How many of you have seen it? . . . . 

Batman was always my favorite super-hero. He didn’t have any super-powers per say. He only had super-toys because of his super-wealth, and super-cunning because of his intelligence and erudition, both of which seemed more accessible to me than super-powers. Aside from the cape and the tightly-fitting, pulled-up pants, Batman was a user-friendly super-hero. 

In the dim and distant past of the “flower-power” 60s, the comic book hero “Batman” was reborn as a classic, “high-camp,” tongue-in-cheek, fun-to-watch TV show. Even the comic book “balloon” commentaries, “bam!,” “whoosh!,” “bash!,” “bop!,” decorated the fight scenes of the Adam West/Burt Ward weekly Batman show. It was fun. It was silly. The good guys were funny-good. The bad guys were funny-bad. The music was staccato-silly. Both Batman and Robin looked like they were wearing outfits that were made for someone else’s body size and shape. 

[If you can get someone to play a couple of chords here from the old sound track, it would be great]

Fast-forward to 2008. The newest “Batman,” aka “The Dark Knight,” is almost a completely different character. The “valiant” knight has now become the “dark” knight. In a world where cautious despair is the new optimism, and dark clouds the new sunshine on the horizon, the “dark” component has now taken over the identity of every other the character in the movie. 

One of Batman’s original adversaries was “The Joker.” Like all of the first generation of bad guys opposing “The Caped Crusader,” the Joker was both a bad guy and funny man. The Joker liked to taunt law enforcement authorities with elaborate pranks and pratfall. The Joker wasn’t just after a great “score.” The Joker was after the last laugh.

“The Dark Knight” has ditched those slapstick battles that marked the good guy/bad guy combat scenes. Instead there is the harshness of utter darkness, complete evil — no “lighter side” of combativeness or shadow-boxing that was part of the Batman legacy. In “The Dark Knight” the Batman hero is fixed, focused, troubled, morally compromised and fearsome. His arch-enemy, The Joker, is horrible, hideous, and humorless. With his smeared visage and vicious attacks, it is hard to comprehend how this incarnation of Ultimate Evil ever got dubbed “The Joker.”

Heath Ledger’s incarnation of “The Joker” breaks new ground for bad ground. Ledger’s “Joker” is not funny, is not quirky, is nothing but poisonous vicious evil. There is no cusp of comedy, no fringe of funny. Instead Ledger’s Joker is mean, menacing, and evil to the uttermost. Jack Nicholson, the 1989 Joker, warned Heath Ledger not to get swallowed up by the dark side of this fictitious figure. “Be careful, Heath: don’t let the role get to you,” Nicholson is alleged to have warned his younger colleague about playing the Clown Prince of Crime.

As everyone knows, the young Heath Ledger died from an overdose of prescription drugs. It is hard not to imagine that this exceptionally monstrous, evil, unfunny “Joker” undermined the actor’s own sense of self and identity. 

Yet this new “Dark Knight” movie is a HUGE hit. The actors are giant media stars. How is it that we are so enamored of a humorless “Joker” and a tongue-out-of-cheek Batman? What has changed in our culture to bring us to this place? Could this “place” we are in be a place of desolation and despair? 

In a post-911 world we are much more accepting of the encroachments of evil. In fact, we relish stories of stars brought down by the evil forces of addiction and narcissism and celebrity folly. Listen to our jokes. All the jokes we know today are bad jokes. Sick jokes. Warped humor. We have replaced slapstick with slap downs, the jocular with the jugular, and have convinced ourselves it is funny.

What are some of the “bad jokes” in today’s culture? 

Try Elton John spending 293,000 pounds (that’s over a half million dollars) in a single year on cut flowers for himself. (as cited in Times Literary Supplement, 14 December 2007, 27). Think what kind of perpetual gardens could have been established for inner-city Londoners with those same funds. 

Or take the oil-rich nations of the United Arab Emirates, where the uber-wealthy have found a new status symbol: low number license plates. For license place number #1 someone spewed out 14 million dollars; for license number 5 the bargain basement price of a mere 7 million dollars was “invested.” A few hundred miles south of these oil drenched countries, whole families struggle to survive on less than $2 a day. 

Or take the CEOs of financial institutions now going broke and wanting government bailouts, all the while taking salaries of hundreds of millions of dollars. A salary ratio of executive compensation to average worker of 400 to 1 (fifty years ago it was 20 to 1) is a bad joke. 

How could there be any worse “jokes” than these? Can you come up with a more reprehensible “punch line” for humanity? The rich blow almost incalculable amounts of money on absolutely nothing, while the poor struggle to live on absolutely nothing.

The new “Dark Knight” movie is so popular because it so precisely mirrors our hard-hearted, cold-blooded, terrorist-obsessed culture. Our sense of humor has been warped into “how much can the big guy make” and “how much can the big guy take.” 

Our Scripture lesson this morning presents an entirely different sense of humor, an entirely different Superhero, who turns the world upside down/rightside up. It is hard for us to find the humor in the feeding of the 5000 for a couple of reasons.

First, Christianity has an ambivalent relationship with humor and laughter. In The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, the huge "secret" being protected, and the reason the wonderful library has to be burned to the ground, is to destroy a secret work written by Aristotle?? a work on "Comedy." The ancient monk Jorge ends up killing half a dozen other monks and sets the fire to burn down the priceless library, and actually EATS the book by Aristotle to destroy this philosophers treatise on the GOOD of humor, of comedy because Jorge believed that if humor was incorporated into Christianity it would destroy the gravitas of salvation. Actually, the opposite is the case. 

Second, the humor in the feeding of the 5000 is not easy to find because what makes for a good joke 2000 years ago seems hardly funny today. Plus different cultures laugh at different things.

Here’s an old Yiddish joke: it’s a joke about a distressed young student who rushes into his rabbi’s study and cries: “Rabbi, I don’t know anymore . . . do I exist?”

The rabbi looks up from his scrolls and says: “And who is asking?”

Now if you are a seminary student struggling with this thing called “self,” this joke if hilariously funny. But if you aren’t . . . . Well . . . 

Here is a 1920s joke still circulating in places like Latvia which used to be called the “Soviet Union:”

“A village party secretary asks the parish priest: ‘How is it, Father, that when you ring your bells on a Sunday morning you fill the church, and I can’t get anyone to turn up for a party meeting.’ The priest answers: ‘Because we have been promising people paradise for 2000 years, but have never made the mistake of showing it to them.’”

Or take this joke that philosophers can’t stop laughing at based on Descartes’ famous assertion: “I think, therefore I am.”

At the 2007 Greenbelt Festival, Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue told a joke that went like this: “Descartes goes into a bar and orders a pint of beer which he duly quaffs. ‘Mr. Descartes, would you like another?’ asks the barman. ‘I think not,’ says Descartes, and disappears.”

See what I mean? Humor can be very specific to sub-cultures. 

True humor tickles all the way down because our expectations are turned upside down. 

Jesus was the master of “turning the world on its head.” He performed good jokes with virtually every action he took. And he invited his followers to join him in this joke-making. 

For all his faults, Ernest Hemingway seemed to get this. In one of his most famous novels, The Old Man and the Sea (1951), Hemingway lifts up porpoises as something humans could study for insight into how to live. On p. 48 of this, one of his final works, Hemingway says this about porpoises: “They are good. They play, and make jokes, and love one another.” 

Here is the gospel, not in a nutshell, but in a porpoise: Be good. Play. Make Jokes, and Love one another.

Here’s an example of Jesus being good, playing, making jokes, and loving one another: Jesus insisted upon working miraculous healing cures upon the most worthless, unimportant, un-newsworthy individuals—lepers, mentally ill people, outcasts, unpopular people, poor people, tax collectors, general “riff-raff.” What a joke!

This was Jesus’ big joke. He never cured Herod Antipas’ daughter’s headache; he didn’t make rich people richer; he utterly failed to perform before the religious establishment in ways that would impress them. In fact, just the opposite. Instead, in today’s lesson, Jesus fed a big rabble-rousing crowd, with nobody special or influential or even literate in its midst. And he fed them to the point of bursting, and all he had to work with was a paltry pittance of five loaves and two fish. 

Jesus’ miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes for the benefit of this “nothing special” crowd is reminiscent of the very first miracle he performed. The miracle itself was another good joke—making wine out of water that had already been consecrated and stored for use in purification rites. This little detail no one seems to notice, but it’s huge. 

Not only does Jesus create wine out of holy water. He does so at a nobody-special little wedding in the little community of Cana of Galilee. What is even more of a joke, Jesus creates this divinely delicious wine at the very end of the wedding party, when the few guests (a huge wedding in that area would have been maybe fifty people?) were about ready to stop dancing and go home. To add joke upon joke, Jesus makes between 600 to 900 bottles of the best vintage wine at the end of the party. Let’s say it was the conservative figure: 600 bottles. Okay. But that’s still a lot of wine left over for a little wedding party. And the best wine at that! This is beyond all reasonableness! What a joke! 

As with this week’s gospel text, the divine miracle is magnified by its abundance, providing far more than could ever be consumed or even appreciated by those being served. What a joke! 

In today’s text Jesus dares his disciples to be his Robin: feed the people gathered before them. Jesus then uses the scant provisions the disciples can muster to feed the mulling multitude. 

And here’s the final punch line: twelve baskets full of leftovers remain after the five thousand have been filled to capacity. 

God does not just “provide” with enough for us to eke out an existence. God provides beyond all our needs, beyond all our wildest imaginings, with enough for us to enjoy the “abundant life” which is all about . . . and to share that overflowing abundance with those in need. 

Are you ready to join in some “practical jokes” this week? To join the humor and lightheartedness of our Savior? Are you willing to go into the darkest, corrupt,and diseased Gothams of the world to help people in need, and join the Jesus in . . . 

Being good. 

Playing. 

Making jokes. 

And loving one another.