Running the Good Race

“What do you want to run a marathon for?” I would hear when I told people I was going to run twenty-six point two miles.

“You must be nuts!”

“The psychiatric department is upstairs,” my doctor said, after I asked him to certify that I was in good enough health to go through the training.

“You’re going to ruin your knees,” my kung fu teacher warned me.

But I was determined.  My wife, Becky, and I had run countless five and ten kilometer races.  We had run a ten mile race up in Santa Barbara (or down, depending upon your orientation).  We found the thought of completing a race that only two percent of the population ever manages to finish to be a challenge we could not ignore.  We knew a lot of runners, and every one of them who had ever completed a marathon told us that there was nothing like the experience.

So when we heard that the Los Angeles Roadrunners, an organization sponsored by Orthopedic Hospital mind you, had a Los Angeles Marathon training program with a 99% success rate, we went for it.  We showed up one Saturday morning in Venice (California, not Italy) to begin the program.  That first Saturday we ran three miles.  And each Saturday thereafter, we ran a little further, until a month before the marathon, we ran twenty-six miles.

Of course, every Sunday we walked around like cripples, but it was worth it.  And when we ran our first Los Angeles Marathon, and crossed the finish line, and the volunteer placed those finisher medals around our necks, both Becky and I burst into tears.  We had managed to finish the race, in spite of the pain, in spite of wanting to quit a dozen times during the race.  We kept on going, regardless of those tempting shuttle busses along the route waiting to ferry the drop outs, the DNFs, back to the starting line.

I know all those people who tried to talk us out of running the marathon meant well.  They loved us and didn’t want to see us in pain.  But we knew that for whatever reason, we needed to face that challenge.  They say that a person who finishes a marathon can accomplish anything.  I believe that.  I am proud of running that race.  I ran it six times, and each of those times is special in my heart.

I imagine that Peter meant well when he tried to talk Jesus out of pursuing a path that would lead to his eventual torture and execution.  But he didn’t understand the importance of what Jesus was trying to accomplish.  Jesus understood that there was only one way that people would accept that distance between humanity and the divine could be bridged.  And in the same way that Becky and I were tempted to drop out of the race when it got harder, Jesus met his own temptations in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Like us, Jesus knew what he had to do.  The Gospel of Mark has it:

Jesus and his disciples set out
for the villages of Caesarea Philippi.
Along the way he asked his disciples,
“Who do people say that I am?”
They said in reply,
“John the Baptist, others Elijah,
still others one of the prophets.”
And he asked them,
“But who do you say that I am?”
Peter said to him in reply,
“You are the Messiah.”
Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him.

He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days.
He spoke this openly.
Then Peter took him aside and began to scold him.
At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples,
scolded Peter and said, “Get away from me, adversary.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them,
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it.” (Mark, Chapter 8, 27-35)

Jesus wanted to know how the people saw him.  His friends told him the crowds definitely saw him as some kind of holy guy.  He was either John the Baptist re-incarnated (which shows that early Jews had some notion of reincarnation), or one of the prophets returned to earth (which shows that they also had some idea of eternal life).  Then Jesus asks a pivotal question, one each one of us has to answer, “Who do you say I am?” Who do you see when you see me?

Peter answers, “You are the messiah.”  Now we have sort of a blurred idea of “the messiah” coming from our predominantly Christian culture.  Christians and Jews do not see “the messiah” in the same way, and Peter was Jewish after all.  The word “messiah” simply means “anointed” in Hebrew.  So, after Jewish law, every king of Israel and Judah was a “messiah”.  Every prophet was a “messiah”.  Being a messiah simply meant that God had chosen you for something. If you believe that Siddhartha Gautama was chosen by the divine, then he would be a messiah too.

Christians tend to see the messiah as that person sent from God to save us all, but that was not the Jewish understanding of the word.  So when Peter said that, he was saying that he believed that Jesus was chosen by God.  He did not understand that Jesus was “the savior” in the born-again evangelical Christian way of thinking.  So he would not understand why Jesus would feel he needed to be arrested or die the kind of death he was going to die.  Naturally, he didn’t want his friend to have to go through that kind of thing.

The point of all four gospels is that when we look at Jesus, we are looking at God.  “The Father and I are one,” Jesus tells us.  You want to know the nature of God, look at Jesus.  God is loving, healing, compassionate, and forgiving.  God is like us.  You want to know what God is like, look at the person next to you.  Look in the mirror.  You will see God.  Blessed are the pure in heart.  They shall see God.

And the way to see God is to take up your own cross, and follow in the steps of Jesus, that is, to be loving, forgiving, healing, and compassionate.  And when you are loving, forgiving, healing, and compassionate, you will see God—in the face of each person you reach out to in loving kindness. Let go of your own self interests and reach out to those around you, and you find peace and satisfaction in life.

This is, of course, not easy to do.  If it were easy, we would still be living in Paradise.  Jesus claimed that a life lived in service is ultimately more satisfying than a life lived acquiring crap.  He promised that if we follow his teachings, we would have life, and life more abundant.  But like everything, a life lived in service has its own cost.  It isn’t easy.  Sometimes people will treat us like shit.  Sometimes people will think we must be nuts.  They will think us weak.  They will say we are not living in the real world.  We will have self doubts.  We will fail, and fail frequently.  We will feel like quitting.  We will fall back into old habits and attitudes.  It isn’t a life for sissies.

You won’t believe this just because I tell you so, though.  Just as you won’t believe that running a marathon is something amazing until you do it.  You have to find out for yourself.  Maybe that’s why Jesus kept telling people not to tell anybody he was the messiah.  Tell somebody that some guy is God, and s/he’ll think you’re nuts.  Just tell him/her to listen to the teachings.  Then, after s/he hears what that guy is teachnig, s/he might just try it out to see if it works.  And then s/he’ll see the messiah on his/her own.

But, like running a marathon, at the end of the race, I suspect we will find that it was all worth it, worth the pain, the suffering, and the self denial.  And when we look back at the life we’ve lived, we will receive our own sort of finisher’s medal, and we’ll have that same sense of satisfaction, knowing that we finished what we started, something meaningful.  Like Saint Paul, we will be able to say, “I have finished the course.  I have kept the faith.”