The Olympic Games were deeply ingrained in the Greco-Roman culture which surrounded the early Church. There is an epitaph to a baker living in Macedonia who had gone to the games at Olympia twelve times – a record hard to match even in these days. In addition to the Olympic Games, there were Isthmian, Pythian and Nemean Games. Greek athletics took place at Pompeii, and they were a feature of the festivities arranged by Julius Caesar when he turned the Campus Martius into a stadium. So it’s not surprising that athletic imagery should feature strongly in Paul’s lexicon. It was in the air so to speak, as it has been in London this summer. So I thought it would be interesting to see how he uses it to illustrate the Christian life, and to see how far the insights he draws from the sporting world he knew might still resonate with us to-day.
First then a few reminders. In the letter to the Hebrews, after the great roll call of faith, we are invited to think of all those Old Testament heroes as our supporters thronging the stadium to cheer us on. ‘Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us …’ (Hebrews 12. 1-2). To the church at Corinth, host city to the Isthmian Games, Paul writes about the training as well as the race itself: ‘Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize. Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though boxing the air, but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming [the gospel] to others, I myself should not be disqualified’ (1 Cor 9.24-26). We encounter the same urgency and total commitment in his letter to the Philippians. Speaking of his goal, which is to really know Christ, he writes: ‘Beloved, I do not consider that I have made [that goal] my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.’ (Phil 3.13-14). And finally a couple of snippets from 2 Timothy – first a reminder that ‘noone is crowned without competing according to the rules’ (2 Tim 2.3) and at last, as he faces death: ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord will give me on that day (2 Tim 4.7-8).
We have seen, these last two weeks, what the athletes put themselves through in order to win that brief moment of glory. Yet most of those who are said to have ‘made history’ will soon be forgotten by all but a few specialists in the minutiae of sporting history. The over-hyped immortality of sporting celebrity can have a cruelly short life, which Paul contrasts with the prize to which we aspire as Christians, the prize of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord, the prize of realizing our full potential as children of God, each one of us unique in ourselves, and yet stamped with his image and likeness. This is the medal that will never tarnish, the glory which is truly immortal.
There is a great deal in all this about the importance of our effort, our commitment, our discipline. We catch glimpses of this in the interviews with the medal winners, whose whole lives – certainly for the past four years, in many cases for much longer than that, have been geared to delivering the best possible performance in these agonisingly brief competitions spread over at most a few days, for some perhaps only a few seconds. For years on end their lives have been dedicated to the training regimes that are required to hone their technique, to raise their fitness to the highest level, to optimise their mental as well as their physical preparations for this decisive contest. It’s a sobering thought that Paul wants us to see our commitment to the Christian life as demanding that same level of total dedication and commitment. If we want to win the prize, we must be prepared to pay the price, not just now and then when we’ve got nothing more pressing to do on a Sunday morning, but every day of our lives, as we make the realisation of our full potential as Christians, our commitment to being Christ’s faithful soldiers and servants, the true focus of our lives, the goal to which all our other ambitions must be subordinated. That’s a very big ask – for us as it is for an athlete. Even Paul says he hasn’t got there yet, but he’s working on it, and he urges us to follow his example.
There is a balancing corrective to this heavy emphasis on our own efforts, a corrective which Paul himself would apply. In parallel with his insistence on the need for the Christian to display total commitment and dedication, he never forgets that the Christian life is a vocation that is initiated, sustained and ultimately fulfilled in us by the gracious activity of God. As any coach will tell you, a capacity for hard work – all that grafting to which Mo Farah attributed his double gold – is an essential ingredient of success, but to succeed at the highest level you need that spark of talent in the first place, and that’s a gift. Just as Paul speaks of straining every sinew as he presses on to win the prize of knowing Christ, he says that he does this ’because Christ Jesus has made me his own’ (Phil 3.12). He goes on to assert that he can ‘do all things through him who strengthens me’ (Phil 4.13) and he looks forward to the day when his body will be transformed by the power that enables Christ to make all things subject to himself (Phil 3. 20-21). So we see that Paul’s theology of commitment, dedication and effort is shot through with a deep-seated recognition that his progress from novice to medal-winner is enabled at every stage by the grace of God who makes him his own, who strengthens him for every step of the way, and who will ultimately complete the work of transformation towards the goal of knowing Christ so utterly as to become more and more like him. It’s the dizzying perspective which Charles Wesley captures in his great hymn of praise for the love of God, where we are changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before him, lost in wonder, love and praise.
Jesus said: I am the bread of life. As we commit ourselves to the ongoing challenge of the Christian life, we give thanks for the grace which first fired our enthusiasm, and now strengthens our resolve. We thank God for the grace which provides us in this holy sacrament with the food we need to sustain a demanding training programme. As we feed on this bread, we are given the strength to face the challenges that the race of life throws at us, until at last, when our race is almost over, we enter the stadium like one of those exhausted marathon runners, to be urged over the line by that great crowd of witnesses, looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, the greatest Olympian of all time, by whom and in whom we too are winners, caught up with him onto the podium of true immortality. By God’s grace we run, we run to win.