Be excellent to each other

On love, forgiveness, and Hippie Jesus

It’s been a long day. I’m writing this in my hotel room after a full day of flying up and down the East Coast dodging thunderstorms. I feel the need to write, but I really don’t want to write about the big story of the day, which is the Olympic opening brouhaha. On the other hand, I think that there is something that needs to be said on the topic.

My opinion can be summed up in the words of Bill and Ted, who admonished us to “Be excellent to each other.”

A contemporaneous screenshot from Twitter describing the performance as a reference to Dionysus

To start with, I didn’t watch the ceremony. The Olympics are not my cup of tea. They might hold more interest to me if the nations played for world domination or if, as someone suggested recently, they put an average guy on the field to act like the control in an experiment, showing the viewers just how much better than the rest of us the Olympic athletes really are. As it is, I’m just not much of a TV guy, especially when it comes to sports. Most of the time, I’d rather be active myself than watching someone else, and if I have control of the remote, I usually end up on “Seinfeld,” “Impractical Jokers,” or a good movie.

From what I’ve seen of the opening ceremony, I’m not impressed. And from some of the clips I’ve seen, I can understand why some people would think it satirized the Last Supper.

But I’m not sure whether that was the intent. There’s evidence for both points of view, but the context of a program that contained mostly French and Greek history (as described in the program) doesn’t fit the inclusion of the Last Supper. Neither does what some on the internet called a “man dressed as a Smurf being served on a food platter.”

The Smurf-like character was apparently intended to be Dionysus, the Greek god of the wine and grape harvest. At any rate, the character much more closely resembled a member of the Blue Man Group than Jesus Christ.

Over the weekend, quite a few people who had probably never heard of Dionysus before Friday started attacking the ignorance of people who assumed the performance was an attack on Christianity. This mirrors the official line, but the perception of an attack on Christianity was not limited to the American right. For example, Bloomberg reported that the French Catholic Conference of bishops denounced the performance, which somewhat undermines claims that it was only uneducated American Christians who misinterpreted the event.

As is the case with many things, both sides seem to be wrong here. First, I haven’t seen any convincing evidence that the Olympic Committee meant to insult a multi-billion-member religion. The evidence that I’ve seen is of the internet meme and he-said-she-said variety. Some outlets report to have evidence that the producer of the performance has admitted that Christianity was targeted, but so far I have not been able to corroborate these claims.

If nothing else, the performance was guilty of bad communication. If an obscure mythological reference is going to be used, it would be helpful to provide the audience with some clues. The last thing that the organizers of an event like this should want to do is offend a large share of the world’s dominant religion, yet that is exactly what they did. The performance was a failure from the perspectives of being good hosts and conducting successful sports and artistic diplomacy.

The Olympic Committee did the right thing, however. They apologized. The AP reports that the ceremony’s artistic director denied the Last Supper connection or any intent to shock or offend the audience.

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group,” an Olympic spokeswoman said, adding, “If people have taken any offense we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

The flip side is that some don’t want to accept the apology. They want to stay angry. In my view, this is unchristian.

There are a great many verses in the Bible where Christians are taught to love their enemies and to practice forgiveness. I can’t think of any verses where God delegated his role as judge to humanity. We are never told to be unforgiving or vindictive. On the contrary, we are warned against judging hypocritically.

Going back to the 1990s, we might ask, What Would Jesus Do? After all, Jesus was the one who might have been mocked. Maybe he would have called down lightning from Heaven, but he eschewed a similar temptation to exhibit his power when Satan tempted him at the beginning of his ministry. I think it’s more likely that he would have turned the other cheek, a saying that literally has its roots in the teachings of Jesus. I’m pretty sure that Jesus wouldn’t be stoking anger and hatred.

In today’s terms, Jesus would probably be called a hippie.

Christians should ask themselves, which course of action has a greater chance of advancing the kingdom of God, fighting online battles against atheists and agnostics over a perceived slight and boycotting the Olympics or putting Christ’s commandments to show love and forgiveness into practice in a very public way?

The flip side is that pushing boycotts and stoking anger sounds a lot like the cancel culture of the left that the right claims to hate. I’m old enough to remember when the right decried the fact that very-online leftists would fixate on unintentional microaggressions and no apology was ever good enough. Horseshoe Theory is a real thing.

Christianity is a faith of contradictions. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. The meek shall inherit the earth. God’s strength is made perfect in weakness.

But we don’t want to appear weak because it seems, well… weak. The world, including much of the church, celebrates strength and power.

God doesn’t want us to defend his honor. He wants us to demonstrate his love. Responding to attacks from your enemies with love is a radical idea, but that is exactly what Jesus said to do.

Jesus’s greatest commandment can be summed up as love God and love people.

Treat people as you want to be treated.

Be excellent to each other.

If we all followed this simple concept, the world would be a much better place, and we should all be praying that God would help us to show his radical love through our lives.

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