Jesus
and Kelly Holmes
Selected
from a collection of sermons by
Dr.
David Clarke
‘As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me.
Night is coming when no-one can work.’ John 9: 4
‘She was very strong and
determined. She never missed a training session, that was why she won an Olympic gold.’ The words are those of Dave Arnold, an athletics coach at Tonbridge in
Born in Kent, the daughter of a Jamaican-born car fitter who
went AWOL soon after her birth, she grew up with two ambitions - to join the
Army and to compete in the Olympics.
Although she showed considerable promise as a teenager, athletics took
second place when she joined the Army, becoming a physical fitness
instructor. Then in 1992, watching the
Barcelona Olympics, she spotted a competitor whom she had trounced during
school championships. She thought to
herself, ‘If she can do it, so can I’. And so the steep ascent to Olympic glory
began, with injury in
Her determination and tenacity are what I hold before you
today. Success in anything demands
application and discipline. As someone
said, ‘The dictionary is the only place where success
comes before work’. Kelly never
missed a training session, as all her energies were concentrated on that one
goal - Olympic victory. With the apostle
Paul, she would have said, ‘This one thing I do’.
Jesus displayed the same single-minded purpose in the incident from
which we take our text, ‘As long as it is day, we
must do the work of him who sent
me. Night is coming when no-one can work’.
The disciples saw a man blind from birth and believing as they
did that all suffering resulted from sin, they saw only two explanations -
either this man had sinned or his parents.
Jesus saw a third possibility which challenged their belief. In some way, God would use this man as a case
demonstration of divine healing power.
Healing was to be carried out while there was opportunity. The night, signifying death, would come soon
enough, but until then work must be untiring.
As one of the great reformers wrote on this passage, ‘The hatred, opposition, and persecution of the world, and
the failures and infirmities of professing Christians must not make us give way
to despondency. Like our Master, we must
work on’. We have to ‘fill the unforgiving
minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run’.
Before we press on, note these preliminary truths. First, success does not come by chance. A person cannot drop a goal at rugby like Johnny Wilkinson, or rip a drive like
golfer Tiger Woods, or launch a
service ace like Roger Federer without hours of painstaking practice. Such skills cannot be extemporised. The performance in the heat of competition
simply reveals the skills which have been perfected in solitude. Their genius is, as
Second, success is not governed by moods. We must not think that the great painters or
musicians or writers produced a masterpiece just because they felt particularly
inspired one morning. No, the great
performers are not governed by moods; they master their moods. One writer said, ‘I
write when I am inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock
every morning’. The prolific
novelist, Sir Walter Scott, once
recorded in his diary, ‘I woke this morning with a
most hypocondriacal spirit; I worked therefore and
endured all this forenoon’. It
was calculated that Scott once covered 120 pages without stopping for food or
rest! When the masters created something
unforgettable, they were simply plying the craft by which they earned their
living. The musician Hadyn was once asked why he had
never written a quintet, and he answered, ‘Because I was
never asked to write a quintet!’
Jesus would say, firstly, that we must do God’s work - even when we do not feel like it. There were times when Kelly Holmes didn’t
feel like applying herself to the rigours of athletics any more. She ended the Atlanta Games of 1996 nursing a
hairline fracture of her left leg. She
said, ‘I had a leg that was killing me, a stomach that
felt as if it was being ripped apart and a heart that was broken’. She dropped her spikes into an
We human beings are such a combination of elements - body and
mind interact on one another. Heredity
sometimes helps and sometimes hinders, outside circumstances impact upon us, so
that while on some days we feel on top of the world, there are other days when
we are down in the dumps. Many a day we
face the world with confidence, - while other days we drag ourselves to duty,
putting on a face ‘to meet the faces that we meet’.
Since our Lord was fully human, there
must have been times when he felt precisely the same. Yet, the New Testament shows little trace of
it, for Jesus developed such a rich life of prayer, laying hold of the Father’s
resources at all times, that he was able to triumph over the downcast
mood. But the mere fact that he did not
succumb to it does not mean that he did not occasionally feel the
temptation. There must have been times
when he was exasperated by the snail-like progress of his disciples, his ‘men of little
faith’.
Marks graphic gospel tells us that he was once angry with the
hard-hearted Pharisees, and the word Mark used refers in other literature to
the snorting of a horse. But Jesus
overcame the emotions, and in his love for all men, went the way of the Cross,
finishing the work He was given to do.
There may be times when we are tempted to say to ourselves, ‘I don't feel like going to church this morning’. Kelly Holmes didn’t succumb to the ‘I don’t feel like it’ mood, and never missed a
training session. Sir Alex Ferguson was pretty annoyed a few years ago when David Beckham missed a training session
because his little son,
A twentieth century poet conquered the ‘I don’t feel like it syndrome’. He chose for his epitaph the words, ‘I woke up, and knew that I was tired and continued my
journey’.
Jesus would say, secondly, that we ought to continue God’s work - even when the vision is dim. Visions are wonderful things. When a person has a dream, work is
transformed into pleasure. Visions come
easily at certain times, after a holiday, perhaps, or at the beginning of a new
church year.
But how do we respond when the dark days come and the visions
fade? Or when repeated disappointments
make us feel that our efforts are wasted or unappreciated. At such times, the only solution is to go
steadily and inflexibly on, pressing along the grey stretches of the road,
until the vision returns. It is an old
military maxim, that soldiers obey the last order they have received, and they
persist until a different order is received.
It is the equivalent of the footballing adage,
‘Play to the whistle’. Christopher Columbus had his vision. Leaves and branches washed up on a Portuguese
beach convinced him of the existence of a land beyond the western sea where
such strange branches must be indigenous. While he sailed west for weeks, his crew
became disillusioned and mutinous, but the ship’s log reveals his
tenacity. Time and time it simply read,
‘Today we sailed on’, until land was sighted
and the vision became reality
There was a time when Jesus seemed to lose the vision. On the Cross he cried, ‘My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?’ But he didn’t then
tell the soldiers that it had all been a purblind prank. The vision was dim, but he hung and suffered
there, and then the light broke, and there burst forth the one great word of
victory, ‘Finished’.
A century ago, there was a turbulent Roman Catholic priest
named George Tyrell. He had a love/hate relationship with the
church, and she with him. ‘Sometimes’, he said, ‘I wish
that one could forget about the whole business of religion, and have done with
it once and for all, but then there’s that strange man on his cross who draws
you back, again and again’.
Jesus would say, thirdly, that we ought to persevere in God’s work - even though we may never see
the work completed. We are only bit players
at most in God’s scheme of things. Even
the towering Paul admitted, ‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God
made it grow’. (1 Corinthians 3: 6).
We each are called to do our little part in the building of his Kingdom,
in the knowledge that we may not live to see its fruit. Many a musician has left an unfinished
symphony; many a writer has left an unfinished novel. So it is in life and faith, for things are
not always neatly rounded off. We need
to embrace the truth stated by the great psychologist, William James, ‘the greatest use of life
is to spend it for something that will outlast it’. And what better way of spending it than in
the service of One whose kingdom is an everlasting
kingdom?
Henry Twells, author of the hymn which begins, At
evening when the sun was set, the sick, 0 Lord, around thee lay, had an experience around a graveside
one day which opened his mind to this truth.
The deceased man was a clergyman, someone who had once confided to Twells his sense of personal and professional failure
saying, ‘If I have managed to turn one life to the
paths of righteousness that knowledge has not been vouchsafed to me’. He died convinced he had been a failure. Around the graveside that day was another
man, noticeably distressed. Twells asked him if he had known the deceased. ‘No’, said
the man, ‘I never spoke to him. But I owe him my soul’.
We do our work, even when we don’t feel like it, even when the
vision is dim and even though we may never see it completed and one day, in a clearer light, we will have
our joy and our reward. As President Edman
of
-------
