There was an odd sense of ritual about last week's controversy over the Paddy Power advert depicting Jesus and His apostles indulging in a spot of gambling at the last supper.
The fuss arose when a new billboard campaign by bookmakers Paddy Power, based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting, sparked a number of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
Most newspapers tracked down at least one representative of the various Christian churches to denounce the advert as "offensive to Christians".
The idea that many Christians would find the advert offensive sounds more like a public piety than a reflection of an actually existing sentiment. I heard several assertions on radio along the lines that the advert was "gratuitously offensive to an awful lot of people", usually from individuals not previously noted for robust defences of Christianity. I wondered whether the note of condescension I detected behind many such comments was not much more offensive to an awful lot of people than the rather good-humoured piece of public nonsense being commented on.
Taking offence is one of the most hallowed traditions in Irish life. The idea that certain things should be beyond humour is ostensibly plausible, but intrinsically dangerous. When you deny people the right to laugh at something, you give that something immunity from a certain kind of human scrutiny. Even when a joke goes too far, it is far from being as dangerous as demands that it be suppressed.
Yes, there is a time for solemnity, reverence and even piety; but there is also, as the caption on the Paddy Power billboard has it, "a time for fun and games".
The idea behind the increasingly prevalent modern tendency of taking offence is based on the notion that taking the p**s is the seed out of which grow disrespect, hatred and, in the end, oppression. The trouble with this argument is that it doesn't understand the multi-dimensionality of a joke.
Jokes are, in a sense, transcendent, in that they carry within them different dimensions of meaning. A joke may, for example, appear at one level racist, and at another be the opposite.
Some years ago, the Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny got into trouble for telling a story about a black bartender who had used the word "nigger". The fact that Mr Kenny's joke had operated at a much deeper level in the layers of irony between the black bartender and his handful of white listeners did not deter the media from trying to "get" the Fine Gael leader.
Human beings are dualistic creatures, tending to see things as good/bad, for/against, black/white. Truth does not lend itself to such ready compartmentalisation. There is a greater Truth, beyond words, only obvious to God, our occasional sense of which is facilitated by the collision of our dualistic opposites: dark and light, good and evil, piety and irreverence. A joke that brings together the incongruous and the culturally subversive is a window into ourselves, into those parts of our consciousness in which the forbidden is stored. It amounts to public permission to laugh at something that in our heart of hearts we always felt, knew, wondered about, but didn't think we were permitted to speak.
A joke, at the very least, tells us, perhaps more immediately than any other form of communication, that we are not alone in our dark, troubled, fearful, irreverent thoughts.
Even the offence inherent in some jokes can be a positive thing: a release from the loneliness of our own impiety, relieving our otherwise total subjugation by the culture of collective sanctimony that surrounds us.
Rather than taking jokes literally, we might more usefully see them as a release from conventional cultural obligations, a way in which, in the collective, we conduct controlled explosions on our darker individual thoughts.
The idea that God needs to be protected from the laughter of men is, I would venture, laughable. There is an argument to be had about the dangers of promoting gambling on the grounds that it can become an addictive and damaging activity, but this is a quite different matter. Paddy Power has defended the billboard campaign by claiming that the point of it was to place gambling in the most unlikely location.
But there is a deeper resonance also: an echo of one of the eternal questions that Christians ask about Christ: how much of a man did Jesus actually become, and how like us was he really?
It is a question that preoccupies the minds of Christians from around the time they take their First Communion, and has exercised writers and philosophers for as long as Christianity has been a force in the world. There are few more vital questions for the questing Christian who seeks to reconcile his own humanity with an aspiration to something beyond.
If the Paddy Power billboard is offensive, then it is offensive merely to a redundant form of piety that has done far more than mere mockery to undermine the connection between Christianity and the searchingly human.
Without laughter, everything is dead - Christianity as much as anything else.