Note: This essay is adapted from an article originally published in Common and from a chapel talk delivered at Regent College.

I wonder if you can think of a time when you laughed, like really laughed. 

Laughing, and making others laugh, is one of the things I love most in life. Maybe this is because I am Australian, and humour seems to be in our cultural DNA. Or perhaps it was the family I was raised in, with parents who helped us learn to never take ourselves too seriously. Or perhaps it is because I am extroverted, and human beings tend to laugh more with others than they do alone. Laughter is often contagious. It can do some of the social and emotional work of expressing interest, understanding, and connection. Gift and grace come in laughing together, and a shared experience of laughter can knit friends, colleagues, and communities together. Laughter can also help regulate emotions, which is why in moments of frustration or even tragedy, or at a funeral, sometimes we laugh. We laugh when something is true, and sometimes we laugh when something couldn’t possibly be true. I also wonder if another reason why laughter can nourish us so deeply is because it is a bubbling forth of joy, and joy is a hallmark of the kingdom, and a fruit of the Spirit.

At different points in Scripture, we see laughter arising when the present circumstance seems incongruent with a promise of God or a declaration of a future hope. Or, as Father Michael Patella describes it, “the human incapacity to understand divine reality.”¹ In Genesis, Sarah laughs at God’s inconceivable promise of a son, because it is incongruent with her age. In the psalms, God laughs at human efforts to assert their feeble reign over the earth and “laughs at the wicked” who live as though there will be no judgement, which is incongruent with God’s sovereignty and judgement. Perhaps we are meant to laugh a little when Jesus speaks of a camel forcing its large body through a very small space, as a way to both reveal and conceal the nature of the kingdom. And Paul urges the Corinthians to consider the absurdity of the human body being one big eye as a way of illustrating the divine reality of unity, which can seem humanly incongruent within the complexity of diversity. 

To be sure, the Christian experience of joy will not always manifest in laughter, but I want to suggest that perhaps laughter can be an embodiment of joy, alongside a hope-filled recognition that “all shall be well,” especially when it isn’t. As author and historian Kate Bowler says, “. . . for every time that we ask, 'is this it?' joy will answer: 'there is more.'"² Laughter can sustain us when joy feels inaccessible and when hope is yet to be realized. In Psalm 126, we read about the people of God laughing, a people filled with joy. At the same time, they are also a people longing and hoping for God’s restoration. This psalm shows us that Israel’s joy and sorrow exist together. Their laughter comes with weeping, and both are held within the presence and faithfulness of YHWH. This psalm is a Song of Ascent or a pilgrimage psalm, a psalm that Israel would sing as they journeyed toward Jerusalem, and it can also poetically capture something of the journey of faith for us.

Psalm 126 can be broken into two parts. Verses 1–3 look back at God’s faithfulness, offering a memory YHWH’s redemptive action, while verses 4–6 look ahead, offering a plea or a petition that YHWH would do it again. Each section is marked with the phrase “restore the fortunes.” In the first three verses, the psalmist is looking back, recalling a moment of God’s rescue and the embodied joy that flowed from it. For Israel, their need for rescue was constant. They needed rescue before the exile, during the exile, and after it. So, while scholars are not exactly sure what moment of redemption the psalmist is referring to, what we do see is that it evokes joy in three ways. Firstly, it felt dreamlike—it was surreal, beyond explanation, and perhaps beyond their anticipation.³ Next, it produced singing. Finally, it caused the nations to recognize the restoration of Jerusalem, this “great thing,” as an act of YHWH. In the final three verses, the psalmist looks ahead, expressed in three different movements—from sowing to reaping, from weeping to joy, from going away to coming home. This threefold movement is a poetic expression of hope, because it comes with an expectation that YHWH will act. Reflecting on this psalm, Eugene Peterson says, “Joy is nurtured by anticipation . . . joy builds on the past, it borrows from the future. It expects certain things to happen.”⁴  

Have you ever experienced this movement between joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, lament and hope? David Taylor explains the three movements in this way, “. . . for the psalmist, there is always a sense in which joy retains a poignant residue of sorrow, a kind of happy-sadness that marks our earthly pilgrimage.”⁵  Being a follower of Christ, a person marked by joy, does not mean we need to be happy all the time, because that is not actually possible—it is not human!

A few years ago, I experienced a prolonged season of not feeling very happy! The things which used to bring me joy were draining. I felt sad a lot of the time. I was burning out, which caused me to take a sudden, unplanned leave from my work at Regent. During that time, one of the only people I felt like I could see was a dear friend, who is a generous laugher and an excellent crier! She is someone who embraces the ugly cry like no one else I know. I had a sense that somehow she might be able hold space for all that I was feeling, and that that was what I needed. When she picked me up from the airport, she asked me how I was doing. She listened, held space for me to be honest, attuned to how low I was feeling, and asked me good questions. Then she said, “So . . . I’ve booked us tickets to an improv comedy show tomorrow night!” I don’t think she did this because she was trying to “cheer me up” nor was she wanting to dismiss my sadness in any way. However, it served as a beautiful reminder that somehow, laughter and tears can, and often do, exist together. 

There are times on our journey of faith when our fortunes don’t feel like they are being restored, or the dreams we are dreaming are not being fulfilled, or when it feels like we have been sowing in tears for so long, desperately longing for joy to return, but not sure if it ever will. Our experiences of sorrow, lament, sadness, and disappointment are not antithetical to the life of faith, but integral to it. Joy does not come from forgetting pain, but it can grow from it and we are invited to hold both honestly in the presence and faithfulness of God. In that sense, joy has a memory, it has a history, or as Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis puts it: “. . . lament is always hoping to grow into praise; when it does, it does not forget where it came from.”⁶  

Did you notice how embodied the emotions are expressed in this psalm? For example, “mouth filled with laughter” and “tongues loosed” and “tears.” Israel’s movement from sorrow to joy and back again is experienced in their bodies! As people who are part of a story whose orienting figure is a God who entered a body, perhaps it is no wonder that this is the case. We don’t have a body; we are a body! This is how God created us, with bodies. This is how we can know what God is like, because God came to us in a body, and God’s Spirit also inhabits bodies. The incarnation of God in Christ is a divine affirmation of embodiment. We feel and participate in the life of faith with our bodies.⁷ Emotions don’t happen “out there” somewhere. They are experienced and held in our bodies. Feelings are not a problem to be solved. They are to be noticed, to be witnessed. Pete Scazzero says: “To feel is to be human. To minimize or deny what we feel is a distortion of what it means to be image bearers of our personal God. To the degree that we are unable to express our emotions, we remain impaired to our ability to love God, others, and ourselves well.”⁸  So, I want to also suggest that Psalm 126—indeed, the whole book of Psalms—is an invitation to feel and hold our very real emotions within the presence and faithfulness of God. 

In her reflections on the psalms, scholar Ellen Davis says that the psalms assume “that God cares intensely about what we experience in this world,” and show us what it sounds like “to bring into conversation with God feelings and thoughts most of us think we need to get rid of before God will be interested in hearing from us.”⁹ One of safest places to feel everything we experience is in the presence of a compassionate Father, in the company of a Son who weeps, and as those filled with a Spirit who intercedes with wordless groans. If psalms were songs that were sung together, then they are also an invitation to feel and to pray very real things, in the presence of one another.

We live within the divine reality of knowing that the God who truly loves us has become just like us and, in Christ, has given himself for us. By the Spirit, he is present with us, bringing a kingdom that includes us. At the same time, our present circumstances can be filled with so much pain that we feel incapable of believing that one day all will be made new. This seeming incongruence can be a seedbed of joy. We laugh when something is true, and we laugh when something couldn’t possibly be true. I hope that one day we will laugh because the divine reality that Jesus invites us to hope for will be revealed as more joyous than we ever had the human capacity to understand.

And may the Spirit empower us to be a community who laughs and a people whose laughter does not exclude weeping. And may our shared laughter be a reminder that “all shall be well” . . . especially when it is not.