I wonder if you’ve ever had this experience. You come face to face with undisguised sin—blatant, obvious, unquestionable—and paraphrase the Bible in response. Perhaps, “There go the blind leading the blind. That fall’s gonna hurt” (Matt. 15:14); or, “He sure knows how to shine the outside of the cup, but there’s a month’s worth of milk scum inside” (Luke 11:39); or, “It’s hard to watch that fool tear down her own house board by board” (Prov. 14:1). If you’ve done this enough, you’ve inevitably encountered the response, “That’s not very loving,” or even worse, “That’s not very Christlike.”
The problem here goes deeper than mere biblical literacy. In many Christian circles, there is an almost irrepressible impulse toward winsomeness—a dogged refusal to offend. As a result, any words, phrases, or tactics that are not governed by that unyielding ‘niceness’ are deemed to be unloving (where love is defined as a kind of universal kindness). At its worst, this imbalance is read back into Scripture, whitewashing any of the less-than-gentle bits.
However, if we let Scripture speak for itself, we find much to undermine the tyranny of winsomeness-at-any-cost. Even more, we may discover—to our surprise or discomfort—that the Author (and authors) of Scripture doesn’t shy away from holy mockery. Especially in the Prophets and when Jesus deals with recalcitrant sinners, we find that God often employs satire—, which might be defined as “the exposure of human vice or folly through rebuke or ridicule.”[1] In fact, we see that Leland Ryken is right in saying, “The Bible is a thoroughly satiric book.”[2]
1. Leland Ryken, A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2014), 180.
2. Leland Ryken, “Satire,” in Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, by James C. Wilhoit et al. (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 762.
In this brief essay, I want to provide a sampling of the spicy speech that we find scattered throughout God’s Word. A failure to recognize satire as a prominent biblical genre will hamstring our reading of Scripture and, as a result, it will leave our speech impoverished. We will flinch from saying, “Thus says the Lord,” if we don’t recognize that our Lord’s words often bear the serrated edge of satire.[3]
3. Douglas Wilson popularized the term “serrated edge” as a description of the satirical language of Scripture in his book by the same title (A Serrated Edge: A Brief Defense of Biblical Satire and Trinitarian Skylarking, (Moscow, ID: Cannon Press, 2003)). I’m deeply indebted to Wilson’s assiduous attention to Scripture there and elsewhere. His insights laid the groundwork for this article and launched my thinking on how wise Christians should wield the serrated edge.
The Old Testament Bite
The Old Testament bristles with satire. The lowest hanging fruit may be Elijah mocking the prophets of Ba’al. He taunts: “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened” (1 Ki. 18:27). This scathing sarcasm hardly needs comment, yet note that Elijah includes scatological language here—though cloaked in euphemism.[4] These prophets believed Ba’al occupied one kind of throne; Elijah imagined him presiding over another.
4. “Scatalogical” should not be confused with eschatological. The former has to do with “potty language” (cf. Phil. 3:8); the latter has to do with the last things.
Or consider Jeremiah, who confronts the men of Judah in ways that might be deemed less than subtle. In Jeremiah 5:8 he calls them “well-fed, lusty stallions, each neighing for his neighbor’s wife.” Therefore, God will judge them for their “adulteries and neighings, [their] lewd whorings, on the hills in the field” (Jer. 13:26–27). Yes, more staid language was available to Jeremiah, but through the vehicle of satire, Jeremiah exposes Judah’s immoral ways as bestial, no better than horses in heat. He lays bare Judah’s pastoral perversions compared with God’s moral norm.
Amazingly, when Ezekiel confronts the same spiritual prostitution of God’s people with Egypt, he manages to make the metaphor even more explicit. Speaking of Jerusalem, he declares, “She lusted after their genitals—as large as those of donkeys” (Ezek. 23:19–20 NET). And in the extended parable of Ezekiel 16, the prophet presents Israel’s sin as akin to working a street corner: Israel “spread [her] legs to every passerby” (Ezek. 16:25 NET). The chapter is hard to read, and yes, every bit of it is the inspired, uncomfortably satiric word of God.
Isaiah also levels mockery at idolaters and their idols. He notes how hard the “god-smiths” have to work at their craft (Isa. 44:9–13). How great can a god be whose maker needs a lunchbreak so he won’t faint? And to cook that lunch, this needy creature takes the leftover wood from his newly-carved god to fuel a fire. Half becomes a deity, and half roasts his grain. Half the log he bows before, the other heats his beans. Isaiah does not let the irony pass silently. For, the folly deserves to be mocked: “Shall I fall down before a block of wood?” (Isa. 44:19). Elsewhere, Isaiah politely asks how an idol, which must be carried by beasts and propped up to stand, can deliver those who cry to it for help. It can’t even move independently, let alone bear others out of hardship (Isa. 46:1–7).
Terry Lindvall, in his work on religious satire, summarizes, “Hebrew prophets once assumed the mantle of holy mocking to uproot the brambles in God’s vineyard so that grapes might grow.”[5] Perhaps Shakespeare got it backward when he said, “Jesters do oft prove prophets.”[6]
5. Terry Lindvall, God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 2.
6. Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd Ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 748.
Yet, satire in the Old Testament is not confined to the prophets. Job repeatedly ridicules his “comforters” as those who murder wisdom (Job 12:1). And Proverbs provides a fund of satiric word pictures. The sluggard is a creaky door, too lazy even to eat (Prov. 26:14; 19:24); a quarrelsome wife worse than Chinese water torture (Prov. 19:13); and a beautiful woman sans wisdom like putting lipstick on a hog (Prov. 11:22).
But this is all Old Testament. What about the New? Surely, the course speech of the prophets finds a reprieve in a mild-mannered Jesus, right? Far from it. To borrow Jesus’s own words: “Have you not read?” (Matt. 12:3, 5; 19:4; 22:31; Mark 12:10, 26; Luke 6:3)
New Covenant Continuity
When we actually read the New Testament, we find that our Lord and his apostles do not jettison this holy mockery. For example, in Acts 13, we are told explicitly that the Holy Spirit inspired the serrated tongue of Paul against the evil wizard Elymas. Paul, “filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, ‘You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?’” (Acts 13:9–10). Behold what Joe Rigney calls the “Spirit-inspired insult.” Here the fruit of the Spirit tastes like withering mockery, hyperbole, and a dash of ridicule.
Elsewhere, Paul affirms an insulting stereotype—“Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons”—and then makes that stereotype the ground for godly rebuke. “Therefore rebuke them [the Cretans] sharply, that they may be sound in faith” (Ti. 1:12–13). Here is a Pauline imperative to employ subversive language to combat sin. Additionally, Paul uses language not fit for the dinner table. In fact, he chooses to use “a vulgar term for fecal matter” when he deems all things as “dung (skubalon)” compared with the super-surpassing beauty of Christ (Phil. 3:8; see the NET note). Paul apparently had no problem using a term for dog doo and the name of the Holy One of Israel in the same sentence if the image laden language helped his hearers to see how worthless religiosity is compared with God himself.
Perhaps most strikingly, Paul insists that men obsessed with circumcision might as well perform the whole amputation (Gal. 5:12)! In the very next verse, he demands that love dominate Christian conduct. So, unless Paul is a blatant hypocrite (which he’s not), his cutting insult does not violate the ethic of love, freedom, and harmony that immediately follows. Rather, if we simply apply the next two verses (Gal. 5:13–15) to Paul’s invitation to emasculation, he is actually obeying the law by loving these men enough to use the serrated edge to cut sin from their hearts, lest their penchant for circumcision lead to eternal damnation.
Holy mockery is not at odds with loving speech. Rather, sharp speech can be (and must be) employed with genuine love. As we will see, the God who is love also uses speech that cuts and condescends.
God Mocks
Finally, not only did God inspire satire, he himself mocks. When the rebels of the earth and their foolish kings form a conspiracy against God, he not only laughs, he “taunts them” (Ps. 2:4 NET).[7] We see this same dynamic when divine wisdom laughs at the tempest of troubles that breaks upon fools and then mocks their distress (Prov. 1:26–27).
7. Cf. Ps. 37:12–13; 59:8; Prov. 19:4; Nah. 3:6
Fittingly, those who are “righteous,” men and women like God, join in the chorus of divine laughter. They “laugh” because they see the massive folly of sin: “See the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and sought refuge in his own destruction!” (Ps. 52:5–7).
And Jesus, the righteous man, often used subversive language. Perhaps we too easily miss the sharp corners of his speech because we’ve toddler-proofed the whole affair so no one accidentally gets hurt. However, our Lord harbored no qualms about satirizing religious hypocrites, christening them a brood of vipers, sons of the devil, blind fools, whitewashed tombs, and more. Just take a moment to read Matthew 23. It’s a MasterClass in holy mockery. He even dubbed them traveling salesmen for hell (Matt. 23:15). Yet, Jesus’s favorite form of satire was the hyperbolic (and often humorous) exaggeration.[8] He spoke of almsgiving heralded by parade, camels squeezing through spaces too small for an ant, unappeasable critics acting like spoiled children, and blind guides (Matt. 6:2; 19:24; 11:16–19; 15:14).
8. “If there is a single person within the pages of the Bible that we can consider to be a humorist, it is without doubt Jesus. . . . The most characteristic form of Jesus’ humor was the preposterous exaggeration” (Ryken, Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, 410).
Jesus regularly uses humor as a polemic tool to confront sin and folly. He illustrates the hypocrisy of his hearers by appealing to the ludicrous image of an eye surgeon operating to remove a bit of sawdust from his patient’s eye, all the while, keeping his head cocked to avoid bumping the table with the two-by-four imbedded in his own (Matt. 7:1–6). He lambasts ignorant leaders with the image of a blind tour guide at the Grand Canyon (Matt. 15:14). He ridicules selective obedience by comparing it to a man who strains the pulp out of his orange juice with tweezers and then drinks it down with gravel (Matt. 23:4). Jesus is blood earnest about the deadly seriousness of these sins, but that does not prevent him from rendering them ridiculous to expose their folly.
Examples of Jesus’s satiric wit and humor abound. Ryken summarizes, “Jesus was a master of wordplay, irony and satire, often with an element of humor intermixed.”[9] The Word made flesh was, unsurprisingly, a master of the word in all its forms.
9. Ryken, Dictionary, 410.
Thoroughly Satiric
In short, subversive persuasion pervades Holy Writ. Even in this selective look at the Book, it should be clear that satire is a thoroughly biblical category. The prophets use it, the wise men use it, the apostles use it, and Jesus uses it. If we are careful readers, we cannot ignore the serrated edge of Scripture, lest we become like men who look in a mirror and go away unchanged.
As one theologian summarized the situation we find ourselves in perfectly: “Plenary verbal revelation requires that biblical style, as well as content, is inspired. Scripture’s inclusion of satire surely vindicates its prima facie legitimacy in Christian discourse.”[10] If our speech ought to be Bible-saturated, we should seek to imitate not only the content we find in Scripture but the kinds of speech (including satire) and the proportions as well. So the question becomes, how then shall we mock?
