When Faith Feels Mocked: Paris, the Last Supper, and the Way of Jesus

A contemporary companion. Sacred images, disputed intentions, and what it means to be salt and light when the faith is mocked.

On the evening of July 26, 2024, a long table stood on a footbridge over the Seine. It was the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The DJ Barbara Butch, in a silver, halo-like headdress, presided at its center, with drag artists and dancers on either side. A little later the singer Philippe Katerine appeared, painted blue, as Dionysus, the Greek god of wine.

Some who watched saw a joyful feast. Many Christians saw Leonardo’s Last Supper, and saw it mocked. Within days bishops had protested, the organizers had apologized, and the artists were receiving death threats.

Two years of argument have mostly asked who was right about the picture. This essay asks something else. When something we hold sacred seems to be mocked, what does following Jesus ask of us? How do we defend what we love without harming the person in front of us? Beneath those lies a harder question. Jesus called his followers the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Matthew places that calling immediately after his blessing of those reviled falsely for his sake. In a time of upheaval, are we? The way we answer mockery is part of the faith we are defending.

This question belongs close to the beginning of Second Humanity, a project rooted in the life and teaching of Jesus. We begin with the conviction that life and love are received from God, and that a life received is meant to be shared. A public disagreement tests what that commitment means when care is difficult.

In brief. The makers said they staged a feast of the Greek gods; their own statements did not fully agree, and one of them granted that viewers were not wrong to see the Last Supper. The hurt many Christians felt was real, and so were the death and rape threats that followed. French courts later convicted eleven people in two cases involving online harassment and threats. What viewers recognized was a painting from the 1490s. Jesus left a meal to be kept, and no picture of it. He also taught what to do when reviled: bless, and do not threaten. At his own last supper he fed the man who would betray him. In Matthew, the blessing of those reviled falsely for his sake is followed by the words “Ye are the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” Measured by those words, the record of believers today is mixed. Confidence in religious institutions has fallen, public inquiries have documented serious failures, and a great deal of quiet good continues. The answer to Paris is a truthful word about the hurt, no cruelty, an honest look at ourselves, and good works that people who expect to be turned away can see.

What happened, and what its makers said

The scene was called Festivité. Tens of millions watched the ceremony in France and the United States. Its makers did not all describe the scene the same way, and the differences matter. IBC on the audience figures.

The artistic director, Thomas Jolly, denied that the Last Supper was his inspiration. He described Dionysus as the god of celebration and said the scene referred to a feast of the Olympian gods. In his comments to the Associated Press, he described his purpose as love and inclusion, rejecting the suggestion that he meant to mock or divide. Jolly’s explanation, with the BFMTV interview; his comments to AP.

TheWrap published a statement attributed to the ceremony’s producers that same weekend. On one point, it said the opposite: “Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting.” It denied any wish to disrespect religious belief. TheWrap.

The historian Patrick Boucheron, one of the ceremony’s writers, called the table “a feast of the Gods” with Dionysian connotations. He acknowledged that a particular angle during Butch’s set could suggest Leonardo’s painting, and that an image can carry meanings its makers did not intend. He also argued that political actors had manufactured the controversy. His concession about interpretation is useful even where we differ from his account of the hurt: recognizing a resemblance does not require proving a hostile intention. Boucheron’s interview.

The organizers apologized for the offense felt while maintaining that they had not intended disrespect. That apology acknowledged the reception; it was not an admission that the scene had been designed to mock Christians. CBS News.

So the record is mixed. Dionysus was plainly there. The Last Supper was seen by viewers and named by some of those involved. None of it shows a shared intention to humiliate Christians. And an artist’s denial of hostility does not settle how anyone should have felt. We owe people an account that makes their intentions no more certain, and no more malicious, than the evidence allows.

Why it hurt

For Christians the supper is where they meet their Lord. An image of it can hold a lifetime of prayer, grief, and hope. Catholic teaching says that “the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype”: to honor the picture is to honor the one pictured. So an apparent parody touches something deeper than taste. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2131–2132.

The French bishops’ statement is worth reading whole, because it did two things. It praised the ceremony for “wonderful moments of beauty and joy.” And it deplored “scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity.” A week later the Holy See expressed sadness at the offense caused to Christians and other believers, and called for respect for others in the exercise of freedom of expression. The French bishops, our translation; Holy See Press Office.

The hurt was real, and saying so is no overreaction. A believer may say “that wounded me” and expect to be heard. It is also true that the same scene gave some people, who have often felt shut out, a public moment of welcome. Both attachments explain why one image was received in two such different ways.

The painting is not the meal

It helps to be exact about what was recognized that night. It was a composition: figures ranged along one side of a long table, facing the viewer, with one figure at the center. That is Leonardo da Vinci’s staging, painted between about 1495 and 1498 on the wall of a convent dining hall in Milan, some fifteen centuries after the meal. Artists have been reworking it ever since. Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano.

The Gospels describe a different scene. In Mark’s Greek the company is reclining at table, as people did at a formal meal. John has one disciple “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.” The single row facing the viewer is the painter’s. Mark 14:17–18, Greek and English; John 13:23.

The Master left a practice and no image. He took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it. What is sacred is the meal believers keep, and that meal was not on the bridge. This does not make the hurt foolish. For many people the image carries the meal, and has done so through a lifetime of worship. It does mean that the thing most worth defending was never within reach of a stage.

When criticism became harm

The argument did not stay an argument. Barbara Butch, the DJ at the table, filed a legal complaint within days. Her lawyer said she had been “threatened with death, torture and rape,” and subjected to antisemitic, homophobic, and sexist abuse. Butch said, “Whatever some may say, I exist.” National Catholic Reporter.

The courts have since ruled. On May 5, 2025, a Paris court convicted seven people of harassing Thomas Jolly online. One of the messages read in the case said: “You are going to pay for having disrespected our Lord Jesus Christ.” On November 21, 2025, the same court convicted four men of harassing and threatening Butch, and acquitted a fifth. The sentences ran from four months suspended to ten months in prison. She told the court she had developed agoraphobia. AFP via The Local on the Jolly verdict; Ozap for the message quoted, our translation; AFP via The Local on the Butch verdict.

Two things must be kept apart. These were judgments about particular people and particular acts. They do not make Christians as a body responsible for harassment. A person may criticize the ceremony, defend a sacred image, or ask a public institution to explain itself. Each response deserves to be judged on its merits. Threatening a performer is a different act.

The same distinction guards against the opposite injustice: using the worst conduct around a dispute to discredit everyone who voiced a concern. The dignity of the artists and the dignity of the offended viewer do not compete.

What the Master taught for this moment

Mockery of the faith is as old as the faith. In a graffito commonly dated around the year 200, someone scratched a drawing into a wall on the Palatine hill in Rome: a man praying before a crucified figure with a donkey’s head, and beneath it, “Alexamenos worships his god.” Before that, soldiers dressed Jesus in purple, knelt, and said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” The faith began with its Lord being mocked, and it has a teaching for the moment. The Alexamenos graffito; Mark 15:16–20.

Jesus gave it in the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.” “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.” He ties this to the Father’s own generosity, who “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good.” Matthew 5:11–12, 43–48.

Applying this to Paris does not require us to call the performers enemies. The evidence does not show that they were. The teaching reaches even the hard case where hostility is real, so it certainly forbids cruelty where the meaning of an image is still in dispute.

His first followers repeated him. Paul: “Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not … Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Peter writes that Jesus, “when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not,” and asks believers to answer critics “with meekness and fear.” By this measure no threat can be sent in his name. The message that promised payment for disrespect to “our Lord Jesus Christ” invoked a Lord who taught the opposite. Romans 12:14–21; 1 Peter 2:21–23; 3:15–16.

One caution belongs here. Peter wrote those words to people with little power, some of them slaves. Refusing to retaliate is never an instruction to stay in harm’s way. Seeking protection, reporting a threat, and leaving a dangerous place are acts of care, and they were the right acts for the artists who were threatened.

Paul also shows a way to meet images that trouble us. In Athens “his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.” The account offers a way to think about religious distress without claiming that Athens and Paris were the same. Paul began from the Athenians’ own altar and quoted their own poets. He brought his conviction into a conversation. Acts 17:16–28.

Judas was at the table

The strongest answer comes from the supper itself.

In Luke, after the bread and the cup, Jesus says: “the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.” In John he washes the disciples’ feet while Judas is still in the room, then dips a piece of bread and hands it to him. Peter is there too, and Jesus tells him he will deny him before morning. A few hours later, in the garden, he greets Judas with the word “Friend.” Luke 22:19–21; John 13:2–5, 21–30; Matthew 26:50.

At the meal Christians hold most sacred, the host fed the man who would betray him and the man who would deny him, and he knew it of both. The betrayal came from inside his own circle. In the Gospel accounts, his care does not disappear when he knows how his companions will fail him. Bread, the washing of feet, and prayer remain part of that night.

Anyone who would defend that supper has its host’s example to follow.

The verse that comes next

Most of us know the two sayings apart. One is about persecution: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you.” The other is the one on posters: “Ye are the salt of the earth.” “Ye are the light of the world.” Matthew places the sayings together. After the blessing of those reviled falsely for Jesus’ sake and the call to rejoice, the next verse says, “Ye are the salt of the earth.” Matthew 5:11–16.

The order matters. The people he calls salt and light are the same people he has just told to expect insult. He does not treat the insult as a sign that their witness has failed, and he does not tell them to make it stop. He tells them what they are for. We read that sequence as a particular summons when faith feels mocked: the response itself makes our witness visible.

Then he says what the light is. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” The light is good works that can be seen. It is not an argument won. It does not point at us either, since those who see are to glorify the Father. Salt teaches the same thing from the other side. It does nothing from a distance. It preserves and seasons only what it touches, and it does its work by disappearing into the dish.

He adds a warning, and it is the hardest line in the passage. “If the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” We read these neighboring sayings as a warning against confusing two very different things: hostility toward a faithful witness, and criticism that exposes our failure to live what we profess. Being disliked does not tell us which of these we are facing. It is tempting to assume that criticism itself proves our faithfulness. The warning about salt asks us to examine what our lives actually give to the world.

The blessing itself gives us words for that examination: “falsely,” and “for my sake.” Peter draws the same line. “If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye.” “But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.” Before we claim the blessing of the reviled, two questions belong to our own examination. Is what they say about us false? And is it for his sake that they say it? 1 Peter 4:14–16.

How are we doing?

So how are we doing, as salt and as light? The honest answer is mixed, and it begins with a look in the mirror. The survey figures that follow describe the United States. They give one view of public confidence, identity, and service; they do not stand for every country.

Trust has fallen. In 1975, Gallup found that 68 percent of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church or organized religion. In 2026 the figure is 33 percent. Fewer identify as Christian: Pew found 62 percent of American adults doing so in 2023–24, down from 78 percent in 2007, while also finding relative stability in the most recent years. These surveys describe changes; they do not tell us how much results from faithful witness, institutional failure, or wider changes in society. Gallup’s historical comparison; Gallup’s 2026 results; Pew Research Center.

There are failures we can name without asking a survey to prove them. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse documented church authorities in England and Wales protecting the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church and alleged perpetrators while failing children who had been harmed. Its report records concealment, inadequate responses, and the continued exposure of children to abuse. That is a documented failure of care, not a charge we can dismiss as hostility to the faith. IICSA, Roman Catholic Church investigation, executive summary.

Where we have concealed harm or used spiritual authority to protect ourselves, the first faithful response is accountability and repair. Jesus’ blessing of those falsely accused cannot become a shelter from accusations that are true. At the same time, a failure does not license abuse against every believer. Truthful criticism and unjust hostility can exist in the same dispute; we are responsible for discerning both.

Paris belongs in this account. A city on a hill cannot be hid, and that holds whatever the city happens to be doing. In the week after the ceremony the world watched how Christians would answer. It saw some measured words, the French bishops’ among them. It also saw a flood of rage, and eleven people were later convicted for what they sent. Among the messages read in court was one written in the name of “our Lord Jesus Christ.” That too was done before men.

There is another side, and it is just as true. In the 2018–19 National Congregations Study, nearly half of American congregations listed food assistance among their four principal forms of social service. The study includes churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious communities; this good belongs to a wider world than Christianity alone. It includes contributing money, supplying volunteers, and running a pantry or a meal program. Christian communities take their place in that quiet work: a pantry open on a Thursday, a meal carried to a neighbor. It may never become news, but it is visible to the person who receives it. National Congregations Study, pages 48–49.

There is also a matter of proportion. Open Doors, an organization that speaks for persecuted Christians, estimates that more than 388 million of them face high levels of persecution and discrimination, about one in seven. The number is its own estimate, drawn from measures of pressure and violence during October 2024 through September 2025; it is not a count of 388 million separate violent attacks. There are believers today for whom “revile you, and persecute you” means a prison cell, a burned church, or a death. They are owed our attention and our prayer, and they give us our scale. The offense many viewers felt deserves a hearing. It is not the same as losing the freedom to worship, being imprisoned, or being attacked for one’s faith. We can take a wound seriously and still keep that difference in view. Open Doors, World Watch List 2026; the study’s methodology.

When the salt kept its taste

Early Christians also lived with ridicule, and at times with violent persecution. Their writings give us accounts of another kind of public witness.

These accounts preserve how early Christians understood their calling and, in some cases, how they said others saw them. Most are Christian witnesses speaking for their own communities. They give us evidence of practices and ideals, not a picture in which every Christian cared and every neighbor abandoned the sick.

Recall the drawing on the Palatine wall, the crucified figure with the donkey’s head. Around the end of the second century, in North Africa, the Christian apologist Tertullian reported outsiders saying of Christians, “how they love one another.” He described a common fund, freely given, that fed and buried the poor and cared for orphans, the housebound old, the shipwrecked, and believers imprisoned for their faith. It is an advocate’s account, but the form of care he commends is concrete. Tertullian, Apology 39.

An anonymous work addressed to Diognetus, usually dated to the second or early third century, offers a similar portrait. “They love all men, and are persecuted by all.” They “are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honor.” “They have a common table, but not a common bed.” Its picture of Christian life echoes the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. It shows what the writer wanted an inquirer to recognize in the community. Epistle to Diognetus 5; introduction and dating.

During a third-century epidemic in Alexandria, its bishop, Dionysius, wrote that Christians “visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually.” He reported that some died after nursing others. His account contrasts their care with neighbors who deserted the sick and fled from friends. We should hear the force of that testimony without treating the bishop’s comparison as a census of everyone’s conduct. He preserves a memory of care undertaken at real cost. Dionysius, in Eusebius, Church History 7.22.

A letter transmitted under the name of the fourth-century emperor Julian, addressed to Arsacius, complains that Christians supported other people’s poor as well as their own. Julian was trying to renew traditional worship, and the letter presents Christian care as a challenge to that effort. Its authorship is disputed. If it is Julian’s, it is the testimony of an opponent; if not, we cannot use it as his independent confirmation. The letter in W. C. Wright’s translation; the authenticity question.

The drawing of Alexamenos does not tell us how its target answered. These writings do tell us what Christian authors thought should make their communities recognizable. Their answer included the shared fund, the open hand, and the person who stayed with the sick. That is a demanding inheritance to claim.

Salt and light when everything is shaking

Our own time is shaken too. Wars drive millions from their homes. Confidence in many institutions has weakened, the churches among them. Work is changing faster than people can prepare for it. More and more of our arguments happen through screens, between people who will never share a room. In such a time fear can be profitable, and contempt can find an audience before a careful account is heard.

That is the kind of time salt and light are for. A lamp is hardly noticed at noon. Salt mattered most where food would otherwise spoil. Matthew places these words among Jesus’ disciples and the crowds in Roman-ruled Galilee. The later witnesses we have heard show how communities understood them amid suspicion, suffering, and epidemic.

They translate plainly. Salt in a time of contempt is speech that keeps its taste. “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” Colossians places those words beside an instruction about conduct toward outsiders. They speak to a comment thread as well as a marketplace. Light in a time of fear is the good work someone can see: the meal, the visit, the lonely neighbor known by name, the stranger defended. It includes the performer whose work offended us and who is now being threatened. Jesus named the mark himself. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” Colossians 4:5–6; John 13:34–35.

One more thing about his words. He did not say, “Become the salt of the earth.” He said, “Ye are.” We hear gift and vocation together in those words. Jesus names what his followers are, then calls them to live it: keep the salt’s taste, place the lamp on its stand, and let the good become visible. This is how we read the relation between receiving life and living it. Mark gives a related instruction that speaks directly to our use of the image: “Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.” Mark 9:50.

The person beyond the argument

A short clip makes another person seem entirely available to our judgment. The artists in the ceremony have lives beyond the scene in which a viewer met them. So do the people who felt wounded by it. Love pays attention to what the clip cannot show: a history, relationships, fears, and needs we do not yet know.

We may go on disagreeing about the performance. Christians also hold lasting differences about sexuality, gender, how sacred things may be represented, and what a public celebration owes its audience. This essay does not settle those. The obligation to speak truthfully and to refuse to dehumanize holds inside every one of those disagreements, and for a follower of Jesus it does not wait until the other person meets our standard of reverence.

It becomes practical in small decisions, the next time something like this happens:

• Read the statement before sharing a summary of it.

• Say plainly what hurt, to someone who can hear it.

• Before claiming the blessing of the reviled, examine ourselves: is the accusation false, and is it for his sake?

• Correct a claim that proves false, even when it helped our side.

• Refuse the humiliating joke, and leave the pile-on.

• Listen when someone explains why an image wounded them, or why it welcomed them.

• Ask who has been put in danger, and whether they are safe.

• Let the reply be a good work that someone can see.

Jesus told a story about a feast that someone refused to enter. A father welcomes home a ruined son with music and dancing. The elder brother hears it from the field, “and he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.” The father goes out to the angry son as readily as he ran to the lost one. The story ends without telling us whether the brother went in. It is left as a question for whoever is standing outside a celebration, sure of being in the right. Luke 15:25–32.

Dressing the wound

A storm of that size showed something unhealed, in the Church and around it. A wound is dressed by cleaning it first, which means telling the truth on every side. Believers were hurt, and the hurt deserved a hearing. The makers’ account was mixed, and no one should be assigned a malice the evidence does not show. People were threatened in Christ’s name, and that betrayed him.

Then comes the dressing, and it is his own teaching. For the insult: say what hurt, bless, and do not threaten. For the deeper wound that the storm exposed: put those two questions to ourselves, repair what we have spoiled, and keep a table that people who expect to be turned away would recognize as his. A Church known for that table has less to fear from any image.

For Second Humanity, this is a commitment about how we mean to follow Jesus now. It asks something of us before it becomes a measure of anyone else. We do not claim that Christians, ourselves included, have always kept it.

Three longer essays set out the convictions beneath this one. The Hope We Hold: Jesus, Death, and Resurrection asks what grounds our hope that death and injustice do not have the last word. Born from Above: What New Life Asks of Us asks how new life is received. The Life We Share: Jesus and the Meaning of the Feast follows that life to the table, through the meals Jesus kept, the bread and the cup, and the hungry person Paul would not let a church ignore.

The question Paris leaves with us is plain. Can the faith we defend be recognized in the care we offer when we least feel like offering it? The world will go on making its images, and some of them will hurt. What it sees when it looks at us is ours to answer. “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

Sources

Scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Translations from French are our own.

On the ceremony and its makers: CBS News, July 2024; the producers’ statement in TheWrap; Patrick Boucheron’s interview in Le Grand Continent, July 30, 2024.

On the Church’s response: the French Bishops’ Conference, July 27, 2024; the Holy See Press Office, August 3, 2024.

On the court cases: the Jolly verdict of May 5, 2025, and the Butch verdict of November 21, 2025, as linked above.

On the early Christians: Tertullian’s Apology and the Epistle to Diognetus in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation; Dionysius of Alexandria as quoted by Eusebius, Church History 7.22; the letter to Arsacius attributed to the emperor Julian. The Alexamenos graffito is linked above.

On the present day: Gallup’s confidence in institutions series, including the 2026 results; the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, 2023–24; the National Congregations Study, 2018–19; and the Open Doors World Watch List, 2026, with its stated methodology. The church-accountability example comes from IICSA’s November 2020 investigation of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. Audience scale is from IBC, July 31, 2024. Each source is linked where it is discussed.

A World of Sacred Meals: Dionysus, Eleusis, and the Table of Jesus takes up the historical question of how those rites stand to the Christian meal.