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Stories about rulers who see handwriting on the wall but decide to ignore it are never out of date, and orchestras and choirs continue to enthrall audiences with one of G. F. Handel’s grandest oratorios, Belshazzar.

Or William Walton’s strongly rhythmic and richly orchestrated cantata Belshazzar’s Feast.

Power Drunk

Like the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, Belshazzar’s feast was a mega-spectacle of hedonistic opulence and bacchanalian excess. A thousand lords with their wives and concubines were bingeing on wine, which was flowing as voluminously in that palace as the nearby Euphrates.

But more than getting drunk on wine, Belshazzar was inebriated by the delusion of his own narrative of power. Like the citizens of Babel, he reached to the heavens and committed double sacrilege, displaying the most consummate contempt for the God of Israel.

First, he requisitioned the sacred vessels of gold and silver stolen from the Jerusalem Temple for his drunken jamboree. Second, he and his revelers use those vessels to raise a toast to the idols of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood and stone — gods that were blind, deaf, impotent, and imbecilic.

Suddenly, a hand materialized, disrupting the soiree of the century by writing a message on the wall of the banquet hall. This was not a disembodied voice; it was a tangible inscription. The king who controlled the greatest empire was unmanned by the ghostly graffito.

Dysfunctional Empire

But the king and his entourage of magi — enchanters, fortunetellers, diviners, and magicians—who were supposed to be the wisest men in the imperial court, had become like the idols they worshipped. They have eyes but could not see the signs of the times, nor interpret the writing that was then so plainly upon the wall.

So Belshazzar was forced to step outside his official circles and summon an outsider — a believer and follower of the One True God against whom the king had committed this blasphemy.

Daniel read the writing on the wall: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” He interpreted the scribble: “God has numbered the days of your rule. He’s put you on the scales and you don’t weigh much. Your kingdom has been carved up and handed over to the Medes and Persians.” In other words, “You are toast!”

There was no point calling the king to repent. Belshazzar (and modern-day “kings” like him) know that the God of Israel is sovereign even over Babylon, because Yahweh had years before humiliated and humbled the king’s father, Nebuchadnezzar, when he became big-headed and pigheaded, and forced him to eat grass like an ox.

“You are his son and have known all this, yet you’re as arrogant as he ever was. Look at you, setting yourself up in competition against the Master of Heaven!” Daniel chided Belshazzar. “And you treat with contempt the living God who holds your entire life from birth to death in his hand.”

That very night Belshazzar was assassinated. Darius the Mede succeeded him as king.

France Is Finished

The writing is on the wall for France. As God was being mocked, a deluge from Heaven swamped the unprecedented open-air Olympics extravaganza. Arson attacks crippled train networks around France hours before the opening ceremony.

And a day later, a power outage plunged most of Paris into a blackout,with only the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre (Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre) remaining lit.

During the power outage in Paris, notice the thing that’s still fully lit: Sacre Coeur Church.

Zoom in on the dark photo.

Incredible find by @GalahadofMalta, especially in context of the Olympics anti-Christian opening. pic.twitter.com/g1KPRzrone

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) July 28, 2024

Atheists and Deists who have drunk the wine of dialectical materialism will dismiss these bizarre events as coincidence. But Christians on social media have been discussing how God is sending a warning message to those who were spitting in Hs face.

The writing is on the wall for France, and not just in the unnerving events plaguing the Paris Olympics.

I wrote about this a decade ago, warning that there were far more Muslims in mosques on a Friday in the land of Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité than Christians in church on a Sunday. Last month, I finished reading Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 bestseller Submission, which was published on the same day as the jihadi attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people were killed.

I struggled to get through the first half of the book with its descriptions of Frenchmen and -women leading lives full of weltschmerz (“world weariness” or “world pain”) while wallowing in the gutters of sexual depravity.

In this work of fiction, Muhammed Ben Abbes of the nascent Muslim Fraternity beats Marine Le Pen of the Front National in the 2022 presidential election. Overnight the country is transformed. Shariah law comes into force: women are veiled and polygamy is encouraged. Worse, the French élite are supinely eager to collaborate with the new regime and to convert to Islam and submit to its terrifying authoritarianism.

Houellebecq can read the writing on the wall. France is finished. Secularism is dead. Islam is now in control. The Church is in exile. But viewed through the lens of the book of Daniel all is not lost. Daniel is keen to assert that Israel’s God is sovereign in Babylon, even when the chosen people are exiled to Babylon.

Daniel’s Counter-Narrative

In a world where God and His people are constantly mocked and marginalized by the myth, might, and monopoly of the empire, the biblical story in Daniel offers hope dosed with steroids. A hero like Daniel offers a model of resistance to the empire by following the path of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “costly discipleship.”

A modern counter-narrative against the pretensions of imperial omnipotence is the story of Eric Liddell, a British track athlete who competed at the Paris Olympics in 1924. Liddell was a passionate Christian who — despite enormous pressure from King George V, his fellow athletes, and his countrymen — refused to run in the heats for the 100-meter race he was favored to win because they were held on a Sunday.

Liddell’s story is superbly dramatized in the movie Chariots of Fire. The part that always moves me to tears is when he is preaching at the Church of Scotland in Paris. Liddell reads the second half of Isaiah 40 (slightly abbreviated in the movie): “Behold, the nations are as a drop in the bucket, and are counted as the small dust in the balance.

“All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity. He bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.”

The Scotsman who would later be held as a Japanese prisoner of war and serve as a missionary in China (dying at the young age of 43) concludes with a thunderous climax: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

These verses would have given tremendous strength and hope to Daniel and his friends as they fought the myth, might, and monopoly of Babylon: “Behold, Babylon is a drop in the bucket, and is counted as a speck of dust in the balance.”

Pay attention, kings of the earth. The God of Israel is moving among you.

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.