On the wall in my office hangs a framed print of an ancient Roman etching. You won’t find it in a museum. I’ve never seen it for sale in an art shop. I had to print the image off the internet. It is believed to be the oldest known depiction of Jesus and his crucifixion.
Possibly carved by a Roman slave on a plaster wall near the Palatine Hill, somewhere between the first and second century, the image depicts a man in a posture of worship, one hand raised. He faces a crucified man on a cross. But the crucified man, arms stretched across the beam, has the head of a donkey. Beneath the image, Greek letters inscribe “Alexamenos worships God.” It isn’t fine art. It’s graffiti. Graffiti that was meant to mock the worship of Christians and their crucified savior.
I’ll admit, it’s a strange image to hang on a pastor’s wall, but I put it there as a reminder. Since the very beginning, the message of the gospel has been a joke to most of the world. As Paul reminded the Corinthians, the message of the cross is both offensive and foolish. I keep that image as a commitment to share in Christ’s humiliation. Being respected is not what matters most in the ministry or our faith. We don’t go looking for ridicule, but neither should we be surprised when it finds us.
That Table on the Seine
Like billions worldwide, our family sat around the TV Friday night watching the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. Full disclosure: I love France. We made a large pan of poulet au vinaigre, buttered our baguettes, and set out the best cheese we could find in Springfield, Missouri. We were in Paris in March and are returning with our kids in October. I love the language, the history, and the people, but I found myself, like so many watching, offended by what transpired.
The French aesthetic is not the American aesthetic, and any student of history will know that the French have a long-standing public hostility toward anything Christian and sacred. As another example, there seemed to be a visual allusion in the macabre image of the beheaded Marie Antoinette singing—positioned in the windows of the very building in which she was imprisoned—and the famous martyred patron saint of Paris Sainte Denis, who was beheaded by the Romans in the Third Century and said to have picked up his own head and walked to his burial place. Today, the Basilicas of Sacré-Cœur marks the site of Denis’s martyrdom.
Another French Denis, Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, pronounced during the French Revolution, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” It’s hard to offer French history in two paragraphs, but hopefully, you can see the historical aversion many French have had to anything deemed sacred. There’s nothing more French (particularly Parisian) than ignoring taboos.
Still, it was hard to watch an image I consider so sacred, the Last Supper of Christ, pillaged with such irreverence. Francophile or francaphobic, it was an insult felt around the world. The reaction has been so fierce that the Paris Olympic spokesperson, Anne Descamps, was eventually forced to offer a half-throated apology, “If people have taken any offense we are, of course, really, really sorry.”
An Olympic Offense
I have been thinking a lot about offense lately. I’ve spent the past three years writing on the subject and am set to release a book on the topic in September, A Sharp Compassion. As I have written, and as I had to remind myself this weekend, if we are willing to look deep enough, what offends us can be a form of revelation. Offense can shock us into seeing things we’ve overlooked in ourselves.
Offense always forms in places of insecurity. If a stranger approached you on the street and called you dumb, it’s not hard to recover. You might call it insulting, but most wouldn’t call it an offense. It’s too random to be offensive. But if a close friend jokes at a dinner party about your lower IQ and you really do feel insecure about your intellect, it hits differently. You’re much more likely to call their insensitivity offensive. What makes one comment rude and the other offensive is your preexisting insecurities.
The experience of offense has as much to do with the sensitivity of our insecurities as it does with the severity of the offending action or words. A person with no insecurities would theoretically never experience offense, while a person deeply insecure will continually find cause for offense, even in the slightest acts of omission.
The French artists who designed the opening ceremony insulted a sacred image we Christians cherish. That’s the easy headline to write. The harder thing to recognize is the deep insecurity we Christians currently find ourselves in. The world is changing, and it’s changing fast.
The writer Aaron Renn has described this change as a transition into the negative world. He identifies three environments the Western church has recently navigated: the positive, neutral, and negative. For my grandparents, to be a Christian was considered positive. In fact, being a Christian was an expectation and probably assisted in finding jobs, building social relationships, and gaining social standing. My parents lived in a more neutral world. There was no hostility toward the Christian faith, but it was no longer a requirement for respectability. One person found meaning in a church service, while another might turn to yoga or hiking national parks.
But the world has changed again. Renn argues that we now live in a negative world. Being an orthodox Christian is now met with suspicion and often hostility. Holding the same Christian views your grandparents held might now keep you from getting a job and can cost you friendships and respectability. Today, believing what Christians have long believed is increasingly offensive. Naturally, Christians are feeling more insecure. The cultural security we once possessed is now gone.
A New Religion
In the negative world, everyone is insecure. All we have left is the fight, the offense, and the deep insecurity fueling it. Everyone feels threatened. Everyone feels defensive. I recently saw a man at Wal-Mart wearing a shirt that read, “I’m offended that you’re offended.” That sums it up well.
If you look closely at the Paris opening ceremony, beyond the lights, the showmanship, the celebrities, and the decadence, it was as much about insecurity as sacrilege. What the French put on display was not the triumph of the secular over the sacred. In fact, the constant religious imagery struck me as a kind of obsession with the sacred. “The lady doth protest too much.” For a culture supposedly post-Christian, there was a lot of attention given to Christian images.
The reason Christianity found itself in the crosshairs this past Friday is that the French and much of the secular West are desperately looking for what Christianity once provided. When Friedrich Nietzsche described the death of God in his Parable of the Madman, he didn’t see it as a cause for celebration. He saw humanity slipping into a deeper insecurity.
“What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
What we saw Friday night was a culture desperately searching for meaning and ironically using the images of the Christian faith they rejected to find it. They were inventing a new religion to fill the space the church once occupied, ironically, with the bells of Notre Dame once again ringing in the background.
The organizers claimed they wanted to promote a French culture that welcomed all people to the table and celebrated feasting and peace over war and conflict. They claimed it was centered around Dionysus, the Olympian God of wine and festivity. They have since said it wasn’t meant to depict the Last Supper at all but rather The Feast of the Gods; however, many performers continue to claim it was a reference to The Last supper. Eitherway, the table stretched over the Seine Friday night was not designed to offend Christians; it was designed to offend the exclusivity of the Christian god. It was designed to honor the new god of the self.
At this new table, the god was the self. We saw that, as the table transitioned into a runway for individuals to express unique avant-garde identities, the new source of meaning. The worship and promotion of the self are now promoted as the source of meaning and salvation. It is the very promises of Christ without a Christ to submit to. Of course, it was offensive to those who claim allegiance to the Christ they deny.
But let us not forget that our message is also offensive to this world. While the Christian table is the true source of peace, security, and inclusion, it does come at a cost. To follow Christ, to share his table, you must be willing to die to yourself. It’s hard to imagine a more offensive message to this culture.
So, we find ourselves at an impasse. The world will continue to offend our faith. And our message has always been and will continue to be an offense to this world. All of us feel the offense intensifying.
The Essential Offense
There is a scene in Mark’s gospel in which a Galilean tax collector asks about Jesus’s willingness to pay the temple tax. It was not required by Mosaic law, and Jesus was quick to point out that the sons of the king should not have to pay for their home, but Jesus ultimately instructed Peter to pay it anyway, lest they offend the collector. In the gospels, Jesus was more than willing to offend. He often risked offending, but when it came to his own rights, he was not willing to risk it.
We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are commanded to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”
I think we are going to have to learn how to respond to offense in the way we wish this world would respond to the offense of our message as well. I fear we are beginning to imitate the offense of the world. Do we have a Christian response to offense?
We will offend this culture. Our message is offensive. But we must be careful that we never offend for the sake of our own rights. If we make ourselves the offense, we risk obscuring the essential offense of Christ and his cross. Offense is a form of stewardship. What we do with genuine offense may prove to be an essential part of our witness in the days ahead.
As Jesus’s followers, we should be ready and willing to share in his offense. They humiliated him, and we can be sure they will humiliate us too. How we handle our insecurity and offense is a part of our witness.
That doesn’t mean we applaud the world’s slander. It doesn’t mean we affirm its profanity. But neither should we take the bait. Those who protest most loudly are often the most insecure and desperate to find what they proclaim to have. Our ability to overcome insecurity and its symptoms of offense is a powerful witness to this world.
What I saw Friday night was a culture hopelessly lost and intoxicated with hedonistic desperation, desperate to find something meaningful. To me, it looked like insecurity. We can recognize it because we feel it, too. But we are not insecure. We have a savior who, through humiliation and persecution, suffered and was glorified. We have what this world is looking for. We do good to remember it. We can’t allow ourselves to live or act out of insecurity. We only prove their point. Ours is a savior who, on the cross, prayed that they be forgiven. “For they do not know what they are doing.”
Sitting in my office, putting these last words down, I’m looking again at that graffiti from the first century. They know not what they do. My heart this morning is to pray for the people of France. My heart is to pray for those men and women parading on the bridge Friday night. Of course, it was offensive. And they did insult me. But I can afford to turn the other cheek. I have Christ. They are still looking for him, even in their offense.
I do not want my offense to be the obstacle. I want them to encounter the message of Christ. I know it will be an offense to them, but if they are willing to die to themselves and submit themselves to Christ, there is a far better table and feast to be found.