Joe Babendreier
15 August 2004
column
Nairobi — Keeping track of our wins and losses feels good. Maybe we should get excited when someone sets a new world record - especially if he or she is a Kenyan. But take the most eloquent politician or the most talented singer. Take the fastest marathon runner or the most dazzling beauty queen. Take all their election victories, all their platinum CDs, all their Olympic gold medals and all their pageant crowns - all of that is the glory of a world that passes away.
The 2004 event that just kicked off in Athens takes us back to the place where the first Olympics were held in 776 BC. The aura of myth that inspired those games is not entirely absent from modern competition. Does the name Nike ring a bell? She was the goddess of victory. Diminutively depicted in the right hand of the gold and ivory statue of Zeus - one of the Seven Wonders of the World - Nike stands with her wings outstretched, holding a wreath to be placed on the winner's head. The wreath was taken from a sacred olive tree, planted by Hercules behind Zeus' temple.
Though today's winners would probably prefer the gold, the wreath symbolised the chief of the gods rewarding a mortal man with divine dignity. The victor was called an Olympian - as they are today - the same name used for the gods and goddesses living on Mount Olympus.
In Greek legend, Hercules, the legendary founder of the games and probably a real athlete, was the first muscle man to acquire the mythical status of half-man, half-god. When he died, the story has him being cremated upon a funeral pyre. His mortal half disintegrated in the flames, releasing his divine half to ascend to the halls of the gods where he married one of the goddesses.
Some people see similarities in Christian revelation and Greek myth. They forget the main difference. Greeks myths made no pretence of truth. Jesus said: "I am the truth". While Greek heroes were busy winning their Olympic wreath, Jesus was wearing a crown of thorns, lifted high on a cross. Before the Greeks could think of him as a god, Hercules had to get rid of his body. Jesus achieved his glorification by rising from the dead in the same body that was nailed to the cross.
The idea is not to condemn athletic competition. Christian faith gives greater importance to the human body than the pagans ever dreamed of, but without that worldly obsession with physical strength and beauty. Perhaps the best way to understand it is to remember the apocalyptic sign of a woman appearing in the sky at the sound of the last trumpet. Of all the signs in the Book of Revelation foretelling the end of the world, it is perhaps the strangest if only because the woman in St John's vision is pregnant.
Like the King of kings nailed to the cross, she highlights the contrast between God's idea of victory and man's. A mother about to give birth does not stand before cheering millions and roar: "I have conquered. Give me my gold medal!" Why would God send a pregnant woman - "crying aloud in pangs of childbirth" - as a sign to the pagan world? Maybe it is because the world needs to be reminded that the "weakness" of motherhood is the true strength of nations. A man is truly a man when he becomes, like God, a loving father.
The Olympic Games bring the world together in peace and harmony. But it only works when we recognise the heroes at home. Most are humble fathers and mothers who welcome new life into their family and show the little baby how to stand and walk, how to love and be loved. If Kenyan youth grow up without the athletic skills needed to win gold medals, we'll survive. But if they grow without learning how to love one another, all our Olympic victories are in vain.
Fr Joe Babendreier is the chaplain at Strathmore School.
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