Jesus Christ is true God and true man. The Church has always insisted on both truths because the mystery of the Incarnation is distorted if either is diminished. The eternal Son of God truly assumed our human nature and became like us in all things except sin. He experienced hunger and fatigue, affection and friendship, sorrow and anger. The Gospels explicitly tell us that he wept. They never explicitly tell us that he laughed, and this has sometimes led people to imagine a Jesus whose humanity was almost entirely solemn. Yet it is difficult to believe that the man who welcomed children, attended weddings and meals, enjoyed close friendships and used vivid humour in his teaching never smiled or laughed.
The television series The Chosen has brought this question into focus because it portrays Jesus with a warm and playful sense of humour. In one scene, after helping a man connected imaginatively with the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus remarks that they should return to town because one never knows whom one might meet on the road at night. After an awkward pause, he shrugs and asks, “Too soon?” In another scene, when told that a room offered to him is supposedly haunted, he smiles and says that he will take that one. Elsewhere he playfully pushes his friend Lazarus from behind, as close male friends sometimes do. None of these incidents comes from Scripture, and no one should confuse an imaginative dramatization with the historical record of the Gospels. Yet the larger question remains legitimate: is this kind of warmth and humour compatible with the humanity of Christ?
There is no theological reason to deny it. Humour, when it is healthy, is part of ordinary human life. It arises from our ability to perceive incongruity, surprise and the disproportion between our pretensions and reality. It can express affection, relieve tension and help us keep difficulties in perspective. Since Christ possessed a complete human nature, there is nothing irreverent in supposing that he possessed this capacity perfectly, free from the cruelty, vulgarity or malice that sometimes corrupt human humour.
G. K. Chesterton famously observed near the end of Orthodoxy that the Gospels reveal many aspects of Christ’s humanity but conceal his mirth. Chesterton did not mean that Christ lacked joy or humour. His point was more mysterious: there was something in Christ’s joy that the world was not yet ready to see fully. The Gospels explicitly record Jesus weeping, becoming indignant and experiencing anguish, but they never say simply, “Jesus laughed.” We should respect that silence and avoid claiming certainty about scenes Scripture does not describe. At the same time, silence is not denial. The evangelists omit countless ordinary human actions of Jesus because they were not writing exhaustive biographies.
It would be strange to conclude from this silence that Jesus never smiled or laughed. Children were drawn to him, and he welcomed them when the disciples tried to send them away. He shared meals with friends and accepted invitations to weddings and banquets. He loved Martha, Mary and Lazarus with a deep human affection. The Gospels present him moving naturally among people from very different walks of life. His enemies even accused him, absurdly, of being “a glutton and a drunkard” because he did not adopt the austere public manner associated with John the Baptist. None of this proves that he laughed, but it certainly does not suggest a grim or humourless personality.
The Gospels also preserve sayings of Jesus that are genuinely funny when we recover their original vividness. We are so accustomed to hearing them in solemn settings that we can miss their comic force. Jesus speaks of someone trying to remove a speck from another person’s eye while carrying a beam in his own. He describes blind guides straining a tiny gnat from a drink and then swallowing an entire camel. He speaks of a camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle. These are deliberately exaggerated and absurd images. They make serious moral points, but their humour helps the lesson lodge in the imagination.
The image of the beam in the eye is a good example. We often hear it simply as a warning against hypocrisy, which of course it is. But imagine the scene literally: a man with a great wooden beam protruding from his eye solemnly offering to perform delicate surgery on someone else’s speck. The absurdity is intentional. Jesus was a master teacher who knew how to use memorable images, exaggeration and irony. His listeners were human beings, and there is no reason to assume that they received every such image with expressionless solemnity.
The same is true of the camel and the needle. Jesus wanted his listeners to understand how difficult it is for someone attached to riches to enter the Kingdom of God. He could have stated the proposition abstractly. Instead, he gives them the impossible spectacle of a camel attempting to squeeze through the eye of a needle. The exaggeration shocks us into attention. The humour does not weaken the seriousness of the teaching; it makes the teaching more memorable.
Jesus also gave James and John the nickname “Boanerges,” the “Sons of Thunder.” The name was certainly descriptive. These were the brothers who wanted to call down fire from heaven upon a Samaritan village that had refused to receive Jesus. There is something affectionate and perhaps gently humorous in the nickname. Christ knew their impetuous temperaments and loved them as they were while gradually transforming them. The same John who once wanted fire to fall upon his opponents would become the Apostle who wrote so profoundly about love.
Humour and holiness are not enemies. Some of the saints possessed remarkable senses of humour precisely because they did not take themselves too seriously. St. Thomas More joked on the scaffold. St. Philip Neri deliberately used humour to puncture vanity, including his own. St. Teresa of Avila could speak to God with striking wit about the difficulties she encountered. Their humour did not arise from superficiality. It flowed from freedom, humility and confidence in God.
A healthy sense of humour can have an important place in Christian life because it helps us see ourselves truthfully. Pride tends to make us solemn about our own importance. We become easily offended, dwell on small humiliations and treat our mistakes as catastrophes because our ego is at the centre of the picture. The ability to laugh at ourselves can restore proportion. We recognize that we are weak and sometimes ridiculous, but we are loved by God nevertheless.
This does not mean making light of sin or suffering. There are things that should never be treated as jokes, and Christian charity places limits on humour. Mockery that humiliates another person, humour built on cruelty and jokes that trivialize sacred realities are incompatible with the example of Christ. Jesus could be severe when confronting hypocrisy and injustice, but his severity was never the irritability of a bitter person. His anger was ordered by love.
The Old Testament also shows that humour and irony are not foreign to biblical revelation. Elijah mocks the prophets of Baal as they desperately call upon a god who never answers. He suggests that perhaps Baal is occupied, travelling or asleep and needs to be awakened. The passage is biting satire directed against idolatry. Proverbs uses memorable comic images, comparing someone who meddles in another person’s quarrel to a man who grabs a passing dog by the ears. The humour serves wisdom by exposing foolishness in a way that a dry proposition could not.
Scripture can also employ understated irony. Second Chronicles tells us of King Jehoram, whose reign was marked by grave wickedness, that he died “to no one’s regret.” Few epitaphs could be more devastating in so few words. Biblical authors were fully capable of using irony, exaggeration and satire, and these forms of expression belong naturally to the human language through which God chose to reveal himself.
We should therefore be careful about constructing an image of holiness that is more rigid than the Gospel. Jesus was not gloomy. He knew sorrow more deeply than we can imagine, and he carried within himself the knowledge of the Cross toward which his life was moving. Yet sorrow did not make him morose. He came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. His first public miracle in St. John’s Gospel took place at a wedding feast, where he saved a young couple from embarrassment by providing an extraordinary abundance of wine. His presence sanctified human celebration rather than abolishing it.
The joy of Christ is rooted in his relationship with the Father. The Gospel speaks explicitly of Jesus rejoicing in the Holy Spirit. He knew the joy of seeing sinners return to God, of friendship, of accomplishing the Father’s will and of revealing the Kingdom to the simple. The Letter to the Hebrews even speaks of “the joy that was set before him” as he endured the Cross. Christian joy is not incompatible with suffering; it can coexist with it because its deepest source lies beyond changing circumstances.
For this reason, we should distinguish between the claim that Jesus possessed and expressed humour and the much stronger claim that we can reconstruct exactly what his jokes or ordinary conversations sounded like. The first is entirely compatible with Christian faith. The second necessarily belongs largely to imagination. A television drama such as The Chosen may legitimately imagine the ordinary human interactions that the Gospels do not record, provided we remember that these scenes are artistic interpretations rather than additions to Scripture.
Some viewers may prefer a more reserved portrayal of Christ, and there is nothing wrong with that preference. The danger comes when a personal preference is elevated into a theological principle, as though reverence required us to imagine Jesus without ordinary human warmth. The doctrine of the Incarnation points in the opposite direction. The eternal Son truly became man. He did not merely appear human while remaining emotionally distant from ordinary life.
We see this humanity in his friendships. Jesus loved Lazarus, Martha and Mary. He allowed the beloved disciple to recline close to him at the Last Supper. He accepted hospitality and entered into conversation with people whom respectable society avoided. He noticed the embarrassment of a wedding couple, the hunger of crowds and the grief of a widow burying her son. His humanity was not abstract. He entered deeply into the lives of the people around him.
It is therefore reasonable to imagine that the same Jesus who wept with those who mourned also smiled with those who rejoiced. St. Paul tells Christians to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” Christ lived perfectly the humanity that Paul later described. We know from Scripture that he wept. We need not regard it as daring to suppose that he also shared human laughter.
There is also something spiritually valuable in recognizing this. Some Christians unconsciously imagine holiness as a gradual loss of ordinary human warmth. The holier a person becomes, they suppose, the more serious, restrained and remote he must appear. The saints often show the opposite. Grace perfects nature; it does not flatten personality. A mature Christian should become more human, not less.
Humour can be part of this maturity. It helps us endure difficulties without dramatizing ourselves. It can defuse tension, strengthen friendship and prevent spiritual life from becoming self-important. Someone who can laugh at his own mistakes is often better able to acknowledge them. Someone who sees the absurd side of an inconvenience may find it easier to accept without complaint.
There is a long tradition of Christian humour rooted precisely in this freedom. The saints knew that the world is serious because it belongs to God, but they also knew that they themselves were not the centre of it. This combination creates a distinctive lightness of spirit. We take God seriously, we take love seriously and we take sin seriously, but we do not need to take our ego with the same solemnity.
Perhaps this is one reason the possibility of Jesus laughing matters more than it first appears. It touches our understanding of the Incarnation. If we imagine Christ as too distant to smile with friends, enjoy an amusing situation or use humour affectionately, we risk making his humanity less complete in our imagination than the Church teaches it to be.
We should not claim more than Scripture gives us. We cannot point to a verse that says Jesus laughed, nor can we know exactly how his humour appeared in ordinary conversation. But neither does Scripture tell us that he smiled, slept every night, embraced his mother as an adult or performed countless other ordinary human actions that we reasonably assume belonged to a genuine human life.
What Scripture does give us is a Christ who is fully alive: capable of tenderness and indignation, tears and rejoicing, profound friendship and vivid speech. He uses irony, exaggeration and memorable comic images. Children approach him freely. Friends welcome him into their homes. Crowds gather around him not only because of his miracles but because there is something compelling in his presence.
The Christian life should reflect something of this fullness. There are times for tears and times for laughter. Ecclesiastes already recognized both. Our faith does not ask us to become relentlessly cheerful or to use humour to avoid suffering. Christ wept, and we will weep. But neither should we cultivate gloom as though sadness were a sign of spiritual seriousness.
A good sense of humour can be an expression of hope. We can laugh at our own limitations because our salvation does not depend on our perfection. We can keep setbacks in perspective because God remains in charge. We can find joy amid difficulties because suffering is not the whole story. Christian humour, at its best, is closely related to humility and trust.
There is even a gentle irony in the people Christ chooses to carry out his work. The Apostles misunderstand him repeatedly, compete for positions and abandon him at the moment of crisis, yet he entrusts the Church to them. The same pattern continues throughout Christian history. God accomplishes great things through weak and imperfect people. We are among them.
We can smile at this without irreverence. In fact, recognizing the disproportion between God’s greatness and our limitations can deepen our gratitude. He knows exactly whom he has chosen. He is not surprised by our weakness. He asks us to give him what we have and allows his grace to work through it.
Whether Jesus laughed on a particular occasion is not a question on which our salvation depends. Christians can differ about how they imagine the unrecorded moments of his earthly life. But we should resist any picture of Christ that makes genuine humanity seem beneath his dignity. The scandal and glory of the Incarnation is precisely that the Son of God entered our human condition completely, except for sin.
Jesus could be righteously angry, but there is no reason to imagine him habitually grim or irritable. The Christ of the Gospels is demanding, but people are drawn to him. He speaks hard truths, yet sinners approach him. Children want to be near him. His holiness does not repel ordinary human life; it restores it.
We may therefore reasonably believe that Jesus possessed a perfect human sense of humour and that laughter had its place in his earthly life, even though the Gospels do not explicitly record it. More importantly, we can learn from the humanity revealed in the Gospel not to confuse holiness with gloom. Christ came to transform the whole human person. As we grow closer to him, we should become more capable of joy, friendship and a healthy ability to laugh at ourselves.
One day we will know Christ not through our reconstructions or imaginative portrayals but face to face. We may discover that many of our mental pictures of him were incomplete. For now, the Gospels give us everything necessary for faith while leaving much of the ordinary texture of his human life unrecorded. Within that reverent silence, there is ample room to believe that the One who created human laughter knew it from within.
By the Via Virtutis team
Photo by BOB ROWLES on Unsplash
