The idea of an opening ceremony for something like the Olympics seems fairly straight forward. You welcome the contestants, spectators and referees/umpires, you declare the event to have begun and then you let everyone sit back and enjoy the spectacle to come. The thing about sport is that it is an incredible visual spectacle and when it happens with a large live audience of passionate partisan fans, the atmosphere takes care of itself. Now, I’m not into a lot of the sports, I’m not even sure how some of them count as sport at all but that’s the beauty of the Olympics, there is something for everyone, or almost. It’s possible that you have no interest in any sport whatsoever in which case the games probably aren’t for you.
However, over the years, the need for grander and more extravagant ceremonies has grown. The high point was probably the Beijing Games in 2008 when the Chinese wowed us with a display of vibrant art, music and dance. Since then, everyone has tried to match that. London did quite well, although we saw that increasing phenomena of Western attempts to match Chinese dance and acrobatic performances by filling stadiums with lots of energetic people throwing themselves about and calling it modern dance. The effect actually worked quite well then. However, take the dancers out of the stadium and stick them on some boats on the river and it does feel more like the end of a drunken night out.
The thing is that gradually, the performances have grown until it feels a bit like a show with the entry of the athletes tagged on. Paris pushed things one stage further and took us away from the stadium. In four years’ time, they probably won’t bother with the athletes at all. You will already get the sense that I wasn’t much impressed with the opening ceremony and the reports since suggest I wasn’t alone.
There were however some lessons for us and some fascinating insights into contemporary culture. First of all, notice how the ceremony has moved further and further away from it’s raison d’etre. Partly this has been caused by the Olympic Committee’s desire to emphasise the worthiness of the event creating a pseudo-religious feel (more of which to come) but partly it’s about the desire of the hosts to show off, to turn the opening itself into a form of competition. Britain didn’t want to be outdone by China, France of course wanted to best London. The problem is that increasingly, the true purpose is moved to the sidelines, becomes assumed and gradually forgotten altogether.
The lesson here is a reminder for us that either in our need for ceremony and tradition or our need to be contemporary and original, we end up assuming, sidelining and eventually forgetting the Gospel.
Like I said, there is a pseudo-religious feel to such events with parades, singing, visual emblems and even a sermon like speech or two laden with references to the sport/games as offering hope or peace, we have an alternative gospel. With all that fire and flames, we might have been in a largescale, midsummer alternative Christingle service (even if they got the Christingle as well as the flag upside down at the end).
It’s ironic then, given the goddess imagery used and the sacrilegious mockery of the Last Supper in one tableaux that one of the main pieces of music chosen was “Imagine” by John Lennon. That’s right, just after the countries of the world had been paraded, named and celebrated with flag waving, we heard the lyric “imagine there’s no countries.” Whilst the competitors don’t literally “kill or die” for their country, the whole point is that there is competition which you give your all for. Imagine something more antithetical to the spirit of the Olympics, you couldn’t if you tried.
There again, the song also invites us to “imagine there’s no heaven.” I can’t help feeling that we were given a vision of what this looked like. If there is no heaven, then we have hell to look forward to and it did feel like we were given a glimpse in there. Paris’s problem was not that their plans for the spectacle were ambitious but rather that they were arrogant, hubristic. The message sent out was “the stadium is too small for our show, we need the whole city.” Of course with that kind of claim you then need to fill the city with light, life, colour and music. The city was too big for the event and so it felt stretched out, patchy and thin.
Furthermore, the overt decision to deny the one true God and to mock the Gospel cannot fail to have an impact. It’s perhaps true that intentionally or unintentionally most of these events draw clumsily on old pagan mythology, so we end up with what I’ve referred to before as “idols without gods.” Secular Paris was just more explicit in its fist shaking at Heaven. We saw what happens when you try to have art, music, dance and performance but stripped of worship, stripped of God and the Gospel. You end up with what we saw, something distorted, disjointed, dis-harmonious, something ugly, stretched out and thin. Fascinatingly, this is exactly how CS Lewis envisions Hell in The Great Divorce. If you switched off at the end or before with a sense of emptiness and disappointment, then that’s exactly what this world and its alternative Gospel has to offer.
Faithroots 
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