The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. Alice in Wonderland is a farce, written as if for children, but enjoyed by adults. It describes a very crazy world into which Alice falls, but one which seems remarkably like the craziness with which we as people live sometimes. We don t have any trouble recognizing farce or irony when it is written by Lewis Carroll, but we have a lot of difficulty recognizing it when it is spoken by Jesus. Part of the problem is the context in which the words are usually read.
People confuse piety with a kind of grimness of humor.
Some times the whole religious enterprise seems more like an undertaker s shop than anything else. The people of the good news have forgotten how to laugh. They have also forgotten how to think. Rabbis were those who had argued and debated with and about the Torah from their youth. So Jesus himself, we may suppose, expected that his teachings were being uttered to provoke exactly this kind of talk and debate.