March 20, 2020 - 10:26am
Christ the Redeemer, the famous statue that stands guard over Rio de Janeiro, has been lit up with a projection of flags of all the countries that have been affected by the virus. It’s a rather touching expression of global solidarity.
Contrast this with Donald Trump’s desire to exploit this crisis to further his trade war with China. For Trump, it’s not coronavirus, it’s the Chinese virus. Or Kung Flu, as others have dubbed it. With Trump it’s always the same: us first and sod the rest.
Contrast also with the nauseating cover of John Lennon’s Imagine that Israeli actress Gal Gadot and her famous Hollywood friends have pushed out on Twitter. Set aside the ludicrous thought of those who are among the most pampered multi-millionaires in the world preaching from a song that asks us to “imagine no possessions”, what gets my goat is also the wistful “imagine there’s no countries.” And of course, there are Lennonists in this country who are spying this crisis as one last chance to reverse Brexit.
Trump and Lennon represent two opposite ends of the scale in terms of political reactions to the virus. In a crisis such as this there is an inevitable tension between the national and the global. The virus is decidedly a globalist, respecting no national borders. Which is why the Imagine brigade think it makes no sense, for instance, that even Schengen countries are closing their borders to each other.
And yet, at a time when national governments are having to make big decisions about how to marshal financial and other resources and close down public gatherings, it is vital that such decisions are not seen as imposing on a population from some distant authority, but are decisions over which a population feels it has some political purchase. That, at least, is how we understand things in a democracy.
Christ the Redeemer, covered in flags, is a pretty good put down to Trump’s national chauvinism. This is a man who self-describes as Christian, so he should know the Biblical injunction that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. Nor American or British, nor Japanese or Ugandan. And yes, I admit: there is a little bit of Imagine here.
But this Christian ‘Lennonism’ has to be offset by the rootedness of Christianity in the specific, in the local. The original Christ the Redeemer was born in a particular place, at a particular moment in time, with a message to a particular people. And the particularity of His message can easily get washed away in the saccharine universalism of evangelistic Lennonism.
As a Christian, Christ the Redeemer, covered in flags, represents my political theology pretty closely. Christ speaks to us all — yes, of course, all — the words of salvation, but not in some vacuous theological Esperanto; rather, in our own language and through our own place.
“How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” was how the multi-cultural crowd at Pentecost described hearing the message of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:8). That beautiful art-deco statue, arms embracing the people of Rio, now superimposed with the tokens of our various national identities, is a refusal both of Trump’s national chauvinism and of Lennon’s sentimental universalism. To my mind, it gets the balance exactly right.
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Subscribe“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28. What a revolutionary statement in the first century. The universal brotherhood of man ( & woman) all started with Christ. So beautiful to see that in visual form on Christ the Redeemer in Rio. Thank you!
Thank you, Giles, for the insight that Christ is for all the nations and, at the same time, transcends the nations. Surely, now is the time to remove our tribalistic mentality and come together as the powerful projection on Christ the Redeemer so clearly demonstrates. I always look forward to what you have to say.
I am no Trump apologist, but I really weary of the constant drumbeat of criticism against him as if he were Satan incarnate. John Lennon was a dreamer. Donald Trump is a pragmatist. That’s about as far as you can take the comparison, and injecting this ridiculous metaphor into the COVID-19 conversation is just plain silly.
Thank you Giles and thank you Andrew, you both remind me of why I am an now an atheist. John Lennon was not against Christianity he was critising all religions because they seperate us rather than unite us, Islam & Judaism, Church of England & Roman Catholic, each one wants to emphasise their own difference and superiority to the others. He was critising countries because they create borders and barriers. If you listen to the real message of Imagine, you may get down to the real meaning of Humanity.
The real message is nihilistic; imagine meaninglessness, that life and death are without purpose or value.
Leonard Cohen, by way of contrast, part of the lyrics to “The Future”
“Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby: It is murder
Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions
Won’t be nothing (won’t be), nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it’s overturned
The order of the soul”
“christ speaks to us all” you must be in direct communication with your god I am 83 and I have never heard a whisper from him in my lifetime, I see many fat priests floating around so he must be looking after them.The statue is a worthless waste of stone and money.
Well, Jesus had no words for the willfully deaf. He knew shouting at them wouldn’t get through. We listen with our hearts. If they are made of stone, they hear not a thing,