I didn’t think Chris Rock would’ve taught us anything this Lent, but here we are. God indeed works mysteriously.
The celebrity slap momentarily taking our minds off basically everything else, not nearly as important as everything else, is indeed mostly just vain worldly noise. Perhaps the best advice for Catholics is to ignore it, don’t let it distract you from prayer. Instead of rubbernecking the latest offering of celebrity gossip, like Mary, choose rather the better part — that is, don’t take your eyes off Jesus. Don’t trade beauty for its lesser.
But that, for various reasons, can be hard to do, especially for the uncloistered, we non-mystics. So, what then? Is it possible to discern some moral, glean some spiritual wisdom from the spectacle of one celebrity slapping another? Oddly enough, I believe so.
Think about it. In that strange span of a moment, Chris Rock showed us something true of each of us, how we can be both un-Christlike and Christlike almost in an instant. He showed us normally frail, fallen human behavior typical of believers and unbelievers alike. A glimpse of the honestly unheroic, he showed us ourselves.
Un-Christlike by the tongue, as a comedian, Chris Rock plays with that ancient, dangerous evil for a living. We Christians know the tongue is a fire, able to set our whole lives aflame. And it can be a hellish fire too (cf. Jas 3:5-6). Rock makes millions by means of this fire; his jokes must be marketable and, thus, as edgy as possible. Which is why comedians often go foolish, cheap, cruel, even devilish — because they need to keep our fallen world laughing.
And this, of course, is as far away from Christ as anything else. Joyful (and I do think, at times, quite funny) Christ’s humor didn’t belittle truth, nor was it cruel. It wasn’t, as C. S. Lewis described it, the sort of humor that’s really just flippancy, “a thousand miles away from joy.” Chris Rock’s joke at Jada Smith’s expense was just this, wicked humor. But, of course, who hasn’t been as wickedly funny as Chris Rock at times, but for no charge at all?
But it wasn’t just wickedness we saw. Chris Rock also showed us Christlikeness — unheroically and thus, I think, more believably. Although Will Smith physically did it for him, Chris Rock did indeed turn the other cheek (cf. Mt 5:39). It’s quite possible, of course, that Rock was more stunned than virtuous, offering no resistance as he did. But again, isn’t that like so many of us, virtuous sometimes by accident, stunned into doing the right thing? Examining myself, my own often begrudged, unheroic virtue, in Chris Rock I see something of myself — good at times, but often only incidentally.
Which is why the apologies and the forgiveness we’ve since witnessed are lessons, too. So much like us — wicked one moment, inadvertently good the next — Chris Rock offers us an object lesson in the struggles of Lent and in the moral struggles we all face all year long. But added to this struggle, added to our weakness, is the grace of forgiveness. That’s what we saw in both Will Smith and Chris Rock’s subsequent behavior; and again, it’s so much like us — repeatedly needing to be forgiven and to forgive.
Which is why we shouldn’t ridicule these celebrities or blow them off. Maybe we Catholics shouldn’t just ignore them as irrelevant media fluff, but recognize them as brothers, imperfect pilgrims like us — wicked, foolish, forgiven — and forgiving. Just like us. Saints in the making, all of us.
Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books.