In his book Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner places the gospel story within the literary traditions of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. Therein he describes “the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks.”
