Parable of the Clown

Somewhere in his writings, Søren Kierkegaard tells about a small circus that traveled from little town to little town in his native Denmark. The pattern of the troupe was to come into a community, hand out announcements of their performance, and then put up a tent on the outskirts of the village for that evening.

On one particular occasion, the circus tent caught fire about an hour before the performance was to start. It turned out that the clown was the only member of the troupe who was fully dressed, so he was dispatched into the village to get help as quickly as he could. The clown discharged his responsibility perfectly. He apprised everyone he met of the crisis and begged them to get their water pails and come out to help.

However, the people in this village had had prior experiences with clowns. They had built up in their minds certain expectations about these folks. So, according to Kierkegaard, they heard the clown with their eyes; that is, they assumed that he was on a mission of entertainment and that this was just a new way of drumming up a crowd. Not until they looked on the horizon and saw the ominous red glow did it dawn on them that in this moment what they were encountering was not a clown at all but a human being dressed in a clown’s costume bearing an urgent and utterly real message!