Reading Francis

What would Jesus do?

I posted something on Facebook about the brouhaha stemming from the Paris Olympics’ Opening Ceremonies spectacle including a performance that was interpreted as a drag-queen parody of the Last Supper, but I want to come back to this and take a different approach. As seems to happen with everything these days, the reaction to this event has been binary: one side is deeply offended and scandalized by the blasphemous portrayal of the Last Supper, and the other argues that the scene wasn’t actually the Last Supper at all, but a reference to Greek mythology. I don’t agree with either response.

First, I think that it’s worth understanding why this is such a big deal to Catholics. The Last Supper isn’t really about a Renaissance painting; it’s the event recorded in the Gospels that marks the institution of the Eucharist, in which Catholics believe that God transforms bread and wine sacramentally into the real body and blood of the fully divine, fully human Christ. As such, Catholics claim the Eucharist to be “the source and summit of our faith”, the centerpiece. In the US, Catholics have just recently wrapped up a multiyear effort to promote and celebrate the gift of the Eucharist – hundreds of thousands of people participated in events across the country culminating in a Eucharistic Congress, with tens of thousands of people joining together in an NFL stadium to celebrate the gift of the Eucharist, just the week before the Paris Opening Ceremonies. So the Last Supper is one of the biggest of deals for Catholics, especially at this moment. And by the way, it’s a big deal for me personally.

Second, I don’t have any interest in arguing whether or not the images presented intentionally invoked Davinci’s famous painting. Art is an amazingly flexible medium of communication, far better suited to parable than allegory. The scene can be a Dionysian bacchanal and also visually reference the Last Supper; art holds multiple messages in tension all the time. I’m still not clear what the kids mean by “gaslighting”, but telling people that what they saw couldn’t possibly be what they’re pretty sure they saw because it’s something else instead is just unsatisfying to me. 

I don’t have a great understanding of drag as an art form, but from what I’ve been told, it uses over the top humor as a means of social criticism and commentary, and I think it needs to be said that traditional Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular seems a reasonable target for drag performers to want to critique. While there are nuances in Catholic doctrine, on the whole, the lived experience of LGBTQ people around the world has been that the Roman Catholic Church is not their ally. With doctrine that calls same-sex acts “intrinsically disordered” and “acts of grave depravity”, many Catholic leaders have crusaded against participation of LGBTQ people in Catholic schools, churches, or broader society. If the creators of the drag scene didn’t intend to poke the Church in the eye, frankly, I’d wonder why not.

But Christians aren’t supposed to defend Jesus or be a fan of Jesus; they’re supposed to try to BE LIKE Jesus. So the question I have been pondering as this tempest roils on is this: What would Jesus say and do in this situation?

When I read the Bible, one of the themes that comes up frequently in the historical books, the wisdom literature, and the prophets of the Old Testament, is the centrality of the Torah, the Law. In many places, authors of Hebrew Scripture extol the Law as the thing that sets Israel apart from all the other nations, the thing that makes it special, better, chosen. In the gospels, we see the love for the Law exhibited by the religious party of the Pharisees, who are urging fellow believers in their day to live up to the commands of the Law. It would be presumptuous as a non-scholar to say that first century Judaism valued the Law the way that current Catholics value the Eucharist, but as a lay reader of the Bible, it seems like the Law was a big, big deal.

And yet, Jesus was often in trouble with the religious leaders he encountered because he chose to associate with outcasts in ways that broke the Law. He touched religiously unclean people, like the lepers he healed. He partied – ate and drank – with prostitutes and tax collectors, who were viewed as depraved and treacherous breakers of the Law. While he said that he had come to fulfill the Law, his actions indicated an understanding of that Law that disqualified him as a moral voice in the eyes of contemporary religious authorities. By at least some tellings of the story, it was his shirking of the Law that led to the plots to kill him.

Through his actions, Jesus communicated a primary interest in delivering good news to the people on the outside of acceptable society and bringing them into the circle of who is deserving of love, even when that meant flaunting the Law that was the center of religious practice. 

The Jesus that shows up in the stories of the Bible seems like someone who would have hung out with drag performers rather than shake His fist at them. He’s someone who loved a joyous celebration, which the Olympic opening ceremonies are. He’s someone who only really took offense at the leaders who got in the way of loving those who most needed it.

One of my favorite writers, Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, has a book of reflections on the Eucharist called Our One Great Act of Fidelity. He covers a lot of ground in the book, but the point of his title is that Jesus tells his followers – and by extension, us – to do a lot of things that we don’t do consistently. Love our enemies. Forgive those who wrong us. Give God what we have. Don’t live in fear. Choose unity over division. Feed the hungry. Care for the outcast. I could go on.

Of all his commands, there’s one that we can pull off, even when we’re pretty rotten at everything else: Take and eat. And for Rolheiser (and for me), that one is enough to keep hope alive that we will eventually get better at doing the other commands, while tethering us more strongly to the loving and merciful God who tells us to do them.

I guess where I land is this: maybe Jesus would have seen this parody of His Last Supper and chosen to love the people who put it on while reminding the rest of us that if we did a better job of doing all the other things He said, we might not be so easy a target to be tweaked. And even if we were, we might not have the energy or interest in being so easy to offend.