The 2024 Olympic Games kicked off with a storm of controversy after the opening ceremonies featured what many have taken to be a mock performance of the Last Supper, inspiring a good deal of outrage among Christians and conservatively minded politicians in the media.
There’s a point to that outrage, for sure. It’s important that leaders maintain an embrace of the truth that the wider Church can gain strength from, and that they clarify that events like this aren’t going unnoticed, inspiring those who lead them to perhaps think twice about what they’re up to.
But such outrage doesn’t have an infinite justification. We tend to be “outraged” because we feel we’ve been met with something, well, outrageous: “I can’t believe anyone would ever do something like this! It’s so disrespectful and so unreasonable.” In this case, particularly, the attack upon Christianity feels like an unmerited, undeserved, oddly exclusive blow amidst what ought to be an otherwise respectable, civil space, and that has only tended to deepen this sense of astonishment.
But it’s important to note that that kind of shocked sentiment misses something of the essence of Christianity. There’s actually a deep logic to these kinds of attacks upon the faith, even if it’s not very sound logic. The well-known, ancient “Letter to Diognetus” gets at the point, articulating a principle which is of use in our time, too: “what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world,” it reads, “The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world. … The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong at their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures. The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and its members; in the same way, Christians love those who hate them.”
We live in a world that wants desperately to run away from God, but the main obstacle it faces in doing so is the Church, “ranging itself against its pleasures.” This is not because the Church is coercively powerful or because it’s winning cultural battles or even because it’s an active persecutor – in cases like this, the world may indeed seem to be suffering no tangible wrong at its hands. But the Church is always conscientiously potent, continuing to hold to principles of right and wrong that poke at the consciences of those who want to ignore those principles. And so in a way that’s profounder than even those doing the running may recognize, it’s that haunting awareness of conscience that becomes the target of hatred and attack. The Church stands as this steady, ever-present spiritual obstacle, even if not always a tangible one, and that’s what must not be, if the world is to wholly “enjoy its pleasures.”
So while we may register anger or hurt at something like the Last Supper debacle, what we shouldn’t be is surprised. “The soul,” the Letter to Diognetus goes on, “when faring badly as to food and drink, grows better; so too Christians, when punished, day by day increase more and more. It is to no less a post than this that God has ordered them, and they must not try to evade it.” These kinds of attacks are to be expected, and they occur under the sovereignty of God and the ways he's ordained his Church to work this side of heaven, promising ultimately only to strengthen us. So we can be humble and confident in the post assigned to us for our time, too, knowing that God, who’s always faithful, will fortify us not to evade it.
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