The only occasion on which I have ever attended a sermon in Latin, I was only able to make out two words – ‘hilaritas’ and ‘hilarius’ which I assumed must have something to do with hilarity. I only realised afterwards that the second word was actually a saint’s name, St Hilary of Poitiers, for this sermon was being preached at the beginning of that term which in some universities as well as in the law courts is known as Hilary term – his feast day being on January 14th. I don’t know whether Hilary was a particularly hilarious person , though he did write the first hymns in Latin, none of which, sadly, have survived.
There is more hilarity in today’s readings than is apparent at first sight because they are hidden by mistranslation. One is in the Old Testament Lesson and the other in the psalm. There we sang about the Leviathan whom God made to take his pastime in the great and wide sea. The Leviathan was a mythical sea monster, a sea serpent or water dragon, definitely something rather scary, and yet we are intended to picture him frolicking in the waves. Another more accurate translation of this verse has it that God created the Leviathan for the sport of it – for his own amusement. The Leviathan, scary as he might be to us, was made to make God laugh. We may not often picture God in this way – laughing with pleasure as he contemplates the wonders of his creation – the hippopotamus, the crocodile and the morning star.
The second mistranslation occurs in the reading from ‘Proverbs’. The passage is all about Wisdom – the power which is seen to be at God’s side in the work of creation. So we heard Wisdom say, ‘I was beside him (that is God) like a master worker.’ But it is possible to translate the Hebrew not as ‘master worker’ but as a little child at play, which gives a very different image of what is happening. There is God creating the world while at his feet wisdom is playing and daily as she plays, she is God’s delight. Wisdom sits there laughing at what God creates and God rejoices with her, delighting in the human race.
So as we approach the solemn season of Lent we find ourselves confronted by a God who laughs at Leviathan and delights in wisdom at play. This is not quite what the promoters of the atheist bus would expect from Christianity. The poster on the bus says that ‘God probably doesn’t exist, so stop worrying and enjoy your life’. We are saying that God does exist so stop worrying and laugh a little with him. Now of course in the present climate that might seem rather insensitive. I could imagine someone looking at the atheist bus and saying, ‘Well I don’t believe in God but I sure am worried, worried about my job and my savings and my mortgage’. What place is there for laughter and playfulness in such circumstances? Except of course that it is part of the human character to make jokes in the face of death – to listen to music while bombs are falling to have metaphysical arguments in the condemned cell. We may remember that on his very painful deathbed, Oscar Wilde, looked round his cheap Parisian hotel room and said, ‘Either the wall paper goes, or I do.’ The sociologist Peter Berger called the human capacity for such play, such insouciance, ‘a signal of transcendence.’ Play always constructs a kind of alternative reality with its own time scale, the second round, the third act, the fourth movement. Perhaps when Jesus points to a child’s nearness to the kingdom of heaven he is pointing to that capacity for joyful absorption in a game before which everything else has to wait. Play is closer to heaven because seriousness can be dangerously self centred.
The Desert Fathers of the fourth century were often asked how to deal with demonic attacks, by which they meant some form of temptation whether it had to do with lust, greed, ambition or despair. Of course prayer was regarded as the first line of defence – the attempt to shake the mind out of its pre-occupation with the sinful thoughts presented by the demons. But if that failed, laughter was regarded as the best remedy. The demons, they taught, hated not to be taken seriously. Though we may no longer believe that demons present the thoughts – the thoughts still arise and somehow to laugh at them – make them seem comic – is a way of raising oneself above them – taking oneself less seriously. A great sixteenth century spiritual director in Rome called Philip Neri had his own version of this technique. If he found that a cardinal who came to see him for confession took himself too seriously he would set him, as a penance, to dress up in his finest robes and then wander the streets with a saucer of milk in his hand calling for Fr Philip’s cat. To be able to laugh at your limitations and foibles, your absurdities and preoccupations is a holy act, a means of redemption.
So if play can be a signal of transcendence and laughter can defeat our self-centredness, what has this got to do with that great passage from St John’s gospel which we are used to hearing at Christmas and not just before Lent? ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.’ It is a passage that usually gives rise to abstruse philosophical speculation with little space for laughter. And yet according to the 13th century German mystic Meister Eckhart – laughter can be the way into understanding even the relationship between God and Jesus, between the Father and the Son. Eckhart pictures God the Father laughing to Jesus and Jesus laughing back. This laughter is like that compassionate sympathetic laughter through which human beings discover a deeper level of mutual understanding, mutual delight. According to Eckhart it is the kind of laughter which ‘begets liking and liking begets joy, and joy begets love, and love begets the Holy Spirit’, the power through which the joy of the Father and the Son is communicated to the world. God laughs to the soul and the soul laughs back to God and the Trinity is born.
So to learn to live in the Spirit – to join in the relationship of the Father and the Son – is to learn to live delightfully and that is not simply about having a good time. The root of the word ‘delight’ is in a Latin verb meaning ‘to love or to choose out as special.’ So Christian acts of love and friendship however difficult, or distressing could be seen as part of the divine delight. This year’s Lent course is about virtue, what it means to do good; if we try to do more good this Lent, but we do it through gritted teeth and without joy it doesn’t count as virtuous. It takes a long time to learn such joy; we see it best perhaps in the kind of radiant tranquillity we sometimes find in people who have borne far more than most of us suppose we could ever bear. Such joy is a gift from God – the God who delights in his creation – the God we might imagine, just occasionally singing along with Cole Porter – ‘It’s delightful, it’s delicious it’s de-lovely’. Amen