We Laugh in the Face of Danger
“I laugh in the face of danger.”
This line from a young Simba, though he is certainly brooding with a bit of youthful pride, strikes at the heart of an aspect of the Christian life we all too often neglect in this disenchanted age. For the Christian, danger is truly no threat at all. While the world runs terrified, leading to all manner of licentiousness, abuses, legalism, and all-too-serious arrogance, God’s children are those who no longer have to fear. God has freed us from our varied forms of lifelong slavery to galavant about his creation in holy play. Death is dead in the death of Christ and by the Spirit we can now throw back our heads in laughter as the world, the flesh, and the devil cast their last-gasp darts at our bodies. In the truest way, nothing, and I mean nothing, can destroy us. We may be struck down, beaten, abused, slandered, and killed, but nothing, not even our inevitable physical death, will separate us from the inheritance that is wholly ours, kept in the hands of our risen King.
But what does this laughing in the face of danger actually look like? Some might hear these words and some warped dream of stoic sugarplums dances around in their head. But there is nothing stoic about this humorous vision. This is not a call to walking like the frozen chosen as we face trials and tribulations. This is a call to a thoroughly eschatological laughter. It is only those who experientially know the rule and reign of our Death-Destroyer who can stand toe to toe with danger and mock it to its impotent face. We walk with the One who sits in the heavens laughing at those who dare presume that they can challenge his sovereignty. We’re simply joining in with that heavenly humor.
Walking with Lions
This is where that animated lion can help cast some vision for what we’re speaking to. The Lion King is very much so a story of death and resurrection. Simba’s youthful folly must die in the wilderness before he can rise to rule what his father has given to him. Sound familiar? In the wake of his father Mufasa’s tragic death, Simba loses himself. He runs as far as he can from his destiny. He’s a son of a King who chooses to reside in adolescence, a prodigal clowning around with a literal pig. And it takes a monkey’s rebuke and a heavenly vision, as it were, of his father to remind him of who he is. “Remember who you are. You are my son, the one true king.” It’s as if Mufasa is channeling King David’s prosopological discourse (peruse Psalm 110). Upon hearing these words, Simba rises to run back towards his father’s house, where he’ll cast his tyrant of an uncle into a fiery death. He now knows who he is, a king called to reign just as his father taught him.
When talking about danger, one might think of the obvious: illness, financial uncertainty, physical threat, war, or, even, death itself. While these are all certainly dangerous in various ways for us embodied souls, there lies a deeper danger that often undergirds all of these more temporal threats. And that is this Simba-like disenchantment of the self, an utter loss of identity and vocation. Look around. You’ll see myriads walking around lost and blind. They’ve rejected their fatherly Creator’s design and call, and have run into a fairly philosophically diverse wilderness. They’ve bought into the world’s all-too-boring materialism and have chosen to reside with either the world’s jesters (Hedonism) or pharisaical sages (Stoicism). They’re either wholly unserious or all-too-serious. Having forgotten who they are, or better yet whose they are, they throw themselves into unsatisfying pleasure or legalistic labor. And such were some of us.
This is where the eschatological gospel of God rends the heavens and breaks into creation to bring us to a place of re-enchantment and holy laughter in the face of the loss of ourselves. The eternal Son of the Father tabernacled among us in order that he might die outside Jerusalem as our true wilderness King, that he might bring us to the everlasting life that brings wonder in its truest sense to the eyes of his children. He openly mocked the powers of the age, disarming them by putting death to death in his own death. He exposed them for the liars that they are. Being utterly unable to form ourselves into who we were always destined to become, Christ came as our substitute, the true Son with no folly to be found in him, in order that he might accomplish what we never could, a soteriological new birth that brings the gift of a newly enchanted heart that can begin seeing the work and wonder of God from one degree of glory to another.
Self’s Death and Resurrection
We are all too quick to build our identities around things that inevitably end. The edifice of our self-perception is made up of the rather feeble bricks of our marriages, jobs, money, children, fame, vocational success, or, particularly in the age of the therapeutic, superficial self-love. In the age of good vibes, the self has become king and anything that would bring these bricks tumbling down can truly terrify. Loss quite naturally stokes fear in the heart. Deferred desires make the heart sick. The death of a marriage, of a future long dreamt of, can bring one to the brink of despair. Why? Because a B-2 bomber just dropped meticulously targeted explosives upon the idol factory of your heart. You’re left in the ashes to, like our brother Job, sit and speak with our Creator, crying out about justice. And in those ashes of all that you’ve genuinely lost, your Father comes in the whirlwind with simple, yet enchanting words, “Come and die.”
Like that adolescent lion, we, in the wilderness we’ve run to, must die. You must, to quote that great 8-mile Michigander, lose yourself. Herein lies one of the great divine ironies. True humanity, a full-throated, doubled-over in joy, being in our Father’s world, only rises out of death. You must put yourself to death in order to truly live. The edifice of materialistic disenchantment must come crashing down in order that biblical birdhouses, if you will, might be built within the ever-growing tree of God’s kingdom. And it is upon these eschatological branches where we are truly human, laughing, feasting, and playing in our Father’s world in the knowledge that danger’s sting has been nullified. No axe can be laid at the root of this tree. It will stand eternally.
This death of empty identity is where life begins. You were crucified with our Lord upon a cursed tree that you might become an all-together different kind of tree, one that bears humorous and life-giving fruit. Now, as impotent dangers loom large in this valley of the shadow of death, we’re able by God’s Spirit to sit back and laugh as the world continually casts lies before us. We can walk with unassailable joy in the midst of dark danger because such things cannot actually do what they say they’ll do. Their words are empty. Christ has already wisely shown them to be truly powerless.
And now your King comes to you with a few more words. “Come and eat.” In the death of death, Christ has inaugurated a banquet that will go ever on, filled with living bread and sweet red wine. He has gone to the highways and byways of our disenchanted world that we prodigals might rise with him out of the wilderness to rule and reign with him at his table. He’s prepared it from eternity past. He’s anointed our heads with oil and our cups overflow with his gifts. As we traverse this world, with supposed dangers on every side, our seats at his table remain unmoved. Eschatological life is no game of musical chairs. When the music stops, when loss strikes, our seat ever abides at Christ’s table. We can laugh with our heavenly Father because no one and no thing can snatch our seat away.
By Way of Reminder
But before wrapping this up, it is important to state again by way of reminder that this is not a call to a stoic avoidance of the genuine hardships of this cursed world. Some might read this and scoff, presuming that laughing in danger’s face implies a chilled response to our own suffering or the suffering of those around us. In the realest sense, this is anything but. In the face of danger’s fiercest roar, the Christian’s response is one of proclaiming from Zion’s mountaintop that God’s gospel has already given the death blow to all the suffering that surrounds us. It’s eschatology all the way down. One could even say that such a response is a means of evangelizing the dead and disenchanted around us. Though ten thousand foes assail us, we have nothing to fear. While those thousands of foes are certainly serious, our Triune God has dealt seriously with them. Danger cannot do anything finally to you. Your new creation inheritance is as secure as the Son is at the Father’s right hand.
Thus, even when danger may actually strike a blow upon us, when cancer afflicts our bodies, loved ones leave us, and communities forsake us, we can continue, through tears, laughing, feasting, and playing in God’s world. They are but a fleshwound. We still weep with the weeping and grieve the losses that befall us. As Qohelet reminds us, there is a season to everything. Yet, those seasons are what they are because this life under the sun, the life of light and momentary afflictions, is preparing an eternal weight of glory for the children of God. When assailants strike, we turn the other cheek in a manner fitting of the world coming down from on high. We cover a multitude of sins joyfully because we are those playing in joyful submission to the God who has cast all of our sins into a sea that is passing away.
Conclusion
The Christian life is one of feasting, laughter, and holy play because we have been given exceedingly great promises from our Father and King. We are those who keep dancing when the world’s music stops. We are those who keep singing when the world cannot find words. We are those who feast in famine. We laugh in the face of danger. While suffering may frighten, and even lay a hand upon us, it cannot carry out what it threatens towards those who are in child-like communion with God. Death and all of its subordinates are shackled under the rule and reign of the one, true King. So, beloved, count it all joy when all manner of dangers stare you in the face. Keep laughing, keep feasting, keep playing in an enchanted obedience to the Lord who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. If you do, you’re walking as your good, good Father would have you to in a world filled with impotent monsters.
