And Jesus sang

After all this time I thought I knew Jesus really well. Then just last week—preparing to preach at a congregational celebration of word and music—I discovered something unsettling about him. If my concordance is telling the truth, then he never played an instrument, never led his followers in song, never hummed a refrain or sang himself to sleep. After all these years, this is like learning that he never skipped a stone on water or warmed his hands at a fire. How is it possible to be fully human without ever making music?

But it seems to be true. Jesus said some things about people who enjoyed the sounds of trumpets and flutes, but the references were not positive. He told a story about an elder brother coming home from a hard day's work to hear music and dancing inside his father's house, but those sounds did not make the brother happy. I know some Christians have decided to ban musical instruments from worship on these grounds—but surely there are other ways to interpret the evidence.

1) Maybe the Gospel writers did not think singing was important for establishing the identity of the messiah. They certainly did not think laughing was important, because Jesus never laughs in the Gospels either. Maybe the evangelists just wrote down the things they thought were pertinent to making their case—the birth, the teachings, the death, the resurrection—and left out the things they judged incidental, like the fact that Jesus made the best hummus in the Galilee or was a wizard at the harmonica.