Wed 3/20/2024 8:09 AM

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

Of course, it is a laughable suggestion that man invented laughter; but Nietzsche’s expression shouldn’t surprise us.  He thought that man invented God as well. 

The first account of laughter in the Bible comes in Genesis 17, when God told Abraham that Sarah would give birth to a son, even though she was 90 years old.  “Then Abraham laughed…”

Later, in Chapter 18, the Lord tells Abraham again that Sarah will have a son, and this time Sarah overhears and “Sarah laughed to herself…”  But of course, we know that a year later, she did give birth to a son, just as God promised—and his name was Isaac, which means “he laughs.”  When Isaac was born, Sarah said—this time in her joy, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.” 

Nietzsche was right, that sometimes laughter comes because we suffer deeply—Sarah lived 90 years without a child of her own and then laughed at God’s promise of a son.  But God has made laughter for us in our suffering, as well as our joy—we certainly didn’t invent it.  And I can’t help but think that, in the end, it was God who was laughing at Abraham and Sarah’s silly belief that “anything [was] too hard for the Lord.”

Here’s today’s joke:

A man was driving down the road when a policeman stopped him. The officer looked in the back of the man’s truck and said, “Why are these penguins in your truck?”

The man replied, “These are my penguins. They belong to me.”

“You need to take them to the zoo,” the policeman said.

The next day, the officer saw the same guy driving down the road. He pulled him over again. He saw the penguins were still in the truck, but they were wearing sunglasses this time. “I thought I told you to take these penguins to the zoo!” the officer said.

“I did,” the man replied. “And today I’m taking them to the beach.”

Have a wonderful day.