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In his opening monologue for SNL this past weekend, Bill Burr made some interesting remarks — as is his wont — about humanity. Regardless of whether you found his opening monologue funny, or insensitive and crude, I’d like to hone in on one particular bit that struck me as surprisingly profound.
The comedian joked about recently coming down with the flu, blaming it on a “shoeless cowboy” who sat next to him with no socks or shoes on an airplane:
“The whole flight I’m sitting there looking at his dirty Jesus feet … I looked at the guy and all I'm thinking is, you know what? God made that guy. You know? And he keeps making that guy. Like one mouth-breathing moron after another. Yet we still go to church on Sunday. And what do we do? We praise him. When is the constructive criticism coming? Like dude, when’s the last time you made a Gandhi? Somebody empathetic?”
When crass comedians like Burr get serious about religion, the discourse is predictably shallow and secularized. But when they get funny about reality, their insights are sometimes surprisingly deep and — I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it — theological. So many of the best comedians emerge from Jewish and Catholic cultures, where deeply biblical intuitions of irony and suffering inevitably mold one’s consciousness for good.
Here, Burr draws out one of the most surprising, shocking, even scandalous contrasts of the Christian faith: God — the infinite, perfect, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-good Creator of everything — has, after 14 billion years of cosmic history, produced this barefoot guy on a plane making everyone’s journey through life that much more uncomfortable. And he ”keeps making that guy” — not only in the sense of continuing to keep this particular person in existence (which is what I thought Burr meant at first; creation, after all, is an ongoing event), but also in the sense of continuing to make countless others like him: more humdrum, annoying, “in the way” people (as Burr so lovingly put it once).
Just the beginning
Of course, Burr has only just scratched the surface of the paradox. First, there’s the ultimate bad news of human wretchedness. Burr may be an especially caustic observer of human behavior, seeing the worst in people based on the briefest of interactions. Nevertheless, there’s an element of truth in his misanthropic rants.
Human beings are, naturally, wretched — cruel, stupid, self-absorbed, unhappy, slovenly messes. We know this most intimately and immediately in ourselves, but it’s also evident all around us. We are, as Christian theology has it, products of original sin — "the only part of Christian theology,” as G.K. Chesterton put it, “which can really be proved.” (Just turn on the nightly news.)
But then, there’s the ultimate good news of divine love. Burr echoed the Psalmist’s great question: “What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” (Ps. 8:4). The Christian, however, asks a far more radical question: What are human beings that you became one of them? God, the New Testament teaches, not only created and attended to humanity, but emptied himself and entered into it, suffering the slings and arrows of life, including death —“even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). And he did all of this for us — so much so that even if a single shoeless cowboy were the only person on earth, he would have done the same thing for him. Jesus got his hands — and feet — dirty, and he did it simply to make our dirty feet divine.
Why do we return to church every Sunday praising God? It’s not because of our wretchedness — though this, too, has been bathed in God’s glory, a “happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer,” as the Easter Exsultet has it — but because of God’s love in the face of it.
The only possible explanation as to why God, who never could have benefited from it, became human is love — a love that’s both too good to be true, and true. Every single person bears the divine image, however marred and disfigured it might be; and God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), however much they might resist it.
Bad and good news
Some of the keenest Christian writers across the centuries, from Dostoevsky to C.S. Lewis, hit upon precisely this heightened tension between the bad and good news — the reality of human wretchedness and the hope of divine love — in spiritual life. We find it so very easy to love an abstract “humanity,” and so very difficult to love the mouth-breathing humans next to us — a “harsh and dreadful” thing!
As Chesterton put it, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.” (“Love your enemies” appears in the Sermon on the Mount, which, it’s worth noting, profoundly shaped Burr’s ideal plane passenger: Mahatma Gandhi.)
Yet love remains our new commandment (John 13:34), even when — especially when — it’s difficult; indeed, Jesus goes on to teach that whatever we do for the least among us, we do to him (Matt. 25:40).
Christianity is incarnational, and the Incarnation is the ultimate scandal: It squarely faces our lowliness, yet gives us the highest view of human life possible. Kudos to Bill Burr — that eternal pessimist — for seeing it.
