus..

(another funny story: "Lord, you're late! He's dead. You were supposed to come when we called you!" Open the tomb. "But he'll be stinky!" You still don't get it. Roll the stone away. They do it. Lazarus comes out dressed like a mummy.
That one had me silently belly laughing to in my pew when it was read at mass a couple weeks ago..)

He gets angry and whips the money changers like curs.

Lots of divine emotion gets expressed.


But no laughter.


Why? Because he's a straight comedian.


"I give them the sign of Jonas," he said.


And this is the thing: the Book of Jonah (like the Book of Job) is a comedy.

Go tell the people to repent, Jonah. "No. Stop bugging me." Jonah runs away, gets on a boat to Finisterra (the name of the end of land where Spain tapers out into the void just beyond Santiago de Compostelle), thinking he can hide from God. There's a storm, like that one on the Sea of Galilee. The sailors are terrified, so when Jonah confesses that God's out to get him, they throw him overboard and so calm the waves. Christ parodies this when he walks out onto the sea himself. Jonah is swallowed by Leviathan. He rests in the gut of a fish (the tomb of the sea) for three days..

(This is an inversion of when the fish leaps out of the Euphrates and Tobias grabs and eats it, then burns its liver to scare away Asmodeus from his beloved.. Or when Christ eats his last meal of grilled fish before he rises into heaven.. See how the symbols and the things signified, how all the referents proliferate? That's what a good comedy is all about..)

He gets spit up onto the beach, resurrected. He then grudgingly decides to obey God, and goes to preach repentance to the people of the great city (Ninevah, or Mosul- the capital of of what is now Southern or Kurdish Iraq, the northern twin of Baghdad, which is on the rivers of Babylon) whom he thinks are disgusting people not worthy of being pardoned. "I don't want to go preach forgiveness to those bastards. I want them to burn like Sodom and Gommorah did.." But he does it now anyway, because he didn't much enjoy being stuck in that fish. He preaches, and they all convert and put on sackcloth and ashes. A great revival. Billy Grahm's wet dream. The End.


It's out of control. And when the meaning dawns on you, you should laugh.


That's why fools who can't take a joke either think that the whole thing is contrived and "just a myth" or else run around saying that it's all "literally" true.

I hate the word literal. It's a nearly useless word that is its own deconstruction.


Our problem is that we need to control everything. We need to pretend we understand. We need to be right. Most of us are running around imposing our narratives on things, telling other people that they're wrong. Faith is parodied as a means of social control, of controlling our own insecurities.

Our tendency is to attempt to turn it all into a recipe for anathematizing and controlling other people..

("The Bible vs. Science," "Creation Science," nursing unhealthy obsessions with Darwin.. The Nazis, the eugenicists, militant atheists and the folks down at the Four Square Bible Church have got it all figured out, see.)

A means of categorizing and reducing or even annihilating the heretical other in all his scandal.


Grinding boots up Muslim asses, for example. Planting boots on their graves.


The irony of militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris writing book length screeds condemning the many horrific things people have done while proclaiming religious motives and justification, but then themselves advocating massive violence and terror against Muslims is a classical example of this..

An example so idiotic and shameless that it traumatizes my mind.


"The Inquisition means the Catholic Church is evil!"

This, immediately followed by "Muslims are evil, and I support the U.S. government's enhanced interrogation and rendition of terrorists, and Israeli and U.S. coalition violence against them!"


Like I say, no sense of irony. Very stupid.


They cannot see that they are doing much what the Nazis did to the Jews, or what the inquisitors in the violent aftermath of the wars that expelled the Muslims and Jews from Spain, did.

It's not that different. It's coming from the same place: rectitude, ideology as tribalism, annihilation of dissent.

Assassination, terror, and violence as censorship.

The other and his ideas are so threatening we must crush him politically or else kill him. Islam (or Judaism, or Catholicism, or jahaliyah - that's a favorite term among Salafist Muslims, it means pagan ignorance and decadence, all that is not Islam, or whatever) is so dangerous, we must eradicate it.

Shut up. You're wrong. If you don't shut up and do what I tell you, and believe what I tell you to believe, we will kill you.


My earlier posts about the "Left Behind" novels and the Grand Inquisitor are all meant to be driving at this same thesis.


When I put all these things up, I mean it to be read in full context. A context that is to me one of irony, parody and amusement.


Because death and evil are either a joke, or nothing's funny.


For what God does is almost always unexpected, you can't prepare your mind or body for the revelation. You can store up a year's worth of food in your basement, buy guns and ammo, vote Republican and try to keep America pure from whatever you think is evil and threatening, but in the end none of that will matter.

You can prepare your heart and soul, though.

One last joke:

Did you hear the one about that guy that stood up in a Podunk hick town synagogue a couple thousand years ago, pointed at the book of Isaiah and said “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing..”


Cymbal clash. Bada-bump.


Jews. They're pretty damn funny bunch. Always going for the best punchlines.


Blessed Holy Week, everyone. Let's keep one another in our prayers.



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