Is life but a joke?

A Reflection for the Feast of St. Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr

Find today’s readings here.

Why did the composers of the lectionary do St. Lawrence so dirty? To have your feast day recognized with a Scripture passage asserting that “whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life” seems a little harsh, no? “Thou shalt be miserable, as your heavenly Father is miserable”?

It gets worse. Poor St. Lawrence, who was literally barbecued to death by Roman soldiers on this day in 258 A.D., is remembered as the patron saint of, among other things, chefs. What’s cookin’, St. Larry?! What sort of cruel joke is that?

It makes more sense when you realize that St. Lawrence is also the patron saint of comedians, and for good reason: According to legend, at one point he told his tormentors who were roasting him to death on a grill, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.” That is gallows humor to be sure, but also a hint that St. Lawrence knew something the rest of us only understand dimly—something very much related to today’s Gospel.

It is impossible to hear those words of St. Lawrence and not think that he was a person who took his earthly life a little less seriously than most of us. And a person of his holiness would have that perspective at the end of his life, that the eternal stakes were high enough to make the temporal action somewhat trivial in comparison. But he also had the instincts of a good comedian in that long last moment. In a situation that could not be more grim, he overturned the expectations of the audience in a startling way. And in doing so, he reminded his fellow Christians (including us today) of what was really important.

Does St. Lawrence die on that grill? In a sense, yes; we all will die. But he is like a grain of wheat, too, and knows the ironic reversal that Christ has promised in the resurrection: He will rise again, in a fullness that we in our earthly lives would find beyond compare.

The fact is that a grain of wheat doesn’t really die before it gives new life. It goes dormant and is, by all external indicators, dead. But what is really happening is that it is preparing to give birth to something much bigger than itself in the new soil it finds. There’s that comedic reversal again, where something small and dead transforms into something living and large. A mustard seed becomes a behemoth; a rejected rock becomes the cornerstone; a man dead for days emerges from a tomb. 

Did St. Lawrence hate his life on earth? Maybe he just recognized that in the grand scheme of things, he shouldn’t take it too seriously. Is a grain of wheat really dead? No. And in Christ’s kingdom, we are in on the joke.

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