The sacrament of sacrilege

Many people were understandably horrified when the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics included sacrilegious mockery of our Lord’s Last Supper.

Perhaps you saw it: the scene was obviously blasphemous, and was taken as a grave insult by Christians all over the world. Why, many people wondered, would the organisers of the Olympic Games want to offend so many people?

‘I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide’, said Thomas Jolly, the artistic director. This, however, seems to be stretching credulity rather too far, along with the frankly absurd claim that resemblance to Da Vinci’s Last Supper was accidental. It was deliberate, as initial responses from the organisers admitted, and as was immediately obvious to anyone watching. And it is inconceivable that the organisers didn’t realise that many Christians would be deeply upset by this; nor can they have imagined that Christians would feel ‘included’ by it. Something rather more profound was going on.

What was on display here was a peculiar drive embedded in secularism to do things which many people think must not be done. It’s not that, in pursuit of some noble aim, it has been found necessary to cross some previously firm social boundaries. Rather, it is the transgression of boundaries itself which has become the aim. The highly sexualised dances, and the men dressed in women’s clothing, signalled the deliberate violation of both social and biological norms. And then these performers were assembled in a pose deliberately mocking the Last Supper, with Christ and His apostles replaced by people celebrating a flagrant violation of Christian morality. To have the scene end with a (nearly) naked Dionysus – Greek god of drunkenness and debauchery – arising from the dish from which Da Vinci had Christ serve the bread was a completion of the desecration. The worst insults were served, deliberately, to the most sacred things.

But why? The answer is that secularism is itself a religion. It too believes in something sacred. But not God: what it holds to be sacred is liberty, freedom, the autonomy of the individual. And therefore the most morally good thing which can be done is the violation of boundaries laid down by authorities external to us – things which seek to limit our freedom, such as codes of sexual conduct, or the physical design of our bodies – or (most of all) by God Himself. To rage against and transgress such things is for secular thought a noble quest, the essential work of those who want to be righteous. The more sacred the boundary (especially if it is a Christian sacredness, for secularism is a rebellion primarily against Christianity), the more elevated is the righteousness of transgressing it. Humanism drives its adherents to fight a holy war against holiness. For secularism, sacrilege has become a sacrament.

Therefore we should not be surprised that such things happen. While by the standards of a few years ago what we witnessed on 26 July was unimaginable, if we understand Scripture’s teaching on human sin we will know that there is no insult which an idolatrous world will not be willing to give to our Lord. After all, when He walked among us, we crucified Him. Fallen man’s hatred of Him has not lessened since that day. Secularism has just given a new, sharp focus to man’s hatred of the transcendent, Triune God.

But though we should not be surprised, yet we should be appalled. We must not allow ourselves ever to be acclimatised to such things. If we do, it will show that we too have been taken in by the spirit of the age; that we too have started to believe that individual liberty is higher and more sacred than the glory and honour of the one, true, eternal God. That our autonomy – which is merely another way of saying our sin, for sin is nothing other than declaring our autonomy from God – is more to be worshipped, and more highly to be honoured, than He is.

In contrast, we must hold that the Triune God alone is the holy one. It is Him alone we must honour. His name and being are what is truly sacred; His gospel the glorious truth which we must defend and honour with all our might. Secularism may be driven to Sacrilege, for that is the nature of sin; but we who belong to Christ know that one day He will vindicate not only His own name, but His suffering people who were willing to bear disgrace for His sake.