The Sad Joke of Christianity

Christianity is one big joke! Kidding. Well, maybe.

I’ve been working my way through God in Pain: Inversion of Apocalypse by Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević. It is an interesting and engaging book where each author takes a different chapter. One of the premises of the book is that Žižek is an atheist and Gunjević is a priest. Oh… the famed believer and non-believer debate. Not really, but it still is a good book.

But let me get to the joke. In one section of the book Žižek describes the incarnation as a “joke” (178). Before you get up in arms you need to realize that for Žižek in a tragedy the actor represents the universal, but in a comedy the actor is the character portrayed, not a universal. For example:

            In the tragic an actor is portraying the idea of despair.

            In the comic the actor is portraying his or her interpretation of the fool.

 So if Christianity is tragic then Christ represents the universal aspect God being present in the world, the universal understanding of suffering at the cross, and perhaps the universal understanding of the resurrection. I don’t see a problem with such an approach. Some types of theology (like Liberation theology) claim that in the suffering of the cross God is connecting with the suffering of the world, i.e. the universal. Others look to the resurrection and find hope for all in places of despair. So there is something about the tragic, in Žižek’s understanding, that makes sense and maybe there is not a joke to Christianity.

Yet there is something about God being God on the cross and in the resurrection. In the drama of the cross we want Jesus to be more than every person, we want Jesus to be more than a universal representation of something, we want Jesus to be God. We want the actor to be the character, i.e. we want incarnation.

If this is the case than it is God who is suffering on the cross and it is God who celebrates the resurrection.

Žižek adds one more point concerning the comedy and the tragedy of Christianity. He states that the “comical” is the domain where the horror of a situation exceeds the confines of the tragic, and in that domain there is a certainty that a transcendent God will guarantee a happy, final outcome.

Funny, right?

Ok, so it is not a joke in the sense of a horse walking into a bar and the bartender saying, “why the long face.” Yet there is something about the comic/hopeful view of the event of the cross.

Here is where I fall. I think the comic is important but at the same time so is the tragic. We need the universal so we individually have a place to connect with the person of Christ. At the same time we need Christ to be God. Žižek seems to be forcing one reading/aspect of the incarnation to the detriment of the other.

Instead, the cross event is a tragic joke.

Christianity is a tragic joke. I don’t think a truer statement has ever been said.