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“What does God pray?”
This question is raised in Berakhot 7a, the first tract of the Misnah. And this is the answer that is given:
Rav Zutra bar Tovia said that Rav said:
God says: “May it be My will that My mercy will overcome My anger towards Israel for their transgressions, and may My mercy prevail over My other attributes through which Israel is punished, and may I conduct myself toward My children, Israel, with the attribute of mercy, and may I enter before them beyond the letter of the law.”
An astounding thought: God speaking to God, aspiring to be true to himself!1 But the immediately-following passage provokes an even more astounding possibility, relating a visionary moment in the life of the 1st century priest and rabbi, Yishmael ben Elisha:
Once, I entered the innermost sanctum to offer incense, and in a vision I saw Akatriel Ya, the Lord of Hosts, seated upon a high and exalted throne. And He said to me: “Yishmael, My son, bless Me.” I said to Him: “May it be Your will that Your mercy overcome Your anger, and may Your mercy prevail over Your other attributes, and may You act toward Your children with the attribute of mercy, and may You enter before them beyond the letter of the law.” The Holy One, Blessed be He, nodded His head and accepted the blessing.
We should be painstakingly careful in our readings of these texts to acknowledge that they are not Christian texts, that they do not teach our doctrine. Indeed, they challenge it, requiring us to think again—much more carefully—about what it is we find ourselves required to say about God.2
Still, because they bear a faithful witness to the Scriptures, they necessarily illuminate for us something in the depths of the glories of God, something which we cannot help but express in trinitarian terms. They cast into sharp relief the profile of a God who is not merely humble and relational but outright playful—as only our closest intimates can be. And that, obviously, reminds us of Jesus, the one who not only taught us to run toward God with open arms, but also met us as the embrace.
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Robert Jenson insists both that it is because God is Trinity that God can be personally known and that this God—the God who actually is God (as opposed to the dour, cranky God we typically imagine)—is most fully known in the moment of shared joy.
There are many ways, I suppose, in which one might stipulate the difference between a mere moral subjectivity and a person. But for this essay let me do it so: personal subjectivity has not only morality, but also humor. A person is a moral subjectivity with a sense of humor. If God, therefore, is personal, He is not only the moral intention at the ground of things. He is also the laughter at the ground of things, the sense of humor at the ground of things.3
David was right to abandon himself to dance in the presence. And hearing the promise, Abraham and Sarah were right to laugh, right to name their child Laughter. God is hilarious, after all—and all his promises absurd.
Once this truth is grasped—or, better, once we are gripped by it—we can see why we are the creatures we are and why history plays (!) like it does. Jenson, again:
We often ask why God takes such long ways around to his stated objectives. We wonder why He takes the long roundabout of crucifixion and resurrection, to his stated goal of reestablishing righteousness in the world. Given omnipotence, why not just do it? We wonder why He permits the fall, as an enormously painful long way around to the goal of showing mercy. We wonder why the history of His church is so crooked. It does not, of course, answer those questions to say that God does it because He has a sense of humor. But it does, I suggest, precisely state the phenomena.4
Evil, needless to say, is no laughing matter; God does not “allow” wrongs, and God does not find our miseries funny. Something like the reverse is true, in fact. Evil cannot overcome us precisely because God laughs with us at its pretensions to ascendancy. Or, to say the same thing another way, we overcome evil with giddiness.
Satan, Jenson argues, is all wit and no humor; he cannot stand for the joke to come at his expense. God, by contrast, is infinitely jovial, happy to be bested, outwitted. Indeed, as the Talmudic story of the oven of akhnai (Bava Metzia 59b), nothing makes God happier than to be beaten at his own game: “My children have triumphed over Me; My children have triumphed over Me.”
Israel is not called Israel for nothing!
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Ralph Waldo Emerson recalls having known a humorist who, against all odds, “had a grain or two of sense,” and once delivered a perfectly irreverent remark: “He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God were two—power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every pious man to keep up the comedy.”
As Jenson knew, however, and as Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha before him knew, God’s risibility is not mean-spirited; God does not deride or ridicule us. Giddy with delight, primed to relish our every move, however awkward, God laughs at whatever plans we make not to mock us for our folly but because he knows the happy surprise that await us on the far side of failure.
Knowing this, we can, as Jenson sees, discern the voices that speak to and over us.
It is the sovereign test: When the voice in the night tells me, “You are hopeless,” is it said with a laugh or a snicker? If the former, the voice is God’s; if the latter, out with the ink bottle. When the preacher tells me, “You are acceptable just as you are,” on whom is the joke? If the joke is on me and the speaker, then the preacher’s voice God’s voice. But if the joke is on everybody around me, in that now they can no longer rely upon my good works, then it is that same bad comedian on the stage again, even if the stage is in the church.5
As Luther knew, the best way to drive out the devil is to jeer at him. And the best way to draw near to God is to make fun of what you’ve had to suffer. Remember: nothing is more divine than belly laughter.
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Christians need not and should not reduce talk of the Trinity to metaphysical conjecture or pietistic flourish. The doctrine of the Trinity is not primarily philosophical; it is personal—experiential. We do not merely assent to the idea that God is “three-in-one”; we invoke the God who is first and last and in-between—source, guide, and goal of all things.6
Hence, to talk rightly about the Trinity is simply to say how it is that God being God is to our good. And we learn to talk like that, not through rigorous philosophical training, primarily, but through wide-eyed delight at what the Scriptures teach.
The power of the passages from Berakhot is precisely that they open our eyes to what the Scriptures teach. They won’t let us forget that the saints and prophets learned (the hard way!) something about God, something almost impossible for us to believe: God’s power is in God’s risibility, which is why we are happiest when we are beside ourselves with joy (Ps. 126.1-2).
Believe it or not, it’s true: to be besides ourselves with joy is to stand in the place of God. And what puts us there? God answering his own prayer, entering before us beyond the letter of the law.
So, whatever else it does, the doctrine of the Trinity tells us what it means to be happy.
Strange as that phrasing may seem, it’s just another way of saying that God is Speaker, Word, and Breath.
These rabbinic texts, arguably, give voice to a way of talking about God’s “tri-unity” that outstrips anything in the Christian theological tradition. If so, we need to make sure we read them so that the joke is on us, who believe that Jesus is God, and not on those who call that belief into question.
Robert W. Jenson, “Evil as Person” in Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation; edited by Steven J. Wright (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 136-145 (137).
Jenson, “Evil as Person,” 137.
Jenson, “Evil as Person,” 143.
See Jason Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).