The Playfulness of Jesus

Can you imagine Jesus playing with children? Yourself as one of the children he's having fun with?

By Bill Gaultiere © 2005, 2011

Tragically, many people when they imagine the face of God they see a frown and not a smile.  And when they think about what it means to be a Christian joyful play is the farthest thing from their minds. They don’t know Jesus.

Meditating on the fun, playful, and humorous aspects of Jesus in the Gospels has helped me to be freer to be like a child with him. Being serious, determined, and hard-working by nature this has been a great blessing for me!

Play in the Kingdom of God

Jesus showed us that playfulness is at the center of his kingdom of the heavens. One of the ways he showed us this is that he enjoyed playing with children. I love the gospel scenes of Jesus blessing babies and he cuddling with kids. He delighted so much in the free and spirited ways of children that, in sharp contrast to the culture of his time, he held them up as role models, saying to the adults:

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3-4).

Jesus even identified himself with children, insisting, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me” (Luke 9:48).

Play as a Spiritual Discipline

It may seem like an oxymoron to say that play is a spiritual discipline. But the truth is that we can’t grow spiritually unless we play with God and one another. This is an example of why Richard Foster called his groundbreaking book on the spiritual disciplines The Celebration of Discipline.

To grow spiritually we need to set aside times for fun—and appreciate Jesus in the middle of the joy and laughter. In this sense, playing with Jesus is a spiritual discipline that we need to practice. We’re prone to take our lives so seriously that we let our problems and pains get us down and we let the important things we need to learn and accomplish cause us to strain.

What I’m really getting at here is our attitude as we go about life. Discouragement and overexertion, taking things too seriously inhibits our growth in God’s grace and weakness our witness for Christ. Truly, a disposition of playfulness is so important that we’re best off when it permeates all that we say and do.

To say that play is a spiritual discipline means far more than playing games! It’s doing something you love to do with someone you love to be with, thankful that Christ is with you. It’s living with a sense of adventure, ready to discover something new that God will show you. It’s being spontaneous and creative, led by the Holy Spirit. It’s having fun in the moment and not taking things too seriously, seeing the humor and things, laughing at yourself without shame, delighting in all that God provides for your enjoyment.

Examples of Jesus’ Playfulness

It’s true! Jesus invites us to have have fun with with him. But to appreciate this we may have to strip away our preconceived notions of Jesus as somber and take a fresh look at the gospels. When we do we’ll see that Jesus’ child-like playfulness, sense of humor, and surprising joy bubbles out from him in many fun ways like…

• Turning water into wine at a wedding so the dancing could continue (John 2:1-11).

• Telling people that they’re worth more to the Father than two sparrows (Matthew 10:29-31).

• Telling people who were worried about what they were going to wear but instead to look at how the wildflowers were dressed (Matthew 6:28-30).

• Winking at the Greek woman as he told her (and his disciples who were listening) that he couldn’t heal her daughter because he couldn’t give the children’s bread to a “dog” like her, but then he healed her anyway (Matthew 15:21-28).

• Sending demons out from a man and into a herd of pigs who then stampeded off a cliff! (Matthew 8:30-32).

• Nonchalantly walking on the water of the Sea of Galilee right passed his disciples as they were rowing their boat strenuously in a furious storm (Mark 6:45-52).

• When Peter was upset because Jesus was being criticized for not paying the taxes he owed Jesus told him not to worry but to go fishing and then to look in the mouth of the first fish he caught because there he’d find a coin that would cover his tax and Peter’s too! (Matthew 17:24-27).

• Prodding Zacchaeus to jump down from the tree he was hiding in so they could have dinner together that night (Luke 19:1-5).

• Going to parties with his societies’ outcasts (Mark 2:15-16; Luke 7:34).

• Saying that the Pharisees, the most religious people of the day, were like “white washed tombstones” (Matthew 23:27, NLT).

• Calling Almighty God his “Abba” (Hebrew for “Papa” or “Daddy”; Mark 14:36).

• Walking right through a locked door into a room to greet his apostles who were scared because Jesus had just been crucified and they thought they were next and they were confused because their were reports that he’d risen from the dead (John 20:19).

• Telling his disciples who had fished all night and caught nothing that all they needed to do was simply throw their net to the other side of the boat and when they did he gave them a huge haul of fish that broke their nets (John 21:1-6).

The Bible shows us that in Jesus’ Kingdom of the Heavens music “plays,” lambs and calves skip along, birds sing, children and the child-like dance, new wine flows, and people talk and laugh at the banquet table.

So we say, “The joy of the Lord is [our] strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). And it’s true because Jesus is joyful. If our Lord Jesus’ wasn’t fun to be with then there’d be no joy from him to give us strength.

So let’s play in the Lord!

More Soul Shepherding

This article is excerpted from my book, You Can Live in Jesus’ Easy Yoke.

Bill Gaultiere, Ph.D. & Kristi Gaultiere, Psy.D. ~ http://www.soulshepherding.org