Christians include queer people. Pharisees don’t

Sunday, July 28, 2024

I’ve read several news reports claiming that Christians were feeling “mocked” or “insulted” because, at the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in Paris, a group of “drag queens and dancers lined a long table in an image that some thought resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” portrait of Jesus Christ and his 12 apostles” (today.com).

Just to make things clear: I am a well-educated Roman-Catholic family father and I feel neither mocked nor insulted. I am glad that queer people were included into the celebration. And I am sure that most of my catholic friends feel the same.

Five years ago, one of our children did a similar joke with some friends:

It is a shame that

Christians do not have any problem with this drag performance, only Pharisees do. Pharisees were a Jewish sect who openly clashed with Jesus’s teachings.

2000 years after Jesus, religious leaders still fall into pharisaical thinking, assuming that queer people should “feel ashamed” and “hide themselves”. No reasonable person of good will can feel curious about the Gospel or the Bible when they hear religious leaders talk such bullshit. Pharisaical thinking is a shame because it “shuts the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces”.

Jesus is always on the side of the poor and excluded people, and he always warns us about pharisaical thinking.

• “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.” (Matthew 23:13)

• “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34)

And I repeat that most of my catholic friends feel the same as I feel. You don’t read about them in the news because news agencies make money from writing “interesting” news about controversial topics.