Did Jesus laugh?

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I guess I really blew it with this thread’s title.

Yeah, it’s obvious He laughed. Would anyone comment on the important question I asked?

Since Jesus wasn’t a sadsack, do you think the Protestant emphasis on happy, happy, joy, joy is more spot-on than doing the Stations of the Cross? Or the Sorrowful Mysteries?
 
I guess I really blew it with this thread’s title.

Yeah, it’s obvious He laughed. Would anyone comment on the important question I asked?

Since Jesus wasn’t a sadsack, do you think the Protestant emphasis on happy, happy, joy, joy is more spot-on than doing the Stations of the Cross? Or the Sorrowful Mysteries?
Ummm … we do that EVERY Sunday … as well as at Easter and Christmas … and the Joyful (hello!) and Glorious mysteries …

but Christ was also a ‘man of sorrows, acquainted with grief’ as Isaiah puts it. So it’s appropriate to acknowledge that side of him too. Not to exclude it.
 
Isaac prefigures Jesus, being the son that Abraham did not withhold when asked to offer a sacrifice.

Isaac means “he laughs”.
 
Now, my question: Is the Protestant emphasis on His resurrection (empty cross with no corpus, for example) biblically accurate considering the Bible emphasizes His sufferings?

From my Catholic perspective, I don’t think it is biblically inaccurate to emphasize the resurrection–just not complete. His life was mixed with joy and suffering.

Catholics display the crucifix (cross with corpus) because it reminds us how much God loves us.
 
Question: Did Jesus laugh?

Chesterton wrote this at the end of his book, Orthodoxy:

“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”
 
Now, my question: Is the Protestant emphasis on His resurrection (empty cross with no corpus, for example) biblically accurate considering the Bible emphasizes His sufferings?
I think the Protestant emphasis on a “happy, clappy” Gospel results from their reaction to Catholicism and to their tendencies toward a prosperity gospel.

Let me put it this way: Does Dick Cheney laugh? Sure he does. How about Condoleezza Rice? Sure. But make no mistake: these are SERIOUS people engaged in serious business.

Jesus was the same.

Paul taught Christ CRUCIFIED. Yes, He was resurrected, also, but Paul understood the centrality of the Cross.

The Protestant emphasis on an empty cross is an over-reaction and over-indulgence of their anti-Catholic inclinations. It’s the sermon on the mount without the agony in the garden.

An empty cross has no power, and a laughing Jesus may make someone feel good for a few moments, but the gospel is not a light-hearted tale…it is serious, sobering stuff.

This is just my opinion, of course. :tiphat:
 
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