Between Sundays
I’ll be honest with you, I have wrestled with Holy Humor Sunday this year.
How do we laugh when the world feels so heavy? How do we lean into joy when so much around us seems to call for grief, for outrage, for vigilance? It has felt, at moments, almost irresponsible to smile. I have sat with that tension this week, and I don’t think I’m alone in it. I suspect many of you have too.
And then I heard Savannah Guthrie, Today Show co-host, returning to work after losing her mother in the most sudden and devastating of ways, look into the camera and say simply: “Joy is my protest.”
I haven’t been able to let that go.
I’ve been turning it over all week like a stone in my hand, feeling the weight of it, the texture of it. Because there is something in those four words that cuts right to the heart of what we believe as Easter people. Joy is not naivety. Joy is not the absence of grief. Joy is not something you earn when the circumstances finally align in your favor. Joy, the kind Savannah was talking about, the kind we proclaim at Easter, is an act of resistance. It is something you choose, fiercely and intentionally, in the face of everything that tells you not to.
That is Holy Humor Sunday. That is Easter.
Because here’s what I know to be true, the resurrection was never meant to be a polite, quiet, tidy celebration. It was a protest. A cosmic act of defiance against every power that insists death has the final word. Against every empire, every darkness, every force that says suffering is the end of the story and the stone stays sealed. When the women arrived at that tomb on the first Easter morning, they were not expecting joy. They were expecting death to have won, the way it always wins. And instead, instead, they found an empty tomb and an angel who seemed almost amused by their astonishment.
The early church understood the radical nature of that moment. It’s where Holy Humor Sunday comes from, the ancient tradition of Risus Paschalis, the Easter laugh. For centuries, on the Sunday after Easter, preachers would fill their sermons with jokes and stories and laughter, celebrating what they called the joke God played on death itself. The great cosmic reversal. The moment the powers of this world thought they had won, and discovered they had lost everything.
We are the inheritors of that tradition. And this year, perhaps more than most, we need to claim it.
So this Sunday, when we laugh together, we are not ignoring the world’s pain. We are not pretending the headlines aren’t real or that grief isn’t present in this very room. We are simply refusing, stubbornly, joyfully, faithfully refusing, to let darkness have the last word. We are standing in a long, unbroken line of people who chose resurrection over despair. Not because the struggle wasn’t real. Not because the loss didn’t hurt. But because they had seen the empty tomb and they knew, they knew, that something stronger than death was loose in the world.
Joy is our protest. Joy is our testimony. Joy is our Easter proclamation to a world that desperately needs to hear it.
There is much ahead for us in these coming weeks, good things, meaningful things, things worth celebrating together. But first, this Sunday, we laugh. We laugh because we believe. We laugh because the tomb is empty. We laugh because death did not win and never will.
Come ready to celebrate, Calvary. Come ready to protest.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton