From Olympia to Paris

Introduction

I want to tell you a story about glory. But what if I told you the story begins with Olympic victory in Paris and ends with missionary death in China? Does that sound like glory? Well, it depends on where the road leads. But before we hit the road, we need to glance in the rear-view mirror. That’ll help us map out where we’re headed, and what we see might surprise us. The Olympics are really religious.

Olympic Religion

The Olympic Games began in Ancient Greece in 776 B.C. Every four years, the Greeks staged epic athletic contests.

There was the Pankration, an event sort of like martial arts, but with hardly any restrictions. You couldn’t bite or gouge, but almost anything else was fair game, including strangleholds and breaking fingers. There were chariot races, the most popular and most dangerous event of the games. In a custom-built stadium called a Hippodrome, each driver steered the reins of four horses galloping at full speed, each horse with the strength of 10 men. In the middle of all this blood and sweat and sometimes death, there was also a whole lot of religion.

During opening ceremonies, competitors marched to an ancient temple in Olympia. Priests offered sacrifices of pigs and sheep to a massive statue of Zeus. Athletes pledged their allegiance to the Greek gods. The games went on for centuries, but they fizzled around 393 AD. That’s when the Roman Emperor Theodosius embraced Christian teaching and banned pagan rituals, including the kind associated with the Olympic Games. It would be 1,500 years before the games resurfaced.

From Olympia to Paris

My name is Jamie Dean. I’m lead writer for Radical, and I want to invite you on a journey. Think of it as a road trip to the Olympics and beyond, and here’s where we’re headed. This summer, Olympic athletes will compete on the same field in Paris that a Christian athlete named Eric Liddell made famous during the 1924 Olympic Games. The Scotsman won a remarkable Olympic race, and then he laid down a running career to take up a gospel calling that ended with his death in China.

A century later, we can still learn from Eric Liddell, and we can also learn what’s happening today with the gospel he loved in the countries he knew best. How did Scotland, a nation of churches, become a nation of the unchurched? How did France, the country that’s home to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, become an epicenter for secularism and a magnet for Islam? And how has China, a nation with an officially atheistic government, become a place where the gospel spreads even under persecution?

We’ll ask Christians in those places those questions, and we’ll see that gospel glory sometimes looks more like losing than winning, at least at first, because God is at work in some of the places and some of the people we might least expect. And sometimes people might be easier to reach than we think, especially if we are willing to reach out. From the team at Radical, this is Glory Road.

A Story About Glory

So, 1,500 years later, the Olympic Games resurfaced. This time the organizer was French and the games were a lot tamer, but there was still a kind of religion. Except instead of ancient paganism, now the religion was modern humanism. The French organizer said that the first essential characteristic of the Olympics is to be a religion. He said it represents above and outside the church humanity’s superior religion. He crystallized the idea in the Olympic motto “faster, higher, stronger.” And no doubt we have seen some seriously fast and seriously strong Olympic athletes.

Athletes like Usain Bolt, the Jamaican considered the greatest sprinter of all time. There’s the Georgian weightlifter Lasha Talakhadze, a gold medalist who’s 589 pounds over his head. And then there’s Michael Phelps, the American swimmer with a six-foot seven-inch wingspan and the title of most decorated Olympian in modern history with 28 medals. 23 of those are gold.

It is an amazing thing to behold. But that the Olympics aspired to showcase the glory of man, they couldn’t hide what the same games often revealed, man’s deep, tragic fallenness.

A Fall from Glory

Old film footage from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin shows athletes from around the world marching in an oval stadium packed with more than 100,000 people.

You see the crowds and some of the athletes smiling and saluting the game’s proud host.

World War II was still three years away and the Nazi Party wanted to project an image of a tolerant, peaceful Germany. They temporarily removed anti-Jewish signs from public places, and they toned down anti-Semitic rhetoric in German newspapers. Not everyone bought it, but the propaganda worked for some. The New York Times declared: Olympics leave glow of pride in the Reich. Three years later, Hitler invaded Poland, World War II began, and an estimated six million Jews died in the Holocaust.

The Olympics shut down in 1940 and 1944 as World War II took tens of millions of lives.

The Munich Massacre

The world tried to pick itself up after the war and so did the Olympics. The games resumed in London in 1948. By 1972, Germany got its first chance to host the Olympics again. This time the host was Munich and the hopes were high. But during the second week, tragedy struck again.

Historians call it the Munich massacre. In the early morning hours of September 5th, 1972, eight members of a Palestinian terror group called Black September scaled the fence into the Olympic Village. They invaded the apartment of the Israeli Olympic Team and killed two members. They took nine other Israelis hostage.

Millions of people stayed glued to their televisions, watching a masked terrorist pacing around the Israelis’ balcony. Nearly 20 hours later, during a failed rescue attempt, the militants killed the remaining nine Israelis. An American sportscaster reported the horrible news.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Over the decades, the pattern repeated. Olympic athletes achieved astounding feats and the real world interrupted. In 1980, the US and 64 other nations boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1984, the Soviet Union boycotted the Olympics in Los Angeles. Does it all sound a little familiar? International turmoil involving Palestinians and Israelis and Americans and Russians.

The author of Ecclesiastes was right. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s still thrilling to watch Olympic athletes do amazing things, but any notion of the Olympics displaying human glory as an ultimate reality doesn’t hold up under the weight of human history or what the Bible teaches about the human heart. We need a champion far greater than ourselves. Eric Liddell understood this.

A Champion Greater than Ourselves

You may recognize that theme music even if you haven’t seen the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. If you have seen the movie, you know it tells the true story of a Christian Scotsman named Eric Liddell and his victory in the Paris Olympics of 1924. This movie was a big deal, and it wasn’t just Christians who loved it. It won the Oscar for Best Picture and three other categories in 1982.

One of the film’s producers was Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian Muslim. But what was it that so many people found so compelling? I think it was this, Eric Liddell stuck to his convictions for the sake of something higher than himself. When it was really unpopular and really costly, Eric Liddell didn’t blink. We’ll hear more about his story in future episodes, but here are the basics.

The Pleasure of God

Liddell was born to missionary parents in China. He grew up in a boarding school in London and attended university in his parents’ home country of Scotland. He loved rugby and later he loved running. He also loved the Lord. But Liddell didn’t see those loves as mutually exclusive. He just knew which one was most important. He saw his talent as a gift to be enjoyed to the glory of the God who gave it to him.

In a pivotal scene in Chariots of Fire, Liddell tells his sister, “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” Now, all of this might’ve gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for two things. Number one, Liddell was really fast. And number two, he wouldn’t run on Sundays. He believed the Lord’s Day was set apart for worship and rest. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to run and organize race on a Sunday.

That simple conviction hit a complicated hurdle when the schedule for the Olympic heats was published. The heat for the event Liddell might actually win was slated in Paris on a Sunday. And despite a lot of pressure, Liddell wouldn’t run it. It’s not too much of a spoiler to tell you the movie has a happy ending. Liddell ran a different race, a race he wasn’t expected to win, and he blew away the competition.

On his return to Scotland, friends carried him on their shoulders through the streets of Edinburgh while crowds cheered. Liddell kept his convictions and he won Olympic glory.

The Road to Glory

But there’s a lot more to the story. In the very last frame of the movie, a two-sentence postscript tells what happened after the Olympics. It says, “Eric Liddell, missionary, died in occupied China at the end of World War II. All of Scotland mourned.”

Those two sentences describe what was actually the most inspiring and most important part of Liddell’s whole life. See, Liddell’s greatest glory wasn’t winning a gold medal in Paris, but losing his own life for the glory of God in China. At a moment when he could have kept running for the sake of fame, Liddell chose a different race again. This one for the sake of the gospel and the joy of the nations.

What happened to Liddell in China is a story you’ll want to hear, but so is the story of what’s happening with the gospel in China today and in France where Liddell ran, and in Scotland where he grew up. We’ll start there, in the winding streets of Edinburgh, Scotland where Liddell trained and learned and worshiped. And we’ll get right to a question that might surprise Liddell if he were around today.

How did Scotland, a land of beautiful churches and brave reformers, become a country where the majority of its population claim no religion at all? A country where so few really profess Christ, some consider it statistically on par with an unreached people group. And if that’s true, who is being reached? The answer to that question might also surprise Liddell and us too. That’s next time on Glory Road.