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Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
A fresh, creative look at the underlying meaning of the Gospels that stresses the many dimensions of God's relationship to humanity.
112 pages, Hardcover
First published October 26, 1977
About the author
Frederick Buechner
67 books1,178 followersFrederick Buechner is a highly influential writer and theologian who has won awards for his poetry, short stories, novels and theological writings. His work pioneered the genre of spiritual memoir, laying the groundwork for writers such as Anne Lamott, Rob Bell and Lauren Winner.
His first book, A Long Day's Dying, was published to acclaim just two years after he graduated from Princeton. He entered Union Theological Seminary in 1954 where he studied under renowned theologians that included Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and James Muilenberg. In 1955, his short story "The Tiger" which had been published in the New Yorker won the O. Henry Prize.
After seminary he spent nine years at Phillips Exeter Academy, establishing a religion department and teaching courses in both religion and English. Among his students was the future author, John Irving. In 1969 he gave the Noble Lectures at Harvard. He presented a theological autobiography on a day in his life, which was published as The Alphabet of Grace.
In the years that followed he began publishing more novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Godric. At the same time, he was also writing a series of spiritual autobiographies. A central theme in his theological writing is looking for God in the everyday, listening and paying attention, to hear God speak to people through their personal lives.
His first book, A Long Day's Dying, was published to acclaim just two years after he graduated from Princeton. He entered Union Theological Seminary in 1954 where he studied under renowned theologians that included Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and James Muilenberg. In 1955, his short story "The Tiger" which had been published in the New Yorker won the O. Henry Prize.
After seminary he spent nine years at Phillips Exeter Academy, establishing a religion department and teaching courses in both religion and English. Among his students was the future author, John Irving. In 1969 he gave the Noble Lectures at Harvard. He presented a theological autobiography on a day in his life, which was published as The Alphabet of Grace.
In the years that followed he began publishing more novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Godric. At the same time, he was also writing a series of spiritual autobiographies. A central theme in his theological writing is looking for God in the everyday, listening and paying attention, to hear God speak to people through their personal lives.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 318 reviews
June 8, 2007
There are two kinds of really good books - the first you devour as quickly as possible - marathon reads... The second you savour, slowly nibbling and sipping at the edges, stopping and pondering. This is one of the second...
April 24, 2012
Buechner examines the arc of the gospel using the well known genres of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale--that is, bad news, good news, and transformation or fantasy. He begins with the tragedy of sin and the fallen world, pictured in Christ's shed tears over the death of Lazarus. From there, he movies on to the comedy of God's grace, pictured in Sarah's laughter when an angel informed her that she would bear a son in her old age. He then ties in the elements of fairy tale, familiar to us from Grimm and The Wizard of Oz, among others.
This was a pleasant and poetic little book. At just under 100 pages long, it's a quick read, and Buechner's fiction writing roots show through in the highly narrative style he adopts. He takes liberties with the details of the Bible stories he retells, but they're minor enough that they don't hinder the underlying themes, and obvious enough that readers are unlikely to get confused (for example, he describes Pontius Pilate as a stressed out leader who's just given up smoking).
I don't agree with all of Buechner's statements--some of his descriptions of the tragedy of the gospel (that is, sin and the fallen world) seem to undermine the sovereignty of God, and his discussion of the gospel as comedy (the unexpected and ridiculous love of God) borders on irreverent or unclear. He describes the gospel as a a cosmic joke, not because it is untrue or a prank, but because is undoes the sequence of expected events--that is, sinners deserve wrath. Given modern usage of 'joke' and 'comedy', the terminology could be confusing.
The general point of the book seems to be that the gospel is not just a bunch of theological facts, but a story that preachers must experience for themselves before they can share it with others. All of which is well and good, but the fluffy, touchy-feely language could easily be mis-read by those with fuzzier theology and a rather amorphous idea of truth. Even though Buechner does not appear to run afoul of orthodoxy here, it could be (mis)read as an endorsement of postmodern liberal theology.
Bottom line: This book shouldn't be the basis for any substantive theological ideas, but it's useful for gaining an over-arching perspective on the story of the bible as a cohesive whole. An easy (and quick) read.
This was a pleasant and poetic little book. At just under 100 pages long, it's a quick read, and Buechner's fiction writing roots show through in the highly narrative style he adopts. He takes liberties with the details of the Bible stories he retells, but they're minor enough that they don't hinder the underlying themes, and obvious enough that readers are unlikely to get confused (for example, he describes Pontius Pilate as a stressed out leader who's just given up smoking).
I don't agree with all of Buechner's statements--some of his descriptions of the tragedy of the gospel (that is, sin and the fallen world) seem to undermine the sovereignty of God, and his discussion of the gospel as comedy (the unexpected and ridiculous love of God) borders on irreverent or unclear. He describes the gospel as a a cosmic joke, not because it is untrue or a prank, but because is undoes the sequence of expected events--that is, sinners deserve wrath. Given modern usage of 'joke' and 'comedy', the terminology could be confusing.
The general point of the book seems to be that the gospel is not just a bunch of theological facts, but a story that preachers must experience for themselves before they can share it with others. All of which is well and good, but the fluffy, touchy-feely language could easily be mis-read by those with fuzzier theology and a rather amorphous idea of truth. Even though Buechner does not appear to run afoul of orthodoxy here, it could be (mis)read as an endorsement of postmodern liberal theology.
Bottom line: This book shouldn't be the basis for any substantive theological ideas, but it's useful for gaining an over-arching perspective on the story of the bible as a cohesive whole. An easy (and quick) read.
August 8, 2009
Buechner has many valid points, many brilliant ones, some that make us scratch our head, but all fascinating. He writes somewhat like Rosenstock-Huessy—that almost stream-of-consciousness prose that rolls and tumbles and spins and defies an editor’s pen. The only time the spell falters is when he throws out an image simply too startling for us to swallow, and then we realize that he might have been making it up all along. Still, an insightful and provocative read.
August 11, 2022
This book had some soaring moments, but both my husband and I were eager to be done with it. Buechner just didn't feel accessible to us. He used characters such as King Leer and people like Henry Ward Beecher to make his points. We just didn't connect with the style.
November 22, 2021
I want all of my Bible stories filtered through the poetic and beautifully specific language of Buechner.
"So if preachers and lecturers are to say anything that really matters to anyone including themselves, they must say it not just to the public part of us that considers interesting thoughts about the Gospel and how to preach it, but to the private, inner part too, to the part of us all where our dreams come from, both our good dreams and our bad dreams...where our concern is less with how the gospel is to be preached than with what the gospel is and what it is for us" (4).
"if the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell" (5).
"It is possible to think of the gospel and our preaching of it as, above all and at no matter what risk, a speaking of the truth about the way things are" (7).
"The preacher must always try to feel what it is like to live inside the skins of the people he is preaching to, to hear the truth as they hear it" (8).
"A particular truth can be stated in words...Truth itself cannot be stated...Before it is a word, the Gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate's question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift" (16).
"The task of the preacher is to hold up life to us; by whatever gifts he or she has of imagination, eloquence, simple candor, to create images of life through which we can somehow see into the wordless truth of our lives" (16-7).
"What Jesus lets his silence say is that truth is what words can't tell but only tell about, what images can only point to" (17).
"Truth itself...cannot finally be understood but only experienced" (21).
"So let [the preacher] use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give us answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions"
"We put frames of words around silence and shells of stone and wood around emptiness, but it is the silence, the emptiness themselves, that finally matter and out of which the Gospel comes as word" (26).
"Stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about, the tragic part" (31).
"Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start" (33).
"For the preacher to be relevant to the staggering problems of history is to risk being irrelevant to the staggering problems of the ones who sit there listening out of their own histories" (34-5).
"'Rejoice' is the last word and can be spoken only after the first word. The sheltering word can be spoken only after the word that leaves us without a roof over our heads, the answering word only after the word it answers" (35).
"let [the preacher] take heart. He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself. He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. If he does not make real to them the human experience of what it is to cry into the storm and receive no answer, to be sick at heart and find no healing, then he becomes the only one there who seems not to have had that experience" (40).
"Just as sacramental theology speaks of a doctrine of the Real Presence, maybe it should speak also of a doctrine of the Real Absence because absence can be sacramental, too, a door left open, a chamber of the heart kept ready and waiting" (43).
"Jesus wept, we all weep, because even when man is good, even when he is Jesus, God makes himself scarce for reasons that no theodicy has ever fathomed" (54).
"As much as it is our hope, it is our hopelessness that brings us to church of a Sunday, and any preacher who, whatever else he speaks, does not speak to that hopelessness might as well save his breath...[but] then a strange and unexpected sound is heard...Laughter comes from as deep a place as tears come from, and in a way it comes from the same place. As much as tears do, it comes out of the darkness of the world where God is of all missing persons the most missed, except that it comes not as an ally of darkness but as its adversary, not as a symptom of darkness but as its antidote" (55-6).
"The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable" (57).
"When finally they string [Jesus] up, they do it for the wrong reasons and string him up as a nationalist revolutionary when the only revolution he is after is a revolution of the human heart and his concern is ultimately for all nations" (60).
"Blessed is he who gets the joke" (61).
"It was not the great public issues that Jesus traded in but the great private issues, not the struggles of the world without but the struggles of the world within" (62).
Jesus preached "not in the incendiary rhetoric of the prophet or the systematic abstractions of the theologian but in the language of images and metaphor, which is finally the only language you can use if you want not just to elucidate the hidden thing but to make it come alive" (62).
"What is the kingdom of God? [Jesus] does not speak of a reorganization of society as a political possibility or of the doctrine of salvation as a doctrine. He speaks of what it is like to find a diamond ring that you thought you'd lost forever. He speaks of what it is like to win the Irish Sweepstakes. He suggests rather than spells out. He evokes rather than explains. He catches by surprise. He doesn't let the homiletic seams show. He is sometimes cryptic, sometimes obscure, sometimes irreverent, always provocative. He tells stories. He speaks in parables" (62-3).
"I think that these parables can be read as jokes about God in the sense that what they are essentially about is the outlandishness of God who does impossible things with impossible people, and I believe that the comedy of them is not just a device for making the truth that they contain go down easy but that the true that they contain can itself be thought of as comic" (66).
"The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been [the elder brother's], too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them" (69).
"Because although what the angel says may be too good to be true, who knows? Maybe the truth of it is that it's too good not to be true" (71).
"The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn't see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn't see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens" (71).
"You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary" (78).
"Maybe above all [fairy tales] are tales about transformation where all creatures are revealed in the end as what they truly are" (79).
"Good and evil meet and do battle in the fairy-tale world much as they meet and do battle in our world, but in fairy tales the good live happily ever after. That is the major difference" (82).
"I suspect that the whole obsession of our time with the monstrous in general--with the occult and the demonic, with exorcism and black magic and the great white shark--is at its heart only the shadow side of our longing for the beautific" (86).
"But the whole point of the fairy tale of the Gospel is, of course, that he is the king in spite of everything" (90).
"That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still" (90).
"With his fabulous tale to proclaim, the preacher is called in his turn to stand up in his pulpit as fabulist extraordinary, to tell the truth of the Gospel in its highest and wildest and holiest sense. This is his job, but more often than not he shrinks from it because the truth he is called to proclaim, like the fairy tale, seems in all but some kind of wistful, faraway sense too good to be true, and so the preacher as apologist instead of fabulist tries as best he can to pare it down to a size he thinks the world will swallow...So homiletics becomes apologetics. The preacher exchanges the fairy tale truth that is too good to be true for a truth that instead of drowning out all the other truths the world is loud with is in some kind of harmony with them" (91-2).
"For the sake, as he sees it, of the ones he preaches to, the preacher is apt to preach the Gospel with the high magic taken out, the deep mystery reduced to a manageable size" (96).
"No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth" (96-7).
"The joke of it is that often it is the preacher who as steward of the wildest mystery of them all is the one who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly mature and wise to the last when no less than Saint Paul tells him to be a fool for Christ's sake, no less than Christ tells him to be a child for his own and the kingdom's sake" (98).
"So if preachers and lecturers are to say anything that really matters to anyone including themselves, they must say it not just to the public part of us that considers interesting thoughts about the Gospel and how to preach it, but to the private, inner part too, to the part of us all where our dreams come from, both our good dreams and our bad dreams...where our concern is less with how the gospel is to be preached than with what the gospel is and what it is for us" (4).
"if the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell" (5).
"It is possible to think of the gospel and our preaching of it as, above all and at no matter what risk, a speaking of the truth about the way things are" (7).
"The preacher must always try to feel what it is like to live inside the skins of the people he is preaching to, to hear the truth as they hear it" (8).
"A particular truth can be stated in words...Truth itself cannot be stated...Before it is a word, the Gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate's question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift" (16).
"The task of the preacher is to hold up life to us; by whatever gifts he or she has of imagination, eloquence, simple candor, to create images of life through which we can somehow see into the wordless truth of our lives" (16-7).
"What Jesus lets his silence say is that truth is what words can't tell but only tell about, what images can only point to" (17).
"Truth itself...cannot finally be understood but only experienced" (21).
"So let [the preacher] use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give us answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions"
"We put frames of words around silence and shells of stone and wood around emptiness, but it is the silence, the emptiness themselves, that finally matter and out of which the Gospel comes as word" (26).
"Stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about, the tragic part" (31).
"Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start" (33).
"For the preacher to be relevant to the staggering problems of history is to risk being irrelevant to the staggering problems of the ones who sit there listening out of their own histories" (34-5).
"'Rejoice' is the last word and can be spoken only after the first word. The sheltering word can be spoken only after the word that leaves us without a roof over our heads, the answering word only after the word it answers" (35).
"let [the preacher] take heart. He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself. He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. If he does not make real to them the human experience of what it is to cry into the storm and receive no answer, to be sick at heart and find no healing, then he becomes the only one there who seems not to have had that experience" (40).
"Just as sacramental theology speaks of a doctrine of the Real Presence, maybe it should speak also of a doctrine of the Real Absence because absence can be sacramental, too, a door left open, a chamber of the heart kept ready and waiting" (43).
"Jesus wept, we all weep, because even when man is good, even when he is Jesus, God makes himself scarce for reasons that no theodicy has ever fathomed" (54).
"As much as it is our hope, it is our hopelessness that brings us to church of a Sunday, and any preacher who, whatever else he speaks, does not speak to that hopelessness might as well save his breath...[but] then a strange and unexpected sound is heard...Laughter comes from as deep a place as tears come from, and in a way it comes from the same place. As much as tears do, it comes out of the darkness of the world where God is of all missing persons the most missed, except that it comes not as an ally of darkness but as its adversary, not as a symptom of darkness but as its antidote" (55-6).
"The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable" (57).
"When finally they string [Jesus] up, they do it for the wrong reasons and string him up as a nationalist revolutionary when the only revolution he is after is a revolution of the human heart and his concern is ultimately for all nations" (60).
"Blessed is he who gets the joke" (61).
"It was not the great public issues that Jesus traded in but the great private issues, not the struggles of the world without but the struggles of the world within" (62).
Jesus preached "not in the incendiary rhetoric of the prophet or the systematic abstractions of the theologian but in the language of images and metaphor, which is finally the only language you can use if you want not just to elucidate the hidden thing but to make it come alive" (62).
"What is the kingdom of God? [Jesus] does not speak of a reorganization of society as a political possibility or of the doctrine of salvation as a doctrine. He speaks of what it is like to find a diamond ring that you thought you'd lost forever. He speaks of what it is like to win the Irish Sweepstakes. He suggests rather than spells out. He evokes rather than explains. He catches by surprise. He doesn't let the homiletic seams show. He is sometimes cryptic, sometimes obscure, sometimes irreverent, always provocative. He tells stories. He speaks in parables" (62-3).
"I think that these parables can be read as jokes about God in the sense that what they are essentially about is the outlandishness of God who does impossible things with impossible people, and I believe that the comedy of them is not just a device for making the truth that they contain go down easy but that the true that they contain can itself be thought of as comic" (66).
"The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been [the elder brother's], too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them" (69).
"Because although what the angel says may be too good to be true, who knows? Maybe the truth of it is that it's too good not to be true" (71).
"The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn't see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn't see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens" (71).
"You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary" (78).
"Maybe above all [fairy tales] are tales about transformation where all creatures are revealed in the end as what they truly are" (79).
"Good and evil meet and do battle in the fairy-tale world much as they meet and do battle in our world, but in fairy tales the good live happily ever after. That is the major difference" (82).
"I suspect that the whole obsession of our time with the monstrous in general--with the occult and the demonic, with exorcism and black magic and the great white shark--is at its heart only the shadow side of our longing for the beautific" (86).
"But the whole point of the fairy tale of the Gospel is, of course, that he is the king in spite of everything" (90).
"That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still" (90).
"With his fabulous tale to proclaim, the preacher is called in his turn to stand up in his pulpit as fabulist extraordinary, to tell the truth of the Gospel in its highest and wildest and holiest sense. This is his job, but more often than not he shrinks from it because the truth he is called to proclaim, like the fairy tale, seems in all but some kind of wistful, faraway sense too good to be true, and so the preacher as apologist instead of fabulist tries as best he can to pare it down to a size he thinks the world will swallow...So homiletics becomes apologetics. The preacher exchanges the fairy tale truth that is too good to be true for a truth that instead of drowning out all the other truths the world is loud with is in some kind of harmony with them" (91-2).
"For the sake, as he sees it, of the ones he preaches to, the preacher is apt to preach the Gospel with the high magic taken out, the deep mystery reduced to a manageable size" (96).
"No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth" (96-7).
"The joke of it is that often it is the preacher who as steward of the wildest mystery of them all is the one who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly mature and wise to the last when no less than Saint Paul tells him to be a fool for Christ's sake, no less than Christ tells him to be a child for his own and the kingdom's sake" (98).
September 14, 2013
If art is a creation which captures some deep essence of truth, and in which the whole transcends the sum of its parts, then this masterfully-told story is art of a mythical and poetic form rarely seen in our Western society -- a society in which we tend to focus on the logical and empirical than the equally legitimate range of human experience in the poetic and mythic. Buechner helps draw us back to experience some of that poetic and mythical quality, and even understand some of the jokes that too seriously minded folk might miss from a less imaginative reading of the gospel story. I'm afraid anything further that I could say about this book would fail to do justice to Beuchner's essay, which reads like the yarn of a master story teller and which is framed by the image of a man giving a sermon. Instead of telling the reader "about" the gospel, as a nonfiction writer would do, Buechner leads us to experience for ourselves, and thus to better understand, the elements of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale, as we ourselves are drawn closer through these interactions to a greater appreciation for the divine. This book is a short read and an easy to read book, but it is one that will both be read more than once and which will profoundly influence how one relates to idea and metaphor in the grand and beautiful story -- tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale, all -- that we call the Bible.
June 22, 2023
Would be a 5 if he hadn't spoiled the ending of King Lear... but it is probably my fault I haven't read Lear to begin with so I'll settle for 4.7/ Buechner does not always land his conclusions but when he does, he really does, and the final sentence lands nicely (I'll only spoil half of it), "...that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have."
July 19, 2022
A beautiful book. I initially tried to rush through it and knock it out in a day - then I realized there were depths of subject matter I wasn’t sitting with. So I started over, and I’m very glad I did.
Want to read
August 17, 2022I think I read the chapter on the gospel as fairy tale around 2011 (and used it in a Christian education workshop).
September 27, 2022
Beautiful little book
June 9, 2023
I want to buy this book for everyone I know. Truly so beautiful, and profound yet simple. It’s a quick read and very worth every moment.
February 28, 2024
“God is not an answer man can give. God himself does not give answers. He gives himself, and in the midst of the whirlwind of his absence gives himself.”
March 15, 2016
This little book was short and sweet, but incredibly powerful as well. Buechner isn't the first person to put the Gospel in new lights so that we may reignite our reverence for it, however, his style and straight-forward prose hit harder than most that I've read. He gracefully works through the Gospel as tragedy (showing the inevitable evil that exists in this world due to man's vitiated nature), the Gospel as comedy (an unforeseeable act whose irony is profound, such as a perfect God saving a corrupt race), and the Gospel as fairy tale (the Gospel is too good not to be true and the mystery and enchantment are signs of vitality and requisites to that truth). He often spins renown bible stories with a twentieth century spin (a rich man can't get to heaven "like a Mercedes through a revolving door", etc.) which make the lines go down smoothly as you read them.
My favorite quote lies within "The Gospel as Tragedy":
"There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God and about the storm of his absence, both within and without, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm."
Or "The Gospel as Comedy":
"Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens."
You could read this book in half a day. Worth it.
My favorite quote lies within "The Gospel as Tragedy":
"There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God and about the storm of his absence, both within and without, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm."
Or "The Gospel as Comedy":
"Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens."
You could read this book in half a day. Worth it.
August 25, 2022
Perfect first read for capstone. Felt myself being tugged to be more content but also vulnerable in telling the truth in my life. Within the first three pages I was captivated by Beechers story of looking in the mirror and seeing his flaws, cracks, and sins.
November 7, 2012
I love how Buechner can mashup biblical and literary characters with a 20th-century setting. Humor and compassion come through clearly.
July 17, 2023
There are moments when Buechner rambles and the power of his ideas gets lost in an overstated literary allusion that doesn't seem to add anything, BUT. When things get going, it soars:
"What is the kingdom of God?.... [Jesus] suggests rather than spells out. He evokes rather than explains. He catches by surprise.... He speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking. I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath. I don't mean jokes for the joke's sake, of course. I don't mean the kind of godly jest the preacher starts his sermon with to warm people up and show them that despite his Geneva tabs or cassock he can laugh with the rest of them and is as human as everybody else. I mean the kind of joke Jesus told when he said it is harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for a Mercedes to get through a revolving door, harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for Nelson Rockefeller to get through the night deposit slot of the First National City Bank. And then added that though for man it is impossible, for God all things are possible because God is the master of the impossible, and he is a master of the impossible because in terms of what man thinks possible he is in the end a wild and impossible god. It seems to me that more often than not the parables can be read as high and holy jokes about God and about man and about the Gospel itself as the highest and holiest joke of them all....
I think that these parables can be read as jokes about God in the sense that what they are essentially about is the outlandishness of God who does impossible things with impossible people, and I believe that the comedy of them is not just a device for making the truth that they contain go down easy but that the truth that they contain can itself be thought of as comic. It is hard to think of any place where that is more apparent than in the greatest parable of them all, the one that is in its own way both the most comic and the most sad. The Prodigal Son goes off with his inheritance and blows the whole pile on liquor and sex and fancy clothes until finally he doesn't have two cents left to rub together and has to go to work or starve to death. He gets a job on a pig farm and keeps at it long enough to observe that the pigs are getting a better deal than he is and then decides to go home. There is nothing edifying about his decision. There is no indication that he realizes he's made an ass of himself and broken his old man's heart, no indication that he thinks of his old man as anything more than a meal ticket. There is no sign that he is sorry for what he's done or that he's resolved to make amends somehow and do better next time. He decides to go home for the simple reason that he knows he always got three squares a day at home, and for a man who is in danger of starving to death, that is reason enough. So he sets out on the return trip and on the way rehearses the speech he hopes will soften the old man's heart enough so that at least he won't slam the door in his face. 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' That will hit him where he lives if anything will, the boy thinks, and he goes over it again. 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son' (Luke 15:18-19), trying to get the inflection right and the gestures right; and just about the time he thinks he has it down, the old man spots him coming around the corner below the tennis court and starts sprinting down the drive like a maniac. Before the boy has time to get so much as the first word out, the old man throws his arms around him and all but knocks him off his feet with the tears and whiskers and incredulous laughter of his welcome....
Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church's thing, the preacher's thing, the lecturer's thing. Heard as a joke - high and unbidden and ringing with laughter - it can only be God's thing....
People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb.... The good news breaks into a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few."
"What is the kingdom of God?.... [Jesus] suggests rather than spells out. He evokes rather than explains. He catches by surprise.... He speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking. I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath. I don't mean jokes for the joke's sake, of course. I don't mean the kind of godly jest the preacher starts his sermon with to warm people up and show them that despite his Geneva tabs or cassock he can laugh with the rest of them and is as human as everybody else. I mean the kind of joke Jesus told when he said it is harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for a Mercedes to get through a revolving door, harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for Nelson Rockefeller to get through the night deposit slot of the First National City Bank. And then added that though for man it is impossible, for God all things are possible because God is the master of the impossible, and he is a master of the impossible because in terms of what man thinks possible he is in the end a wild and impossible god. It seems to me that more often than not the parables can be read as high and holy jokes about God and about man and about the Gospel itself as the highest and holiest joke of them all....
I think that these parables can be read as jokes about God in the sense that what they are essentially about is the outlandishness of God who does impossible things with impossible people, and I believe that the comedy of them is not just a device for making the truth that they contain go down easy but that the truth that they contain can itself be thought of as comic. It is hard to think of any place where that is more apparent than in the greatest parable of them all, the one that is in its own way both the most comic and the most sad. The Prodigal Son goes off with his inheritance and blows the whole pile on liquor and sex and fancy clothes until finally he doesn't have two cents left to rub together and has to go to work or starve to death. He gets a job on a pig farm and keeps at it long enough to observe that the pigs are getting a better deal than he is and then decides to go home. There is nothing edifying about his decision. There is no indication that he realizes he's made an ass of himself and broken his old man's heart, no indication that he thinks of his old man as anything more than a meal ticket. There is no sign that he is sorry for what he's done or that he's resolved to make amends somehow and do better next time. He decides to go home for the simple reason that he knows he always got three squares a day at home, and for a man who is in danger of starving to death, that is reason enough. So he sets out on the return trip and on the way rehearses the speech he hopes will soften the old man's heart enough so that at least he won't slam the door in his face. 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' That will hit him where he lives if anything will, the boy thinks, and he goes over it again. 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son' (Luke 15:18-19), trying to get the inflection right and the gestures right; and just about the time he thinks he has it down, the old man spots him coming around the corner below the tennis court and starts sprinting down the drive like a maniac. Before the boy has time to get so much as the first word out, the old man throws his arms around him and all but knocks him off his feet with the tears and whiskers and incredulous laughter of his welcome....
Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church's thing, the preacher's thing, the lecturer's thing. Heard as a joke - high and unbidden and ringing with laughter - it can only be God's thing....
People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb.... The good news breaks into a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few."
June 1, 2024
“They are going to have a baby after all. It is just what was bound not to happen. The old schlemozzle is going to be the father of a great nation in spite of everything. It is just what was not inevitable. If anything was inevitable, it was that the soup would be spilled on him again. The stranger who appeared at their tent door, turned out to be not a man to read the meter, but an angel. Who could have possibly predicted it? Who could have possibly made it happen, grabbed an angel by the wing, and pulled him down out of the sky and contrived for him to give such astonishing news? It all happened not of necessity, not inevitably, but gratuitously, freely, hilariously. And what was astonishing, gratuitous, hilarious was, of course, the grace of God. What could they do but laugh at the preposterousness of it, and they laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks. The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable.”
“Jesus says ‘Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden’ That is the tragedy. Our laboring couldn’t have been otherwise, given who we are, and who we are not, given who God is, and who he is not, given this world in all its beauty and pain to live in and die in. Then he says, ‘And I will give you rest.’ That is the comedy, and the comedy has to do with both Jesus as the speaker and the Gospel word he speaks.”
“Jesus says ‘Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden’ That is the tragedy. Our laboring couldn’t have been otherwise, given who we are, and who we are not, given who God is, and who he is not, given this world in all its beauty and pain to live in and die in. Then he says, ‘And I will give you rest.’ That is the comedy, and the comedy has to do with both Jesus as the speaker and the Gospel word he speaks.”
August 21, 2013
103. Tellin the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, by Frederick Buechner. 97 pages. Pastor Roger McQuistion tossed me this book during one of my church meetings with him. It is written from the POV of a writer who is also a preacher. I found it captivating because it uses literature to make its points. He begins wit Pilate as a cigarette-smoking nihilist who has a picture of Tiberius in his ‘office.’ When Chris is brought before him, he asks Jesus, “What is truth?” Of course, Jesus responds with silence. This is the only real, possible response because words are inadequate to explain n truth, or love, for that matter. What we ‘say’ using words in speech, writing, and literature is only our pathetic attempt to articulate that which is quite inexpressible, he suggests. As the author says, “Be silent, and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. Be silent and listen to the stones cry out.” I loved how this author used literature to make his points. In King Lear, for example, clothes are removed; people are naked. The word of the play strips us all naked and “to that extend Shakespeare turns preacher because stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about, the tragic part. Clothed in our own “accomplishments, our reputation for wit, our eloquence, knowledge, and dignity, people hope to be illuminated by a life-giving word. In King Lear, images of clothes and nakedness abound. As in our own lives, we “wear clothes as essential to survival because we cannot endure too much nakedness any more than we can endure too much silence (God), which strips us naked.” The preacher must remember the ones he is speaking to, who beneath all of the clothes thehy wear, are poor animals who labor under the burden of their own lives, let alone of this world’s tragic life. The author further reminds us that it is the worldly-wise ones who are utterly doomed, the central paradox of King Lear. In the Brothers Karamazov, Aloysha suddenly sees the world abandoned by God, then finds the world so aflame with God that he rushes out of the chapel where his dead friend lies and kisses the earth, the craggy face wherein God, in spite of and in the midst of everything, is. The author alludes to Father Mapple preaching in Moby dick as well, charging all preachers not to shrink from facing and proclaiming the dark side of truth: “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness.” Melville would appall us by speaking the tragic truth of a tempestuous world where even the whiteness of a great white whale is ambiguous: standing for beauty, gladness, and holiness, and also for the whiteness of sharks.” Not so much a color, he writes, as the visible absence of color…a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” But the author also finds the gospel comedic. We all face the darkness of death and life in a world where God can only be seen from afar; though laughter, like the announcement that Abraham and Sarah will have a child at the age of 100, we come to see that although the tragedy of our lives is inevitable, the comedy is frequently unforeseeable. Of all the people God could have chosen to be his holly people, he chose the Jews, who before his words ended were dancing around a golden calf. Apart from the comedy of Jesus himself, there is the comedy of the word he speaks: parables. Because his understanding transcends the medicine of words, he uses the language of images and metaphors. Consider the story of the prodigal’s son, a caricature of all that is joyless, petty, and self-serving. The joke is that his father loves him more than all of his other sons who are blind to comedy, trapped by their own seriousness. This is all, the author suggests, the sad fun of Jewish ghetto humor. The comedy of God saving the most unlikely people when they least expect or deserve it is what King Lear glimpses at the end of his tragic life, when the world has done its worst, he says to the daughter he loves, “Come, let’s away to prison. We two, alone, so we’ll live, and pray, and sing and tell old tales, and laugh.” Finally, the Gospel is Fairy Tales. Hmmmm. Every age has produced fairy tales, stories about transformation where all creatures. Are revealed in the end as what they truly are: the ugly duckling becomes a great white swan; the frog is revealed to be a prince in hiding; the beautiful but wicked queen in unmasked at last in all her ugliness. What gives these tales their power is the world they evoke: where the battle goes, ultimately, to the good, who live happily ever after; where in the long-run, good and evil alike becomes known by is or her true name. The author cites Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is true that in the destruction of the demonic ring, a great evil is destroyed, but the universal triumph of good is still only a Hobbit’s dream, and the Golden Age of elves and dwarfs is fated to be followed by the tragic age of men. The author suspects that our obsession with the occult, the demonic, exorcisms, and black magic—the great while whales, is actually our longing for the beatific. We are all like the knight in the Seventh Seal who tells the young witch about to be burned that he wants to meet the devil, her master, because “I want to ask him about god; he, if anyone, must know.” The whole point of the Gospel as fairy tale is that he is the king in spite of everything. In the world of the fairy tale, the wicket sisters are dressed as if for a Palm beach wedding, and in the world of the Gospel, it is the killjoys, phonies, and holier-than-thous who wear fancy clothes, the same ravenous wolves in sheep’s’ clothing. I’m not planning on becoming a preacher, but the literary merit of this existential argument is profound and stands alone. ***** = Five Star Rating
January 19, 2019
Such an interesting book about the gospel but in a completely different light. I find reads like this very refreshing as it reminds me of a childhood truth in a new way. A good book to digest slowly and revisit.
Some favorite quotes:
"take up your cross" means simply take up the burden of your own life because for the time being anyway, maybe that is burden enough."
"There is the one who can't stop thinking about suicide. The one who experiences his own sexuality as a guilt of which he can never be absolved. The one whose fear of death is only a screen behind which lies his deeper fear of life."
"God is not an answer man can give, God says. God himself does not give answers. He gives himself, and into the midst of the whirlwind of his absence gives himself."
Some favorite quotes:
"take up your cross" means simply take up the burden of your own life because for the time being anyway, maybe that is burden enough."
"There is the one who can't stop thinking about suicide. The one who experiences his own sexuality as a guilt of which he can never be absolved. The one whose fear of death is only a screen behind which lies his deeper fear of life."
"God is not an answer man can give, God says. God himself does not give answers. He gives himself, and into the midst of the whirlwind of his absence gives himself."
July 10, 2023
A delightful little book that speaks of truth in a way I haven’t heard anyone else speak about it. I enjoyed the connections he draws to literary works as he walks through that truth is and always be truth whether or not we speak it out loud (and when we do we often do not make it complete because truth simply is). His connection between tragedy, and comedy, and fairytale is particularly insightful and I enjoyed how he drew connections to how we’ve always viewed the world through the lense of the three and that the Gospel cannot have the latter two without first having tragedy.
February 20, 2022
This book really challenged my thinking on some things and I was struck by the blunt honesty of some of the lines. Yes, everyone is thinking that, but is it ok to say it?? It was also very well written and referred to a lot of great literature. I think I would have gained more from it if I were more familiar with all the references, especially King Lear.
August 16, 2022
I so enjoyed this book! His writing style is rather rambling, but there were so many jewels of insight along the way that my heart swelled with the truth of, it kept me rapt ‘til the end. A short read that packs a punch…and not just for preachers and teachers (although many a preacher would do well to pay attention to Buechner’s words here).
March 12, 2023
This took awhile for me to get into, but once that was no longer the case, I found myself so appreciating Buechner's unapologetic honesty. The simplicity in which he takes Biblical stories and characters and removes the religious gloss so we see how starkly they parallel us and our emotions is exceptional. I'll definitely be mulling over the concept of the Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale for a long time.
January 30, 2022
Buechner points out the absurdity that the tragedy of Good Friday and comedy of Resurrection Sunday took place in the same week. He then goes so far to say that our weeks are just as absurd, should we look a little closer.
4.5
4.5
December 22, 2022
Amazing! It’s such a creative and eye opening view of the Gospel. It spoke to me in great ways
December 25, 2022
Right book at the right time; near the end of Advent, just before Christmas, at the bedside of a woman dying from leukemia and I’m powerless to help her.
July 10, 2024
Buechner has, once again, entranced me. His sentences are sublime, his thoughts imaginative, and the gospel is made more beautiful to me by reading this.
April 11, 2015
Buechner's poetic manner of 'telling the truth' was difficult to adjust to, at first. To be honest, poetry intimidates me more often than not, less because it is poetry and more because I'm afraid I'll miss it. Academic books and journals give themselves to note taking, as they deal with the kind of ideas that we can manipulate with our minds if not our hands. But poetry and sermon deal with presuppositions and even pre-presuppositions, so as Buechner talks about the truth of the Gospel in tragedy, comedy and fairy-tale, the academic mind spends the first chapter in a cold sweat - tired and terrified of the anecdotal retelling of Pilate's experience of Good Friday, wary of the poor exegesis and strongly tempted to skip the storytelling to the real intellectual meat.
If you're going to read this book, you must overcome that temptation and embrace storytelling and poetry, let the words flow over you in their entirety and be prepared to meditate on God as you read, which above all else is not the kind of thing given to mindful nor manual manipulation. Don't approach this book as an intellectual, nor as a preacher, nor a poet, nor an Anglican or Presbyterian or Nondenominational or atheist or Muslim - approach this as a human. Be prepared and willing and able to feel pain and loss and lack. Be prepared to feel desire and joy and hope. Be prepared to believe again in fairytales. Finish this book and rush to your child's bedside armed not with a story to read, but a story to tell. Rush to your class reunion, your family gathering, your regional manager's conference with a story to tell, and tell the truth.
If you're going to read this book, you must overcome that temptation and embrace storytelling and poetry, let the words flow over you in their entirety and be prepared to meditate on God as you read, which above all else is not the kind of thing given to mindful nor manual manipulation. Don't approach this book as an intellectual, nor as a preacher, nor a poet, nor an Anglican or Presbyterian or Nondenominational or atheist or Muslim - approach this as a human. Be prepared and willing and able to feel pain and loss and lack. Be prepared to feel desire and joy and hope. Be prepared to believe again in fairytales. Finish this book and rush to your child's bedside armed not with a story to read, but a story to tell. Rush to your class reunion, your family gathering, your regional manager's conference with a story to tell, and tell the truth.
October 8, 2010
I don't know if I'm just sentimental, or if it's just the state I'm in spiritually, but this little book about preaching was very moving for me, especially the section on the Gospel as tragedy.
Beuchner is an excellent storyteller, and anyone who reads this book, I am sure, will come away with several memorable stories to mull over, even if the manner of storytelling may have at times felt a little quaint or dated. Having been a high school English teacher myself, the story of the teacher discussing King Lear with his students was wonderful, heart-wrenching, and almost brought me to tears.
I also was reminded as I read that most Christians most of the time don't speak about certain things. Certain realities of daily human life that we just live with are simply 'unspokens.' The rare pastor/preacher who is real enough to actually talk about these things (like Beuchner does, especially in his stories and descriptions of people--"poor, bare, forked animals" that we are) is one who, in my experience, is popular but whose ministry seems to be very short-lived.
Perhaps this kind of stuff is too real for the pulpit, but it feels like the Gospel that is preached authentically, made the true words of life that in our wretchedness we can understand and relate to. That's the kind of Gospel that stirs the soul.
Beuchner is an excellent storyteller, and anyone who reads this book, I am sure, will come away with several memorable stories to mull over, even if the manner of storytelling may have at times felt a little quaint or dated. Having been a high school English teacher myself, the story of the teacher discussing King Lear with his students was wonderful, heart-wrenching, and almost brought me to tears.
I also was reminded as I read that most Christians most of the time don't speak about certain things. Certain realities of daily human life that we just live with are simply 'unspokens.' The rare pastor/preacher who is real enough to actually talk about these things (like Beuchner does, especially in his stories and descriptions of people--"poor, bare, forked animals" that we are) is one who, in my experience, is popular but whose ministry seems to be very short-lived.
Perhaps this kind of stuff is too real for the pulpit, but it feels like the Gospel that is preached authentically, made the true words of life that in our wretchedness we can understand and relate to. That's the kind of Gospel that stirs the soul.
October 18, 2022
First read this in senior capstone. Both years since have felt a murmur to pick it up again. Don't know if I'll keep logging it after this read.
It seems my life is full of aisle seat conversations right now. Granted, I'm reading and (sometimes) talking to people who (mostly) know and read each other: Chris Green, Rowan Williams, Andy Squyres, Buechner. And all of them are saying that we must always muster strength to tell (and hear) the truth about ourselves and others. And, usually, that truth will be dark before light, grievous before joyous, arid before verdant. Buechner admonishes that we read "Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden" and "stop there, stop there," so that we may really know the tragic word before the comic word.
But to know ourselves and others is hardly enough, for then we are "like people who have been successfully psychoanalyzed . . . all dressed up but with no place to go except where they have always been. The only best for them is the best they can do for themselves and for each other." And that has hardly ever been enough. Thus the fairy tale, the "too good to be true" (a phrase that Buechner gently skewers), which is really "too good not to be true."
It seems my life is full of aisle seat conversations right now. Granted, I'm reading and (sometimes) talking to people who (mostly) know and read each other: Chris Green, Rowan Williams, Andy Squyres, Buechner. And all of them are saying that we must always muster strength to tell (and hear) the truth about ourselves and others. And, usually, that truth will be dark before light, grievous before joyous, arid before verdant. Buechner admonishes that we read "Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden" and "stop there, stop there," so that we may really know the tragic word before the comic word.
But to know ourselves and others is hardly enough, for then we are "like people who have been successfully psychoanalyzed . . . all dressed up but with no place to go except where they have always been. The only best for them is the best they can do for themselves and for each other." And that has hardly ever been enough. Thus the fairy tale, the "too good to be true" (a phrase that Buechner gently skewers), which is really "too good not to be true."
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