Article

Advent

Creed

12 December 2023

3 min read

Is your nativity missing a dragon?

This Christmas, we might be closer than ever to the story’s origins. Terror. Surveillance. Poverty. Genocide. Perhaps it is time to add a dragon to tame creche scenes.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

The head of a giant paper dragon glows orange and red against a night sky.

Oliver Needham on Unsplash.

Advent is not Christmas. The wisdom of the church is this: humans need time to take stock of the grim reality of life, as the nights get even longer. We can’t skip forward with shopping bags and fairy lights to Christmas. These weeks of Advent prepare us. For the unexpected. For the necessity of grace.

Advent is the time the church reflects on its hierarchical structures, its imperialist tendencies, its obsession with power. And repents. It repents because it is about to celebrate that God’s greatest power move was to become powerless. Yes, the church forgets this annually. Sometimes centennially. But inbuilt within the church year is a season that forces it – and ourselves – to come face to face with our hypocrisy.

Advent begins in the darkest time of the year.

Advent is also an enforced time of waiting for the miracle of the unexpected, often in times of grave crisis. We, like the church, can be perpetrators, but we can also be victims. Another aspect of Advent is a vigilant time of waiting alongside the oppressed, in hope, for what we cannot see. For some people it involves fasting, a sign of repentance. For others, it is an advent wreath with daily readings and meditation. Still for others, it is a time to challenge rather than give in to our consumerist global empire.

Advent invites us to remember that God doesn’t come how or when we want. God cannot be manipulated. God can only be received, and most often by those who least expect him. Those on the margins. Those pregnant by accident. Those under tyrannical rule. Advent grows in the church a reverence for the downtrodden and the abused, if we are paying attention. Advent teaches that God comes to those who think they least deserve him.

What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely?

The first Christian account of the birth of Jesus is not, surprisingly, in the gospels – the four biographies of Jesus’ life, composed within living memory of him. We are accustomed to this first century record of sheep and shepherds, stars and stables. But there is a poetic nativity story that is composed prior to all these histories of Jesus, hidden in the middle of the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Written just a couple decades after Jesus’ death, this story is of a woman on the run, being pursued by a dragon. At long last, she is cornered. “The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born”. This child facing the dragon, against all odds, is the child Jesus.

This is the grim situation of people all over the world this Advent, far closer to the original nativity story than our chocolate calendars communicate. And perhaps this is a better text for this year’s Advent, as the world watches the fate of women and children in Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Africa. The dragon has indeed invaded the lives of so many. The world is holding its breath.

This Christmas let’s up our Advent game. Let’s put dragons in our nativity creche displays. Take out the baby – he hasn’t been born yet! And let’s hold our breath with the rest of the world, sensing the real and present danger. What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely? What if we used Advent for its original purpose, which is to examine ourselves for our own hypocrisy, our own violence and hatred, our own abuse of power on micro and macro levels? Perhaps then we can truly welcome Christmas. As hope for the powerless. As the possibility for peace in the midst of war. As good news for the world.

As a teenage girl 2,000 years ago prayed in hope,

My spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant…

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Article

Comment

Paganism

Sport

28 July 2024

8 min read

Paris 2024 and Christianity’s opening ceremony

A subversive Olympic opening relies on Christianity’s own beginnings.

Tim May

Tim is an associate vicar of King’s Cross Church (KXC), a London-based Anglican church.

A painting of the Last supper showing Christ and the disciples at a table.

da Vinci's Last Supper.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, held on the River Seine, has unsurprisingly caused controversy. Such moments, where one nation through pageantry and spectacle performs itself to all others, never fail to draw comment. The 2024 ceremony has drawn various detractors, not least those claiming the ceremony was an “attack on Christianity.”

You might remember the masterful opening to the London 2012 games. Director Danny Boyle’s theatrical spectacle told a symbolic story of nationhood. By depicting the bucolic, the industrial, and the NHS, he considered the UK in both dark moments and at its brightest. With a great exhibition of British humour, James Bond appeared to parachute out of a helicopter with HRH Queen Elizabeth II, while Mr Bean entertained the whole wordlessly through sardonic single-finger piano playing.

Widely held to be a creative triumph, Boyle was preceded by the Beijing Olympics where its opening ceremony, CGI fireworks put to one side, wowed the world with unprecedented size and scale, reminding us that we live in an era of Chinese power.

Tokyo 2021, delayed by a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, involved 1,800 drones filling the skies – a faultless demonstration of a technological age where Japanese engineering has been indispensable.

The sporting side of things was easily forgotten as we witnessed an emphatically kitsch depiction of French history and culture.

In 2024 Paris, the weather was perhaps the greatest focus of attention, which suited the British commentary perfectly. We Brits surely are the world experts in making light-entrainment out of describing rain. Soggy athletes sailed the Seine on a variety of uninspiring looking barges. Sanguine but soaked, the athletes dutifully waved and smiled; adorned not in gold, silver or bronze but flimsy ill-fitting plastic ponchos.

Overshadowing this athletes’ parade were the creations of theatre director Thomas Jolly, mastermind of the whole ceremony. Boldly deciding to choose the city as a stage, rather than make use of the conventional choice of a stadium, the sporting side of things was easily forgotten as we witnessed an emphatically kitsch depiction of French history and culture.

Although the weather somewhat thwarted proceedings, it was the content of the performance that drew criticism.

Far-right politicians decried Jolly’s offering as a violation of French nationhood. Conservative pundits focused their criticism on Jolly’s elevation of LGBTQIA+ culture.

Christian commentators have, with various degrees of rancour, condemned a strange scene where Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper was subverted by a pastiche of ostentatiously queer characters. At the centre of which was not Jesus Christ but a robust-looking figure resembling Lady Liberty.

Elon Musk spoke up in protest too, posting that it was ‘extremely disrespectful to Christians.’ Full-throttled cries of blasphemy resound, and probably for good reason. What we witnessed was Christ being usurped and replaced by the insurgency of self-expression and the currently sacred idea of diversity and inclusion.

Ahead of the ceremony, Jolly told British Vogue about the heart behind his creation: “there is room for everyone in Paris. Maybe it’s a little chaotic, it’s true, but that allows everyone to find a place for themselves.” The opening ceremony will be a success, Jolly says, “if everyone feels represented in it.”

I guess this isn’t the case for the thirty per cent of the world who would identify as Christian. That’s because every family and flavour of Christianity would recognise that Holy Communion, the central act of Christian Worship for 2000 years, the institution of which is depicted in da Vinci painting, was being publicly and globally vandalised.

When Christianity becomes moral wallpaper to an entire civilisation and its culture, it unsurprisingly becomes a target for satire.

How can we make sense of this moment? Is there anything more for the Christian to contribute other than indignation or outrage?

Whenever something like this occurs it reminds me of the central role Christianity has played in Western culture. The intelligibility of the ceremony’s controversial scene rests on the idea that da Vinci’s painting is a globally recognised symbol. Otherwise, we would have just been watching a really strange dinner party with no food. But with Da Vinci’s famous painting in our mind the subversive power of Jolly’s scene hits hard.

The view, popularised by the historian Tom Holland among others, would go as far as to suggest that Christianity’s effect on Western culture is so pervasive that even moments of protest and subversion, as we saw in the Paris ceremony, are cultural phenomena inherited from the Protestant Reformation. Regardless of how far you agree with Holland’s thesis, Jolly's subversion only makes sense because of the dominant role Christianity has played in shaping the western imagination, and that is a position of latent power that should cause pause for reflection.

I’ve read half a dozen articles from a certain sort of right-wing journalist who parrot thoughts like, “they wouldn’t do that with the Quran”. That might be right, but it fundamentally misses the point. Blasphemy, let’s say, in Iran, would certainly not involve the Last Supper.

The scene made sense only because of Christianity’s now diminishing position of power but it's a position of power, nonetheless. When you align Jesus Christ with the status quo, with the corridors of power, when Christianity becomes moral wallpaper to an entire civilisation and its culture, it unsurprisingly becomes a target for satire. Especially for anyone or any group that feels persecuted or marginalised. I’m not for a moment defending what Jolly did but trying to understand why it happened.

The last supper, the meal Jesus shared with his friends the night before his crucifixion, was the opening ceremony of Christianity.

The kind of cultural power Christianity has had in the West comes at the cost of clarity because Christianity was itself originally a counterculture. Crucifixion, a supreme act of imperial domination, became the foundation of Christian thought and ultimately its greatest symbol. The original Christian movement was seen itself to be blasphemous for contradictory reasons by both the Jewish and Roman religious leaders of the time.

The fundamental difference between Christianity and merely holding conservative values that should not be transgressed, is God. It was genuine belief in Jesus Christ as the long-awaited messiah of the Jewish people and the Saviour of the whole world - a belief that led his first bedraggled and bewildered disciples to live in such radical and counter-cultural ways that many were killed by the Roman Empire.

It is right for his followers today to speak up and say how wrong it is when the special and sacred things he did for them are yet again trampled on in public, but it's also worth remembering that’s how the story started - with Jesus’ body brutalised and broken. That somehow, in moments like this, we miss the power of Jesus when we simply defend him on grounds of “decency” and “respect.” Instead, if we return to the original events themselves, Jolly’s depiction, in its mockery and subversion, actually reveals the power of The Last Supper.

Da Vinci’s painting was not intended for a gallery but was originally painted on the wall of a fairly obscure monastery, transported to a gallery years later to become primarily art, it is more a foundational aid to the faithful to remember the original events Da Vinci is depicting.

The last supper, the meal Jesus shared with his friends the night before his crucifixion, was the opening ceremony of Christianity. Every time a Christian takes Holy Communion - the central act of Christian worship for over 2,000 years - they remember the opening ceremony where:

“Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins”

The most peculiar part of the opening ceremony of Christianity - more peculiar than any sight we saw last night - is the presence of Judas. The biblical accounts describe Jesus’ knowledge of Judas’ intentions to betray him to the Romans, and yet Judas is still welcome to the table. If there’s space for Judas, then there is space for all of us. The opening ceremony Christianity cannot be remembered without the presence of Judas the betrayer, and Peter the coward or Thomas the doubter. The great irony and the big mystery of the Christian Faith is that you can’t out-sin grace. You can mock it and subvert it, but Christ died for the ungodly.

Last night’s scene doesn’t come close to the original events. Not only was Jesus betrayed by his friends, he was then tortured, humiliated and executed publicly in just about the most excruciating way humans have devised. That was blasphemy of another level, but it was also victory because God was choosing to love inclusively beyond any human metric.

Tom Holland may be right that no part of western culture has escaped Christian influence, but I want more than a little downstream influence.

This means that there’s nothing more inclusive than the opening ceremony of Christianity and yet, at the same time, nothing more exclusive. It is not us who provide the food but God. In Jolly’s performance, the Last Supper scene was concluded by the French actor Philippe Katerine, emerging painted head to toe in blue. Whilst this bearded smurf caused baffled sniggers across the planet, Katherine was apparently representing Dionysius, The Greek god associated with wild drunken parties. The food on offer by Jolly is wild desire and self-expression. In Christianity the food is God himself, his body and his blood. God’s love is given not simply expressed, even to those who will betray him.

Moments like this will become harder for Christians to navigate. It feels like just as a wave of secular liberalism wants to finally vanquish the power position Christianity has painted for centuries, a new conservative vanguard of resistance is rising to protect or enrol it for its own means. From the mouth of Modi or in Trump’s tirades, a new religiously armed populism is raging. Tom Holland may be right that no part of western culture has escaped Christian influence, but I want more than a little downstream influence.

Take us back to the opening ceremony, to the foundation of Christian faith. Take us to the waterfall, where the torrent flows straight down from the mountain, and save us from the slow-moving sludge of the wide river downstream. Take me back to the opening ceremony of Christianity. To the table where God welcomes a Judas like me, to the meal where the master became a servant and washed his followers' feet. Take me back to eat food I could never afford and wine I could not create.