In her essay The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, Dorothy Sayers makes this passing comment about Jesus Christ:
…When confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humour that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by a rule of thumb.
– From Creed or Chaos?, p. 6
I don’t think I have ever read a better summary of the subversive character of Jesus as a man of conversation. He confounded men with the head-side of a coin, and with heads of grain. He asked trick questions. He told the educated that they knew nothing. He could take any man and make him a character in a story that inevitably demonstrated that he (the man) was a real-life bad guy (Imagine if Jesus were to turn your life into a parable). He would tell people that the way up was the way down, that strength was actually weakness, and weakness strength. He promised life through his own death. And he was not afraid to be misunderstood – for our misunderstandings of him do not harm him, rather they only reveal us to be what he said we were in his parables.
By ‘humour,’ Sayers does not mean that Jesus was a comedian. She speaks of his mood or state of mind. He spoke in paradoxes, which means that he thought in paradoxes. Chesterton said that a paradox is the truth standing on its head. I’ve added to that that a parable is the truth rolling around in the dirt, and irony (another favorite of Jesus) is the truth doing a back-flip. What fun it must be, therefore, to have the mind of Christ. His mind is doing gymnastics. Therefore his speech comes out like cartwheels – which is a lot more fun (and of course true) than the vast majority of speech we hear these days, which seems to only walk (slowly) in zigzagged lines and backpedal from time to time.
Jesus’ opponents often considered his speech to be blasphemous. They also likely considered him to be flippant. He wasn’t flippant, he was only flipping – the truth on its head. That was his mood, and it should be ours as well. Call it subversiveness. Call him the greater Jacob – the Usurper – he grabs ahold of the truth’s ankle, picks it up, and lets it dangle upside down as a spectacle. And men still don’t want to look – or more precisely, they don’t want to listen.
