THE STREAM/ Jules Gomes-
When the Paris Olympics grotesquely blasphemed Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of the Last Supper during the opening ceremony last Friday, Christians around the world unleashed a torrent of righteous indignation against the debauched parody. Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican bishops protested.
America’s largest privately held wireless company, C Spire, pulled its advertising from the Games, announcing that it would “not be a part of the offensive and unacceptable mockery of the Last Supper.” The largest coalition of Protestant churches in Korea held public protests.
Even the Shia Muslim leadership of Iran denounced the “insulting representation of Jesus Christ,” saying it was “completely offensive” and had “crossed all red lines.” The French ambassador was summoned to Tehran and told: “France, a country with a major history of Christianity, must be ashamed of itself … We resolutely condemn this.”
Catholics around the world begged Pope Francis to pronounce a papal condemnation. But Francis, who had just been pontificating on how the Olympics serves “to dismantle prejudices” and “foster esteem where there is contempt and mistrust,” froze utterly.
Prophetic Warning
Like the psalmist, Francis could have thundered through his papal megaphone: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his Anointed.”
He could have yanked the carpet from under the Eiffel Tower of hubris, with a red-alert: “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.” But like Belshazzar, whose story is told in Daniel 5, Francis cannot read the writing on the wall of post-Christian civilization.
This is the Achilles’ heel of all arrogant rulers who strut and stomp upon the world stage, blind to the biblical truth that their narrative is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
King Belshazzar of Babylon, the greatest empire of its day and the locus of the archetypal Tower of Babel, is the epitome of a ruler who rules the nations but cannot read the writing on the wall. His story, set in the context of Israel’s profoundly dislocating experience of exile, has sparked breathtakingly dramatic paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, John Martin, Don Juan Carreno de Miranda, Pieter de Grebber, and Johann Heiss, to name just a few.
Stories about rulers who see handwriting on the wall but decide to ignore it are never out of date, and orchestras and choirs continue to enthrall audiences with one of G. F. Handel’s grandest oratorios, Belshazzar. Continue reading…
