My friend Jane is about to die.
Her husband David texted me last night to tell me that the doctors say it will likely be hours.
Hard to believe it was only a few days ago that she was giving me reading assignments.
“Go into the house and look on the little table next to my bed,” Jane said, lying now in her other bed – her hospice bed – with eyes closed. “There are two books there. I didn’t get to them in time.” She smiled. “They are both about laughter. Let me know what you think.”
I got the books, but Jane is now mainly sleeping. It is too late to discuss them.
Instead, I thumb through the pages, waiting for news. I remember our last real conversation, as Jane lay there with eyes closed and a smile on her face, describing a place crowded with everyone who in this world was excluded: a place where all feast, embrace and worship. Every now and then her eyes open and she cracks a joke. “Some of the folks back home won’t be particularly happy about who all is around that table,” she said, breaking into another grin, “but they’ll get over it.”
“The Lord’s Supper … might seem to require somberness,” writes Conrad Hyers (author of my first assigned book, “And God Created Laughter”). And yet it “seems in fact to have been celebrated, and in a banquet atmosphere.” Hyers also describes an ancient Greek Orthodox tradition where, on the day after Easter, everyone “gathers in the sanctuary to tell jokes” as a way of “celebrating the big joke God played on Satan in the resurrection.”
Wish I could have talked with Jane about this. She would have loved the idea of a post-Easter joke day. I imagine she and I would have made an executive decision to adopt the tradition this year, given that Easter falls on April Fools’ Day and we would have a running start.
I’ve been thinking, though, that the joke of the resurrection is as much on us as it is on Satan. Think about our responses over Passion Week. We fall asleep with the disciples in the garden. We scatter, doubtful and afraid, avoiding the cross. We show up with the women to weep. But Jesus more or less undoes all our responses. He shakes us awake and gathers us back together. He meets us in our doubt and shows us his scars. He sends us to Jerusalem to wait for the Holy Spirit. The resurrection joke: He’s back, and he has lots of stuff for us to do besides sleep, doubt and weep.
The way I figure it, Jane must be in on this joke. If I came into Jane’s hospice room thinking all she would be up for was sleeping, reminiscing and grieving, the joke was on me: Jane had other plans. Which is why she dished out an assignment, right at the end — not so much to keep me busy as to make sure the interesting thing she had planned to do next didn’t get lost in the shuffle surrounding her death. Laughter, Jane had decided, was in need of theological attention, and theological attention it would get.
In my second assigned book, “Between Heaven and Mirth,” James Martin argues that levity “prepares” us for heaven, where we will “share our happiness with the saints, in the company of our loving God, who has prepared a place of eternal joy for us.”
Thanks, Jane, for helping me lighten up so I can get ready, too.
