RECORDING SCRIPT — What Are We Defending?

Prepared from the approved narration script. It has not been checked word for word against the recording and may differ from what is heard.

Second Humanity. What are we defending? You see an image. Something sacred to you seems to have become the joke. Before you have finished looking, you know that you want to answer. Perhaps the image carries a church you grew up in. A person who taught you to pray. A meal where grief had somewhere to go. What someone else can dismiss with a laugh has a place inside your life. You want to say, that matters. You want someone to understand why. And then there is the reply you are about to make. What will it carry? Will the person who receives it recognize anything of the faith you are defending? This is one of the questions I have carried into Second Humanity. If the life and teaching of Jesus give this work its direction, they must also address us when we feel wounded. Especially then. It is easy to speak of love while imagining the person who will welcome it. What happens when the person before us seems to have insulted what we love? This is What Are You Seeking. The regular show takes a question every other Thursday. Today is a special edition accompanying our foundational collection, The life we receive, the life we share. The written companion is called When Faith Feels Mocked: Paris, the Last Supper, and the Way of Jesus. You will find the sources and the fuller discussion in the Anchor. This conversation asks how those convictions meet a public disagreement. How we tell the truth about hurt. How we answer for harm. And what Jesus meant when he called his followers salt and light. I want to begin on a bridge. Paris. July, twenty twenty-four. The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. A long table stands over the Seine. Barbara Butch, the DJ, wears a silver headdress. Drag artists and dancers stand beside her. Later in the sequence, the singer Philippe Katerine appears painted blue as Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Some viewers see a feast, a celebration, a public welcome. Many Christians see Leonardo's Last Supper, and see it mocked. Bishops protest. The organizers apologize for the offense felt. The artists begin receiving threats. The disagreement is real. So is the difficulty of describing it honestly. Thomas Jolly, the artistic director, denied that the Last Supper was his inspiration. He described a feast associated with the Olympian gods. A statement attributed to the producers said that Leonardo's painting had helped shape the setting, while denying any intention to disrespect religious belief. Those explanations do not say the same thing. We should let the difference remain. Patrick Boucheron, one of the writers, acknowledged that a particular view of the scene could suggest Leonardo's painting. He also argued that political actors had manufactured the controversy. His account of the hurt is open to disagreement. His acknowledgment about images gives us something useful: what an artist means and what a viewer recognizes can differ. We do not have to tell someone they imagined the resemblance. We also do not have evidence of a shared intention to humiliate Christians. That is where a truthful account begins. With enough care to leave another person's intentions less certain than our anger would like them to be. And enough care to let a wounded person speak. If that image held something precious for you, you can say so. An explanation of Greek mythology cannot decide what you were allowed to feel. Religious images carry more than their arrangement of figures. They can hold years of prayer, a remembered voice, the place where someone sat beside you after a death. A viewer encounters the image with a life already attached to it. The person who felt welcomed also brought a life. Someone accustomed to being spoken about may have seen people like themselves occupying a public place with joy. We do not need to make either person disappear to understand why the scene divided its audience. The French bishops' response held more than one thought. They praised moments of beauty and joy in the ceremony, and deplored what they saw as mockery of Christianity. Criticism can be specific. It can acknowledge something good while naming what hurt. It does not have to become a judgment on every person involved. There is another distinction worth holding. The picture was not the meal. Leonardo painted his Last Supper in Milan, around the end of the fifteenth century. The familiar composition, people along one side of a long table, facing us, belongs to the painter. The Gospels describe people reclining. John places a disciple close against Jesus. We are looking through a history of representation. That does not make the painting unimportant. For many believers, an image carries the event into memory and prayer. But Jesus' acts at the supper are not exhausted by a composition on a wall. He takes bread. He blesses it. He breaks it. He gives it. The stage could resemble a painting. The reply of a believer could resemble the host. That is the possibility I want to stay with. Because the argument did not stay an argument. Barbara Butch's lawyer reported death threats, threats of torture and rape, and degrading abuse. Butch filed a complaint. In twenty twenty-five, a Paris court convicted seven people in the online harassment case concerning Thomas Jolly. Later that year, four men were convicted in the case concerning Butch, and a fifth was acquitted. The offenses and sentences were not identical. These were judgments about particular people and particular acts. They do not establish that Christians as a body were responsible. They do not turn criticism of the performance into a crime. They do establish that real people were harmed by responses to it. One reported message invoked our Lord Jesus Christ while promising that Jolly would pay. Hold those words beside the Lord they invoke. Jesus says, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” He speaks of the Father making the sun rise on the evil and the good. First Peter remembers him this way: “when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not.” We do not have to call the performers enemies to hear the force of that teaching. It reaches even the case in which hostility is real. It therefore has something to say while the meaning of an image is still disputed. A person can explain a wrong, ask an institution to account for itself, and maintain a boundary. Reporting a threat and leaving danger belong within care. The teaching is never permission to keep someone available for abuse. The artists who sought protection had every reason to do so. What we cannot do is borrow Jesus' name to authorize conduct that contradicts his teaching. Come back to the supper itself. Judas is there. Luke places the betrayal saying after the bread and the cup. “The hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.” John describes Jesus washing the disciples' feet while Judas is still present. Later, Jesus dips a piece of bread and gives it to him. Peter is there too. Jesus knows that Peter will deny him. These are people inside his circle. People close enough to share the meal. His knowledge of their failure does not remove the bread, the washing, or the care from the evening. We should be careful about what we make that mean for someone who has been betrayed. It does not require restoring access to a dangerous person. The scene addresses the way we use our own power. Jesus knows what is coming, and his response is still recognizably his. If we want to defend that supper, we have its host's example before us. And now listen to the verse that comes next. We often hear two parts of the Sermon on the Mount separately. One concerns persecution. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.” The other gives us the images. “Ye are the salt of the earth.” “Ye are the light of the world.” In Matthew, they stand next to one another. The blessing and the call to rejoice are followed by salt and light. The people told to expect insult are the people being told what their presence is for. We read that sequence as a summons in a moment like this. The response to the insult is part of the witness. The lamp does not go off duty because someone has spoken contemptuously about it. Jesus says what is to become visible: “that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” A work that someone can see. Something received by an actual person. The light points beyond our need to be acknowledged. Salt gives us another way to hear that. It has to reach what it seasons. Care cannot remain a description of the sort of people we are. Somewhere it must reach a life: someone hungry, someone isolated, someone trying to find out whether the threat they received should be taken seriously. We can spend so long explaining the goodness of our convictions that the person who needs their goodness is left waiting. The teaching brings our attention back to that person. Then comes the warning. Salt can lose its taste. In that image it becomes good for nothing, cast out and trodden underfoot. We read the neighboring sayings as a warning against confusing hostility toward a faithful witness with criticism that exposes our failure to live what we profess. Being disliked cannot tell us which one we are facing. We have to examine the life being criticized. Two phrases in the blessing give us questions to carry into that examination. Falsely. For my sake. Is the accusation false? Is this being said because we are following him? These questions belong first to us. They are not a device for deciding that every wounded believer must have deserved the wound. Truthful criticism and unjust hostility can happen in the same dispute. A community can have something serious to repent of and still suffer a lie about it. We owe attention to both. So how are we doing? In the United States, Gallup has recorded a long decline in confidence in the church or organized religion. Pew has found fewer adults identifying as Christian than in two thousand seven, with greater stability in recent years. Those surveys describe changes. They cannot tell us how much of the change follows from faithful witness, institutional failure, or other changes in people's lives. We should not make a percentage deliver a moral verdict it cannot give. There are failures we can name directly. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse documented authorities in the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales protecting institutional reputation and alleged perpetrators while failing children who had been harmed. That is not an accusation we can answer by announcing that Jesus said we would be misunderstood. Where harm was concealed, truth has to be heard. Where authority protected itself, authority has to become answerable. The first faithful response is accountability and repair. That can begin with listening to an account we would rather interrupt. Letting the person harmed describe what happened without making them responsible for the institution's reputation. Accepting that an apology may need to be followed by changes in who holds power and how that power is answerable. We cannot ask someone to restore our good name in place of addressing what injured them. The truth may be painful to receive. Refusing it leaves the wound with the person who was already carrying it. Jesus' blessing of those falsely accused cannot become a shelter from accusations that are true. There is also quiet good. In its twenty eighteen to twenty nineteen survey, the National Congregations Study found that nearly half of American congregations listed food assistance among their principal forms of service. That study includes churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious communities. The care belongs to a wider world than Christianity alone. Christian communities participate in it. A pantry opens. Volunteers make a meal. Someone receives groceries. The act may never become a story anyone shares online. It is visible to the person who receives it. That matters when we ask what it means to shine. A hungry person does not need their meal to become evidence in an argument about the reputation of the church. They need to eat. We also need a sense of proportion. In its twenty twenty-six report, Open Doors estimates that more than three hundred and eighty-eight million Christians face high levels of persecution and discrimination. That is the organization's estimate, using measures of pressure as well as violence. It covers different kinds of hardship. Among those believers are people facing imprisonment, attacks, and the loss of freedom to worship. Their lives deserve our attention and our prayer. The offense felt in Paris deserves a hearing too. It is not the same as being imprisoned or attacked for one's faith. Keeping the difference in view does not require pretending the image could not hurt. It asks us to remain attentive to lives beyond our own dispute. This is an old question for the faith. Around the year two hundred, someone scratched a picture on a wall in Rome. A worshipper stands before a crucified figure with a donkey's head. The inscription names Alexamenos worshipping his god. The drawing is commonly understood as mockery of a Christian. We do not know how its target answered. We have no response from him to quote. What we do have are writings from early Christians about the kind of life they hoped others would recognize. Most of those accounts are Christian witnesses speaking for their own communities. We should hear them that way. They preserve practices and ideals, without giving us a world in which every Christian cared and every other person refused. Tertullian, writing in North Africa around the end of the second century, reports people saying of Christians, “how they love one another.” He describes money freely given to a common fund. It cares for poor people, orphans, the housebound old, the shipwrecked, and believers imprisoned for their faith. An anonymous work addressed to Diognetus describes Christians being reviled and blessing in return. Its portrait echoes the Sermon on the Mount. During an epidemic in third-century Alexandria, the bishop Dionysius writes of Christians visiting the sick and ministering to them. He says some died after nursing others. His contrast with neighbors who fled belongs to his account; it cannot stand as a report of everyone's conduct. But the cost of the care he remembers is plain. The faith could be recognized in a person who stayed. These witnesses do not let us claim an innocent past and stand above the present. They give us an inheritance that asks something of us. A shared fund. A blessing where there had been an insult. A sick person who was not abandoned. What would that inheritance look like where we are? Colossians says, “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” The passage concerns conduct toward outsiders. Its question reaches the words we send from a phone. A reply can remain clear without becoming cruel. We can say what hurt. We can read the original statement before passing on an accusation. We can correct something false even after it has helped our side. We can leave a humiliating joke unshared. We can also ask a different question while everyone else is deciding who won. Is anyone in danger? Does someone need protection? Who has become a target while we have been watching a performance? Caring about that person does not settle every disagreement we have with them. Christians differ about sexuality, gender, and the ways sacred things may be represented. Those differences do not suspend the obligation to tell the truth and refuse to dehumanize. The other person does not have to meet our standard of reverence before their safety matters. Nor does listening require us to pretend the image did not wound us. A conversation can hold the sentence, this hurt me, and the sentence, I want you to be safe. Both can be true. We can make room for someone to explain what they meant, and still explain what their work touched in us. The difficulty is staying present long enough for there to be two people in the conversation, instead of one wounded person and a symbol of everything they fear. Jesus tells a story about someone standing outside a celebration. A younger son has returned, and his father has prepared a feast. The elder brother hears the music. He is angry. He will not go in. He has an account of his own faithfulness, and his brother's welcome seems to put it in question. Then the father comes out to him. He addresses the angry son, just as he went toward the returning one. The story ends without telling us whether the elder brother enters. That unanswered invitation can address us. We should let it address us before using it to name the person on the other side of a dispute. What has made another person's welcome feel like a loss to me? Can I say why I am hurt and still hear the invitation to care? The father goes out. That movement matters to Second Humanity. Love approaches a person with a grievance. It does not require the grievance to disappear before there can be a conversation. It asks for a response within the relationship. There is one more thing about salt and light. Jesus says, “Ye are.” We hear gift and vocation together in those words. He names what his followers are, then asks them to live it. The salt must keep its taste. The lamp must be placed where its light reaches someone. Receiving and responding belong together. That is the connection with Born from Above. New life is received before it is achieved. Its fruit appears in how we live with other people. We cannot manufacture the gift by performing generosity. We can become answerable for what happens to the gift in our hands. And that returns us to the bridge. An image was seen. A wound was felt. Explanations differed. Threats were sent. The scene cannot be made simple by leaving out one of those facts. We can begin by telling the truth about each. The hurt deserved a hearing. The makers should not be assigned a malice the evidence does not establish. Those threatened deserved protection. And anyone who used Christ's name to threaten another person needs to reckon with what that name asks of them. What are we defending? If we are defending the faith of Jesus, the manner of our answer belongs to the answer. So does the act of care that follows it. A truthful word. A boundary that protects. An apology with a repair attached. A meal given without making someone purchase it with agreement. These are small enough to be done. They are also difficult enough to reveal what governs us. Before sending the next reply, there may be room for one pause. Have I heard what was said? Have I turned a resemblance into certainty about a person's intention? Am I passing along something I would correct if it came from the other side? Then one question beyond the reply: what care is available to me now? We may need to return to that question after the argument has stopped drawing attention. The person's life continues. Second Humanity begins with the conviction that life and love are received from God, and that a life received is meant to be shared. That commitment first asks something of us. We return to the sources so that they can address our own conduct, especially where our conduct has become easy to excuse. You do not have to stop caring about what is sacred to you. Let the care reach the people the sacred one taught you to love. The world will go on making images. 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.” Second Humanity. What Are You Seeking.