Sports fans will love the image that St. Paul uses today: one borrowed directly from the stadium. Paul gives us a runner in a race, caught in freeze frame: stretching forward to cross the finish line first, not daring to look back over the shoulder to gauge his position for fear of losing focus. In this race, distraction is the enemy. Races, after all, have been lost for less.
For Paul, the runner is a metaphor for the life of faith. We know the ancient Greeks, founders of the first Olympic games, were given to athletic competition; and doubtless Paul, the citizen of a barely Romanized city re-founded by the Greeks, would have known what he was talking about. The Romans themselves were more given to gladiatorial exhibitions. Paul in other places talks about the life of faith in terms of a boxing competition, or “beating the air” (1 Cor. 9:26); and even about the spectacle of the condemned in the colosseum (1 Cor. 4:9): an echo of the competitors’ salutation, “we who are about to die salute you.” In each case, Paul deploys the language of the stadium in order to illustrate the Christian vocation.
As Jesus’ disciples, we’re called to stretch ourselves; to break out in a sweat for the sake of the kingdom. We’re called to action. Action by its nature takes place here and now. We cannot go back and act in the past: that moment has had its day and cannot be retrieved except in memory. Our plans for the future remain just that: plans that may or may not be realized. What we are given today is this moment in which we can act, to exert ourselves in obedience to the call.
Lent is precisely the season in which Christians are called to purposive action and intentional practice. “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent,” we heard on Ash Wednesday, “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” St. Paul gives us the runner, shaped by ascesis for the task; while Lent posits a spiritual ascesis, an ascetical practice that will fit us for the race ahead.
Our reading gives us Paul’s runner, situated in that moment of action, poised between past and future. He’s caught in the freeze frame, suspended in the moment of action, when every nerve is strained in the leap forward. What is past has been left behind; treated as if forgotten. St. Paul’s runner is also properly oriented, headed forward toward the still unrealized future. The finish line, and the victor’s crown, are in prospect, but not yet attained.
St. Paul’s metaphor of the runner works for any consideration of human agency. Human beings have a past, they’re headed to a future, and they exist in the present: as fleeting as the present moment is. Now is the time for action: true for all of us. The theologian Jurgen Moltmann writes, “Human life must be risked if it would be won. It must expend itself if it would gain firmness and future” (Theology of Hope). Now is the time for answering God’s call, for sure. Now is the time to throw the dice, to hazard all, and to act.
But Paul has in mind a different horizon than tomorrow, a purely human future. “This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14). The future toward which Paul is headed, and to which he invites us, is not the horizon of the next moment, but rather the horizon of God’s future. Again Moltmann, “If… we are thus to risk expending ourselves, then we need a horizon of expectation which makes the expending meaningful…”. Only the heavenly call provides that horizon.
That’s the orientation of Lent: to engage in the practices that will prepare us for that moment in which God will act, through raising his Son Jesus Christ from the dead. Our action is predicated on God’s action, the Easter moment on which everything else hangs. It’s the hope of heaven that provides the real horizon of Christian hope: that transcendent goal that we cannot bring about by our own effort, but for which we must nevertheless strive, as runners in the race. Our renewal of baptismal vows today is a case in point, directing us to action.
That goal is our deepest desire, one that can only be made secure beyond this world. Desire is always about the future; and Christian desire is about God’s future and our ultimate goal. Remember the words of our collect today: “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” We act now, stretching out to what lies ahead, forgetting what lies behind, and pressing forward toward the goal.