The Paris Olympics are now history. Nobody qualified for the Olympics -- let alone stood on the winners' podium -- without extraordinary commitment. It involved years of work and pain and endurance and discipline and sacrifice and single-mindedness. "Going for the gold" is what people call it.
Did you know that when the apostle Paul used athletic imagery from the Olympics, the games had already been around for 700 years?
What's even more interesting to me is the fact that Paul could employ athletic imagery from the games so positively when he knew full well the pagan background of the Olympics -- the temples, the altars, the invocation of the gods, the violence, and so forth. Yet despite all those reservations, he felt free to pull big lessons from the Olympics about spiritual reality. What can we Christians learn from the secular games? he might have asked his congregations. An obvious example is Phil. 3:14:
"I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God is calling us up to heaven" (TLB).
Here we see nothing less than a call to perseverance, sacrifice, giving up our small ambitions, and single-minded devotion to the task at hand. This is not to say that we should ignore the dark side of sports. At their best, sports can point to a way of life worth emulating. Simultaneously, sports can reveal our uglier side. I think of Pete Rose's lifetime banishment from baseball, or Mike Tyson chomping down on Evander Holyfield's ear, or NBA referee Tim Donaghy fixing games for money, or baseball coaches surreptitiously using technology to steal opponents' signs, or the quest to gain an unfair edge through doping (Lance Armstrong, Ben Johnson, Marion Jones). Yet who can deny the positive benefits of sports? Professional athletes have established hundreds of charitable foundations with causes ranging from promoting health and fitness to diabetes awareness. Stadiums have been used to honor true American heroes like the first responders after 9/11. In 2014, Boston Bruins hockey players visited their local children's hospital for Halloween dressed up like Disney characters to help cheer up the patients.
Studies have shown that young people who played high school sports had a better career outlook and were more successful in their jobs later in life. Not to mention how sports provides a platform for local churches to lovingly share Christ and the gospel with their communities.
Sure, it's not all sunshine. Paul knew the dark underbelly of athletics. I'm sure he was aware of the devastating influence that Greek sports had on the Jewish youth of the intertestamental period, when peer pressure even led some of them to undergo "reverse circumcision" to hide the sign of their ancestral faith (see 2 Macc. 4:12). Still, Paul used sports analogies positively.
As an adult-onset athlete, I know from personal experience that sports builds bridges between generations and has many positive health benefits. I am living proof that one should not assume that exercise cannot be initiated by people who are aging. Senior adults who stop participating in sports reduce their physical activity and have health risks equivalent to people who have never done sports.
Paul makes it clear to his churches that the Christian life is like participating in an athletic contest. He wishes to emphasize the importance of continual concentration on those things that lie ahead. Effort in the Christian life is necessary if we are to achieve our goal of a complete and full knowledge of the Savior. So Paul runs to receive the prize. For him, that prize is found in Jesus Christ. Like an Olympic athlete, with his eyes fixed firmly on the goal, he hopes to receive from God the award he covets -- perfection in Christ.
In the meantime, there is a race to be run.