Playing in the Ruins: Humor and the Discipline of Biblical Interpretation

An Unexpected Break

The sanctuary lights were carefully dimmed, the communion table prepared, and our leadership manuscripts open. The Maundy Thursday worship service has long been a favorite of mine. I value the smaller crowd, as the intimacy of the gathering deepens the narrative’s impact. As one of several associate pastors at a large church, I was still relatively new to both the position and to ministry. That evening, I was given not only the rare opportunity to preach but also to officiate a sung communion liturgy. The stakes felt high.

I drew a deep breath to calm myself as three of us took our places behind the communion table to begin the evening’s liturgy. My colleague began: “On the night in which Jesus fathered with his disciples…”

What followed was a brief, yet excruciatingly long pause as he caught the spoken typo. Jesus and his disciples did what? He began again, “On the night in which Jesus gathered with his disciples.” He pressed on, but I was undone, helpless against the rising tide of laughter. I tried in vain to make my face look like it was pained with grief, not with the strains of suppressed laughter. Maybe the congregation would assume I was overwhelmed by deep grief rather than immaturity. Mercifully, the opening liturgy ended, and we slipped back to our places for the first hymn. Still struggling, I held my open hymnal directly in front of my face.

Then, I heard it: a cough. No doubt a cough of condemnation, signaling disapproval. The heat and redness of my shame intensified. Bracing myself, I turned toward my colleagues. The first thing I noticed were the hymnals in that same odd position I’d been employing. Then I saw that their faces were red like mine, and their bodies were shaking like mine.

Like fourth graders who’ve been repeatedly told to stop laughing, we three leaders fully broke. Moments later, one of us left for a nearby hallway to regain composure. By the end of the hymn, we managed collective self-control. Before beginning the sermon, I looked out at the congregation and brought them in on the joke, acknowledging the disruptive humor. We moved from shared laughter to the shared story of Christ’s final evening with his friends.

On the night I gathered with my new congregation to remember Jesus’s final meal, an unexpected connection emerged within the rituals of grief. I’d feared that the disruption had irreparably undermined our worship’s engagement with the story. Instead, it deepened our shared experience. This suggests that humor may itself disclose something otherwise concealed. I wonder if Jesus also laughed with his friends at that dinner.

Through reversal, irony, and exaggeration, biblical narratives interrupt the impulse toward premature coherence and reshape how readers might perceive meaning. By attending to such disruption—textually, interpretively, and bodily—humor becomes not an ornament to serious theology but disciplined hermeneutical work. Before considering humor as an interpretive posture, it is worth noticing how frequently Scripture itself already reads this way. This dynamic within the text also invites us to consider how humor might shape our embodied and communal practices as interpreters, bridging textual disruption with lived experience.

Here, “humor” does not mean entertainment, flippancy, or turning sacred texts into jokes. Instead, it refers to narrative incongruity—moments of reversal, exaggeration, irony, or delayed recognition—that challenge what we expect. Humor appears when outcomes differ from what is expected, roles are switched, or recognition comes late. In Scripture, humor is not opposed to seriousness; it can be an important way to reveal deeper truths.

The book of Jonah provides a compelling starting point. Its satirical humor unfolds through constant reversals. For example, when a storm threatens the ship, the foreign sailors desperately pray to their gods, but Jonah, the prophet, is asleep below deck (Jon 1:5). When the sailors confront him, Jonah says he worships “the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9), but ironically, he is trying to escape from this very God by crossing the sea. Rather than fulfill his mission, Jonah tells the sailors to throw him overboard, choosing death over obedience. Instead of dying, he is saved by a giant fish and spends three days inside it (1:17).

In contrast to traditional prophetic stories, which resolve with the prophet obeying God and others repenting, Jonah’s story keeps turning expectations upside down. His warning to Nineveh is comically terse: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4)—but the people respond instantly and dramatically with repentance. God shows mercy, and Jonah is angry rather than pleased. Rather than concluding with success or resolution, the story accumulates inversions, leaving both the prophet and the audience unsettled.

While the story’s conclusion unsettles traditional expectations, this pattern of inversion can be seen throughout the narrative’s key episodes. When Jonah delivers his brief warning, the king of Nineveh responds with remarkable humility and urgency, proclaiming: “Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent” (3:8–9). Not only do the people fast and wear sackcloth, but “both man and beast” are covered in sackcloth—a comic exaggeration. Jonah’s single-sentence prophecy prompts immediate citywide repentance—an outcome that both fulfills and subverts the typical prophetic storyline.

In the final chapter, the narrative reversals become even more pronounced. God appoints a plant to give Jonah shade, “to save him from his discomfort” (4:6), followed by a worm, which attacks the plant, and a scorching east wind that torments Jonah further. These elements—plant, worm, and wind—respond to God’s commands more obediently than Jonah himself, emphasizing the prophet’s stubbornness in contrast to the rest of creation.

Rather than concluding with triumph or resolution, the story ends in unresolved tension: Jonah sulks, the plant withers, and God asks, “Should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people—and also many animals?” (4:11). Instead of heroic closure, escalation leads to a prophet resentful in the face of divine mercy.

The book’s exaggeration and reversal do not trivialize prophecy; instead, they disrupt conventional assumptions. Authority shifts: the prophet resists obedience, while outsiders respond faithfully; mercy offends its own messenger. Rather than mocking divine purpose, the humor unsettles human certainty. In this way, the narrative suggests that prophetic truth may arise from unexpected sources—even sworn enemies or wilting plants.

In contrast, the Emmaus-road narrative in Luke (24:13–35) uses a subtler form of ironic humor. Two disciples walk in grief, convinced that the story has ended in failure. “But their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (24:16), so they recount recent events to the very person at the story’s center. The reader, however, knows that the risen Christ is their companion. When Jesus asks, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” (24:17), the irony is heightened: Christ listens as his own story is retold to him, and the disciples remain oblivious.

Jesus lets the disciples share their sadness, even as he represents the bigger story of redemption. They do not recognize him until “he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight” (24:30–31). Recognition comes not in spectacle but in the breaking of bread. Glory is not amplified; it is reframed. Their eyes open within an ordinary gesture that suddenly carries more weight than their expectations allowed.

These examples demonstrate that humor in Scripture is not incidental, but formative. By disrupting the reader’s expectations, the text reshapes the perception of meaning. Humor functions not only within the narrative but also influences the reader, modeling a mode of attention grounded in openness rather than control.

Within traditions shaped by reverence and doctrinal precision, attending to humor may seem destabilizing—perhaps even irreverent. Yet humor does not trivialize the sacred; it reveals how divine wisdom routinely unsettles human certainty. Humor resists the interpreter’s drive toward totalizing coherence. Where theological reading can drift toward control—resolving tension, harmonizing contradiction, securing meaning—humor preserves excess. It keeps the text capable of exceeding our explanatory frameworks. Comic, ironic, and satirical elements are not decorative flourishes. They shape how biblical stories generate meaning.

If biblical stories often include collapse, confusion, and reversal, then humor may fit their structure better than rigid resolution. Stories saturated with surprise require readers willing to remain inside uncertainty rather than forcing closure. Satire tolerates disproportion. Irony sustains double meaning. Comic timing slows recognition. Where tragedy tends toward finality, humor preserves openness. In narratives of resurrection, reluctant prophets, delayed recognition, and extravagant mercy, a strictly linear reading risks flattening tension. Humor, instead, lingers where expectation fractures. It does not rush to repair disruption but waits to see what meaning might emerge from within it.

Humor within the Interpretation

Imagine encountering Balaam’s talking donkey (Numbers 22). The prophet, intent on his mission, misses every warning until his donkey turns and rebukes him for his blindness. The image is jarring. A beast of burden sees what the seer does not. The scene arrests the reader: What is happening here, and why is a donkey suddenly more perceptive than a prophet?

Moments like this do more than decorate the narrative. They destabilize it. Authority shifts. Perception is inverted. Absurdity exposes the fragility of spiritual certainty.

Robert Alter observes that “the Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of these lifelike characters and actions… But that pleasure of imaginative play is deeply interfused with a sense of great spiritual urgency.” ¹ Delight and urgency coexist. Attending to the Bible’s strangeness is not at odds with seriousness; it is one of its vehicles. Scriptural oddity is not ornamental. It is instructive.

If humor in Scripture disrupts expectation within the narrative, it invites a corresponding attentiveness in the reader. Where, then, should we allow ourselves to notice Scripture’s excess?

One starting point is disproportion. What appears to be unusually large, oddly specific, or narratively exaggerated? A donkey who rebukes a prophet. Manna descending daily from heaven. Rhoda, so overcome with excitement that she leaves Peter knocking at the gate while announcing his arrival (Acts 12). These moments resist flattening. They interrupt interpretive haste. To read with attentiveness to such incongruity is not to make light of the text. It is to resist premature coherence. Humor does not invent instability; it exposes instability already present. By lingering where the story strains against expectation, readers allow meaning to emerge from imbalance rather than imposing it too quickly.

Consider the elder brother’s protest in the parable of the “prodigal son”: “You have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15:29). The specificity arrests attention. In the midst of music, dancing, and the slaughter of the fattened calf, he does not lament the loss of inheritance or affection. He laments the absence of a goat. The scale contracts abruptly. Feast gives way to livestock accounting.

The complaint borders on the absurd, yet its disproportion reveals something crucial. The older son narrates obedience as transaction. His grievance is measured, itemized, and almost domesticated. In contrast to the father’s extravagant welcome, his imagination narrows. The humor does not lie in mockery but in constriction. Lavish mercy unfolds before him, yet he remains preoccupied with what was not allocated. To linger over the goat is not to trivialize the parable but to honor how imbalance discloses fracture. The exaggerated precision of his protest reveals how easily faithfulness calcifies into entitlement. What appears as comic excess marks the collapse of a story the elder brother believed about fairness.

This attentiveness is not confined to private interpretation. It shapes proclamation. When such details are allowed space in preaching, their quiet humor can open paths toward harder truths. A congregation may initially smile at the elder brother’s fixation on a goat, and that gentle recognition softens resistance. The laughter is brief, but it creates room. Within that opening, deeper questions can be asked—about comparison, resentment, longing, and the unspoken calculations that structure our relationships. Humor does not reduce seriousness; it lowers defenses. What follows is not levity but recognition. Because Scripture was first encountered as spoken story, this dynamic becomes more evident when the text is embodied. Reading aloud, pacing, and inhabiting a scene can magnify its disproportion. When a story is embodied—when its emotional arc is allowed to build—the discomfort or absurdity it contains becomes communal rather than private.

Embodied Interpretation

Interpretive openness should not be regarded solely as an internal disposition; rather, embodied interpretive practices facilitate new understanding. Scripture is encountered through vocalization, pauses, breath, and gesture, rather than exclusively through silent reading. When a narrative is spoken aloud with careful attention to pacing and inflection, its imbalances often become apparent without explicit argument. A complaint that appears measured on the page may sound petulant when voiced, while a promise may reveal underlying strain. Elements that seemed minor may become prominent, and what appeared stable may reveal fractures. Thus, storytelling does not merely embellish interpretation; it reveals it.

Expanding upon this concept, the discipline of biblical storytelling—particularly as developed by the Network of Biblical Storytellers and Thomas Boomershine—approaches storytelling not as performance for effect, but as a disciplined attentiveness to how Scripture sounds and moves when the audience hears it being told rather than read. ² Meaning is embedded not only in vocabulary but also in cadence, repetition, escalation, and pause. A story internalized sufficiently to be recited from memory begins to reveal its structural features, such as points of rising tension, lingering irony, and disruptions to the expected narrative arc.

The effectiveness of these practices is demonstrated through targeted exercises. For instance, Richard Swanson characterizes storytelling as an experiment in destabilization. By fragmenting a narrative into brief lines and reading them rapidly, or by assigning unexpected emotional tones, participants uncover new resonances and tensions. Swanson inquires: “Did any of the odd emoting make surprising sense? Did any of the line fragments that followed each other turn into arguments… a love story? A detective story? A slumber party?” ³ The objective is not to distort the text, but to reveal its flexibility. Tone alters perception, and emotion reshapes sequence. Elements previously considered incidental may form coherent arguments, while solemn passages may approach comedy. Familiar lines interact in novel ways, generating new interpretive possibilities.

Similarly, read-around exercises encourage participants to stand in a circle and allow the text to move from one voice to another—initially delivered in a flat and hurried manner, then with exaggerated affect, and ultimately, collectively amplified as a shared emotional arc develops. What emerges is seldom invention; more frequently, it is tension that has long been concealed beneath habitual delivery. A hurried exchange may sound evasive, a formal declaration may begin to tremble, and a complaint may appear insubstantial against its surrounding abundance.

Such embodied practice does not impose interpretation; rather, it tests it. Modifying tone does not create humor artificially but instead reveals where the narrative already strains against coherence. As Swanson observes, these “sparks and tensions” may not always indicate something definitive, and “sometimes it takes a few more laps before anything suggests itself.” Nevertheless, the process of repeatedly engaging with the text and allowing its rhythms to disrupt familiar readings exposes fractures that silent familiarity tends to obscure. Thus, interpretive openness is maintained through the exploration of texts orally and aurally, both individually and through communal engagement.

Humor often emerges in precisely this shifting terrain. When emotional registers refuse to remain fixed, incongruity surfaces. We notice something is off before we can explain it. We may laugh briefly at a line that sounds suddenly small or exaggerated, and that laughter signals recognition—something in the text has resisted control. Embodied telling, then, becomes a discipline of staying with that resistance. It keeps the problem clear long enough for meaning to come from within the story, rather than being forced from outside. In the end, interpretive openness is not simply a willingness to see differently, but an ongoing, shared practice of letting the text speak through embodied and communal encounter.

Biblical humor often appears at the site of collapsed expectation. Jonah’s prophetic arc collapses into reversal. The disciples on the road to Emmaus walk inside the wreckage of their hope, convinced that the story has ended in defeat. The elder brother’s protest discloses a family narrative that has not unfolded as imagined. In each case, something has already broken. The story has not proceeded as planned.

Sasha Chapin offers language for such moments:

When this happens—when expectation breaks down, and you are living in a shipwreck of your expectations—a precious state of being can dawn, if you’re lucky. This is the state of Playing in the Ruins. You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, okay, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day. Who am I actually, in this fallen place, this actuality foreign to my hopes and dreams. ⁴

What Chapin names as “Playing in the Ruins” resonates with the destabilizing work of biblical humor. Humor does not rush to repair the shipwreck. It lingers among the fragments. Resisting immediate reconstruction, it creates space to ask what remains. In Jonah, what remains when prophetic dignity collapses? In Emmaus, what remains when messianic expectation lies in pieces? Humor slows the rush toward resolution long enough for recognition to arise within the wreckage rather than outside it.

I have seen this kind of play in a hospice room, where I was invited to officiate a wedding.

The groom’s grandmother was not expected to live much longer, and the couple wanted to share the ceremony with her before she died. I agreed to meet them to officiate a service with only the couple, Grandma, and me in the room. She was lying down the whole time, her eyes largely kept closed. She groaned on and off while we began. When I came to the “affirmation of the family,” I paused, wondering if she’d even understand the question, and if she understood, would she be able to respond? I proceeded:

“Do you, Grandma, give Laura and Erich your blessing,

promise to uphold them in their marriage,

and encourage them in their life together?”

I’d barely finished before her groan morphed into a resounding “Yes!” The moment passed just as quickly as it had arisen— she returned to her moaning. Later, we giggled as the bride and groom took their solemn vows, “before God and Grandma.” More moaning. The service concluded with the marital kiss, and the groom bent down close to Grandma, held his newly ringed hand before her, and said, “Look, Grandma! I’m wearing a ring! I’m married now!” Without missing a beat, Grandma said with veritable gusto, “LET THE GAMES BEGIN!”

There is a particular kind of in-breaking laughter that can occur in the depths of grief. It does not erase pain. It does not deny the ruin. It interrupts it. It dares to suggest that grief is not the only story being told. Grandma died the next day. The loss remained real. Yet before she breathed her last, in the midst of pain and parting, she shared joy and laughter.

To play in the ruins is not to romanticize devastation. It is to remain present within it—honestly and hopefully—without surrendering interpretive agency to collapse. Biblical humor models this posture: Jonah’s prophetic dignity unravels as he sulks outside Nineveh; the disciples on the road to Emmaus wander in confusion; the elder brother of the prodigal son stands outside the feast, clinging to his grievances. In each case, the narrative refuses tidy resolution, lingering in the aftermath of fractured expectations.

But these stories do more than depict their characters amid the ruins—they invite us as readers to join them there. We are called to play in the ruins of these stories, to resist the urge for premature closure, to inhabit the ambiguity, and to imagine what God might be communicating through unresolved tension. Humor, in this light, is not merely a literary device but a summons to a particular mode of interpretation—one that lingers among the fragments, attends to what remains, and trusts that new meaning may yet emerge from within the disruption.

In the shadow of death, a grandmother’s suddenly spirited and joyful responses did not erase grief. They interrupted it. The ruin remained real. Yet within it, laughter disclosed a deeper truth: loss was not the only story being told. Such moments do not trivialize suffering; they resist its totalizing claim. They are small reminders of the gospel promise that death does not have the final word.

Humor, then, is not ancillary to theological interpretation. It interrupts the interpreter’s impulse toward mastery and resists premature closure. Whether sharp as satire or quiet as irony, biblical humor trains readers to inhabit destabilized spaces without forcing resolution, to attend to what remains when certainty collapses, and to trust that new coherence may yet emerge from within the fragments. In both pulpit and classroom, this discipline invites us to linger in the scrapyard honestly—and to discover what grace might yet be forming there. In sum, humor’s generative potential lies in its ability to hold open the space between disruption and meaning, allowing new theological insight to arise without rushing to closure—a claim that echoes the central thesis of this essay.

Conclusion

On that Maundy Thursday night, I feared that laughter had ruined the sanctity of worship, but the disruption did not derail the experience. It may have even intensified it. It invited us to participate with our full humanity and to deepen my own consideration of that night when Jesus gathered with his coworkers and friends.

Just as that laughter offered a new way of entering the story, so too does Scripture invite us to find meaning in the unexpected. Scripture’s own comic ruptures issue a similar invitation. Jonah sulks beneath a withered plant. The disciples recount their grief about the death of Jesus to the risen Christ. A donkey rebukes a prophet. A son protests over a goat while a feast rages behind him. Again, and again, expectation collapses. Humor does not rush to repair the collapse. It preserves the instability long enough for revelation to emerge from within it. We laugh at the absurdity of the situation, only to realize we have been there, too.

Approaching a text with humor means relinquishing the need to control its meaning. It requires patience, especially when the narrative feels uncertain. Humor allows us to notice elements that do not seem to fit, to search for meaning amid reversals, and to recognize that additional details are not errors but significant components. When former interpretations collapse, new perspectives can emerge.

Playing in the ruins is not denial. It is faithful presence. It refuses to grant devastation the final word while also refusing to skip ahead to triumph. It lingers, watches, and waits. Biblical humor trains us in that waiting. And sometimes, if we are attentive enough, we discover that the laughter we feared might be irreverent is instead the sound of grace refusing to be contained.