In an Easter 1984 article for the Boston Sunday Globe, Harvey Cox, author of The Feast of Fools, observed, “In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri reports that after he had made the tortuous ascent from hell to purgatory and then drawn close to the celestial sphere, he suddenly heard a sound he had never heard before.” Stopping and listening, Dante wrote that “it sounded like the laughter of the universe.”

The Easter story, says Cox, “gives us a clue to this baffling riddle” as to why God laughs. “God laughs, it seems, because God knows how it all turns out in the end,” wrote Cox. “God’s laughter is not that of One who can safely chortle, from a safe distance, at another’s pain. It comes from One who has also felt the hunger pangs, the hurt of betrayal by friends, and the torturer’s touch.