One Sunday before Easter, a Church School teacher asked her class about the meaning of Easter. One pupil said: "Easter is when all the family gets together and they have a big turkey and sing about the pilgrims and all that."

The teacher said, "No, that's not it."

Then a second pupil responded: "I know what Easter is. Easter is when you get this pine tree and cover it with decorations and exchange gifts and sing lots of songs."

Again, the teacher had to say, "That's not it."

Then came the third pupil. He began: "Easter is when Jesus was killed, and put in a tomb, and left for three days."

"He knows! He knows!" the teacher said to herself, ecstatically. But then the boy went on, "Then everybody gathers at the tomb and waits to see if Jesus comes out, and if He sees His shadow ...."

I would hesitate to begin my Easter sermon with that story, except for the fact that one of the earliest descriptions of Easter depicts it as a gigantic joke, a joke played by God on the devil.

Conrad Hyers, in his book And God Created Laughter: the Bible as Divine Comedy, says: "In the early Greek Orthodox tradition, an unusual custom developed ... On the day after Easter, clergy and laity would gather in the sanctuary to tell stories, jokes, and anecdotes. The reason given was that this was the most fitting way of celebrating the big joke that God had pulled on Satan in the resurrection. A similar custom has been preserved in some rural Slavic areas where, on the day after Easter, folk dancing and feasting take place in the churchyard. In the early church, the 'big joke' was also expressed humorously by representing Jesus as the bait in the mousetrap with which Satan was caught" (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987, p. 25).

I would suggest that, while there are a lot of things in our world to be sad about (and we ought not to go around with a silly smirk on our faces all of the time), Easter proclaims that life is not ultimately a tragedy, but a comedy (in the technical sense of the term: a story whose ending comes out right).

The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia defines "comedy" as a story which contains "... the resolution of a contretemps thrown up by the plot." Boy, that is surely something we need, isn't it! Somebody to bring about a "resolution of the contretemps thrown up by the plot (life)." Maybe I'd better define our terms a bit further. My huge Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines "contretemps" as: "an inopportune happening which causes confusion" (French, from Latin contra, against, and tempus, time). Shakespeare's Hamlet lamented: "The times are out of joint, O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set them right" (Act I, Scene V)! Well, the times are, indeed, out of joint, but the New Testament message is that Jesus Christ was born to set them right!

Andrew Greeley, in his book The Jesus Myth, says: "His (Jesus') message is very simple and, through repetition down through the centuries, has become trite. But its simplicity and its triteness should not obscure for us the fact that the message responds to the most basic and agonizing question that faces all who are part of the human condition: Is everything going to be all right in the end? Jesus' response was quite literally to say, 'You bet your life it is.' Or, to put the matter only slightly differently, to the question of whether life was ultimately a tragedy or a comedy, Jesus replied with the absolute assurance that it was comedy" (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1971, p. 40).