Fantastic Four!

Four years ago next Thursday, I set up this blog and wrote my first posting- all of two lines! Four years ago next Thursday, four British rowers brought a team including Sir Matthew Pinsent his fourth consecutive olympic gold medal in an Olympic regatta, as part of the Coxless Fours in Athens. It was an emotional occasion indeed. How do you top that?
By the sort of tear-jerking, heart-stopping, jaw-dropping performance four Pommy Powerhouses managed to put in an hour ago in Beijing, that's how, beating their Australian rivals by just a whisker. How do they do it?!
Teamwork. In an age which seems to lionise individualism, the coxless fours is an example of how the most worthwhile things in life are very rarely the effort of one person alone. Sir Steve Redgrave, or should that be the Venerable Steve Redgrave, with five of those gold medals behind him for olympic rowing events, was quick to dismiss any suggestion from his fellow commentator in Beijing, the BBC's John Inverdale, that any one member of a rowing four, even less an eight, is more important than the other. They all have their part to play.
But it's not only the high profile team in the boat, the ones catching all the camera angles whose every bead of sweat, every breath,every pained expression, is recorded for posterity, that bring olympic glory. It's the physiotherapists, the doctors, perhaps especially even the nutritionist who help to ensure that four human bodies can give every joule of the quite extraordinary power they are capable of, to bring the jewel in every sportsman's crown, the gold medal on the victory podium.
One body, many parts. Something St Paul gave a masterly treatise on in one of his pastoral letters to the early church. Every part of the human body has its function, and it's no good expecting it to do something it was never intended for. Rowers can't rely just on their arms to win a race. It takes strong lungs- Matthew Pinsent reputedly had the highest recorded lung capacity in Britain-, pounding legwork, keen eyes and ears listening to every utterance of the rest of the team and not least the coach following on the bicycle from the shore to achieve these sort of world-beating results.
I can't but think of the solitary man shouting from the shore to some rather disconsolate individuals in a boat on the Lake of Galilee some 1,973 years or so ago. He appeared to be walking, not even rowing, on the water, and called one of them over to him to walk with him on the water. One of his team, a man called Peter, at first was quick to respond and did just that-but then fear started to grip him and his mettle failed. Think what a disaster it would have been for Team GB if our four today had done that as they continued to row backwards towards their finishing line.

For the one who walked on the water was Jesus- the same Jesus who came to his team on the shore on Galilee again, and offered them a nutritious breakfast, just days after they had apparently seen defeat snatched from the jaws of victory on a cruel cross in Jerusalem. He had risen again- and was to rise yet higher, not to the raised platform of a victory ceremony alongside a man-made lake, but to the exalted throne of heaven, beyond all earthly achievements.

Yet even for the Jesus who was as I put it was "being held in a queue" in my last posting some five months ago, actually in a stone cold tomb, it was his Father's amazing, awesome, unfathomable power that brought him back to life in a human body- a body recognised and seen by more than five hundred people, witnesses of an event far greater than olympic glory, some two thousand years ago. And it was the Holy Spirit, the third person of that profound mystery Christians call the Trinity, that inspired those early believers like Paul to carry on, whatever the cost, to their destiny, their victory, to claim their prize. In Paul's case, and for many Christians since in too many lands even to this day, it took them to their own deaths at the hands of persecutors and detractors.
Despite all the controversies which inevitably follow it from fallible human beings, the Olympic games remains an extraordinary sporting spectacle, the greatest show on earth indeed. Yet even the efforts of the greatest olympians- and surely I must give due credit here to the extra-ordinary Michael Phelps who looks set to claim his eight gold medal of the XXIXth Olympiad tomorrow in the Beijing watercube- will never match that labour surpassing Hercules which raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and which still inspires countless billion believers today. A more fantastic event never was seen!