“I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

(Philippians 3:14)

 

Paul Tournier, the celebrated Swiss Christian Psychiatrist, wrote a book to which he gave this title: To Resist or Surrender. In his book Tournier pointed out that what each one makes out of life pretty much hangs on our daily choices of whether we choose to resist or surrender to the forces, good and bad, that surround us.

And, of course, the cardinal virtue in all such contests of “resisting or surrendering” is courage. Have we the courage to resist, or does a cowardly spirit rise within us to precipitate a surrender?

Surely for most of us the pre-eminent example that comes to mind of a courage to resist and not surrender is that of Winston Churchill in the aftermath of the British armies’ defeat at Dunkirk, and the Fall of France, Belgium and Holland. When well nigh the whole world was afraid, and the deep gloom of an inevitable military defeat by the most tyrannical of enemies threatened the British people and the whole world, it was Winston Churchill who rose to say: “We will never surrender.” And he so stirred the British people to respond in that desperate hour of crisis with undaunted courage that they transformed that dread experience into Britain’s finest hour.

So, it was not just Churchill’s personal courage, but his capacity for making courage contagious, that was his greatest gift. Norman Cousins said Sir Winston had the peculiar ability of “speaking to the strength inside people and causing that strength to come into being.”

For when Churchill died, an old man of 90 years, full of honors at home and abroad, as might have been expected, he was widely acclaimed and mourned by the middle-aged and elderly folk with whom he had shared his hours of greatness; but what astounded the world at his passing was the strong response from children and young people, both long after his retirement from active life and heroic labors. For when Winston Churchill died young people everywhere spontaneously were moved to offer prayers, to make speeches and to conduct memorial services for this remarkable man. Why?

Oh, because what every young person wants most at the start of life is the courage to resist and not surrender; to stand bravely for something worthwhile; to push ahead against opposition to courageous achievements.

Dag Hammarskjold penned in his private diary: “Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy. Life demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away.”

Yes, of course, what every one of us, young and old alike, admires and wants for our very own is courage to resist and not surrender.

But so often our problem is not just the choice: “To resist or to surrender?” but “What to resist?” and “What is worth fighting for?” Sometimes people display remarkable courage in fighting for the most frivolous causes.

I saw two hockey players who had bumped into each other rather soundly in a game begin to fight with such a glorious fury that they broke their hockey sticks, bashed their heads, and the blood flowed, and bones were broken, with the result that one player was laid up with injuries from that fight for weeks.

I watched last week on TV two football teams slugging it out in fierce attacks on each other to gain the prize of victory in the Super Bowl, and I couldn’t put out of my mind the thought: “What a frivolous, fleeting goal for which to put on so ferocious a fight.”

I got a letter from a Seminary classmate, now retired and living in New Orleans, in which he wrote: “Everything going on in the city seems to be centered on the Super Bowl XXXI. I expect to see it from the best seat in the house, a seat in the den looking at the TV. Tickets for the game start at $275, and are selling on the black market for up to $5,000. And the Dome is sold out, of course! This is something I just don’t understand!” And who of us does understand?

Sometimes people make terrible, destroying mistakes in their choices of what to resist and to what to surrender. Take for example, the recurring dismissals of cadets from our national military academies. What a dismal display of being thrown out for cheating! Some people have blamed the honor system in the schools for the tragedy, for each of our national academies has an honor system which requires every student to live by this promise: “I will neither lie, steal, nor cheat; neither will I tolerate the company of those who do.” Such a code of honor imposes on each student not only the responsibility to be honest himself, but also the responsibility to help build a society where honor is cherished and protected above everything else.

Whenever “the honor system” breaks down on a school campus and no longer works, it is usually due to the students’ failing in their second responsibility, when instead of abiding by their promise not to tolerate the presence of those who cheat and lie and steal, the students begin to chose to be obedient to another code: namely, “the thieves’ code of honor” — not to squeal on the wrong doer. So the old Sicilian Mafia code, which has been the basis of cruel gang rule in our Big American cities and the foundation of rackets which have enslaved millions, becomes the code of conduct rather than the honor system of reporting the presence of the bad guys in our national academies. One can make a choice to resist the school’s honor system and to surrender to the thieves’ code.

What to resist and to what to surrender is sometimes a very difficult problem. Our natural desire is to be brave, and we can thank God for that gift. But where to direct that courage is where we need some wise and good counselors to help us.

St. Paul, who was as courageous as ever Winston Churchill was, and who fought with wild beasts, endured shipwreck, stonings, ostracism by his own family, and who struck off in his own inimitable style some fine phrases to call other people to live and die courageously, discloses for us in one of those quotable quotes of his — more familiar even than “Churchill’s”: “We shall never surrender!” — his secret for determining what to resist and to what to surrender. “This one thing I do,” declared St. Paul. “Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

Paul Tournier in his book, To Resist or Surrender, tells us that our problem of what to resist and what to surrender to is always solved at the deepest level of our souls by doing what God wants us to do at any given moment.

This was Paul’s way. Against all opposition he could “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” What is this? Is this the challenge for everyone to be a little Jesus? A carbon copy of the Galilean carpenter, teacher, healer? Oh, no. Each one of us is distinctive in the potential creativity God has locked in our personalities.  Jesus is the model — the goal toward which we strive — in the manner of his personal perfect obedience to the will of God for Him. This is the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus toward which Paul was striving and toward which we are called.

Too often it is thought, and taught erroneously, that the Biblical example is that of a soft pietism, a goody-goodism of negative virtue. But no, the courageous supreme Biblical example is that of a brave man in service to God and man, in dangerous places, in danger of his reputation at the hands of respectable but malicious people, in danger for his physical safety at the hands of power-mad political and ecclesiastical officials gathered about a cross.

On the Islands of Hawaii, where Betty Carol is now vacationing and many of us may wish we were, there is preserved to this day, I have been told, an ancient ritual. “Each evening under the purpling splendor of the Polynesian sunset, just as the sun sinks into the ocean, an eerie signal sounds from a conch shell, and suddenly there appears running down the cliff-side a man holding a lighted torch. As he runs, he lights while traveling at full speed, other torches along the way, and then, leaps from the high lava cliff into the surging waters of the ocean below.”

Visitors in Hawaii viewing the dramatic ritual for the first time always asks: “What does it mean?” and the answer given is that it is part of the old tradition of Hawaii. Long ago when the world was young and mankind was close to all creation, the sun and its dying daylight were cherished as very sacred possessions. The Sun was giver of light and health and only the highest chiefs of the people possessed the mystery called the “kapu of the sun” — controlling the rising of the sun and the lighting of the world and the setting of the sun beyond the western sea. The old ritual celebrated the natural phenomenon and what these primitive people thought to be their relationship to it.

The wisest and the best of the leaders of men and women and boys and girls of all the world, in every age, are given this “kapu of the sun” — the power to light the inner lights of the human spirit — both with power to be brave, and something of the wisdom of what to choose to be brave about. But we Christians believe that only Jesus Christ, the bravest of the brave, can give us both the courage and the incomparable wisdom to be faithfully obedient to Eternal God at every moment and in every experience.