Beyond the Medal - Homily at the Olympics
This homily for Sunday, February 15th, was delivered by Fr. Diego Puricelli in Milan, Italy during the occasion of the Olympics. It is re-printed with author permission. The author is not affiliated with Theology for the Unwanted.
“Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!”: We have just repeated these words with the psalmist. And, they are not simply beautiful poetry. They reveal a beatitude — a promise from God himself — that true and lasting happiness is found in walking in His ways.If we are here this evening, it is because we have tasted the joy of being with the Lord; because, at least once in our lives, we have savored a drop of His love — and that was enough to awaken within us a longing for Heaven.
“You would not be seeking Me if I had not already found You”, saint Augustine once wrote, expressing the paradox at the heart of every search for God: we are able to seek Him only because He first allowed Himself to be found.
And so, His Law can only be a path meant to help us live each day with joy. By following it, we discover true happiness.
And yet, something does not quite add up.
I do not know about you, but as I listened to this evening’s long Gospel, I found myself feeling somewhat unsettled. Jesus’ words seem to place before us an ideal that is lofty and beautiful, yet difficult to attain. And so it often happens that the Law of the Lord — which should be a source of joy — ends up feeling like a burden.
How many times, in fact, do His commandments, instead of “giving light to our eyes”, as the Psalm says, leave us weighed down by guilt? Measuring ourselves against them, we feel lacking, inadequate, never quite enough. This is a common experience, especially for those who live a form of Christianity in which rules, norms, and precepts gradually take over and dominate everything.
And so it happens that faith, from being a liberating experience, gradually turns into its opposite: a constant reminder of our fragility, an inner tribunal that leaves little room for mercy. We end up living as though life were a never-ending examination to be passed — exhausting and distressing, because it offers no rest.
In these days, as I have been following the Olympic competitions and watching both the victories and the inevitable falls of so many athletes, I have found myself wondering: is this not the same logic we often apply to our life of faith? A logic built on performance, results, and inner rankings — where we end up feeling “good” only when we win and “wrong” when we fall.
“Nothing hurts more than trying your best and still not feeling enough”. This repost on TikTok by Ilia Malinin — known as “the Quad God” — shared shortly before the performance in which he lost the gold medal, struck me deeply. It goes straight to the heart of one of the most profound dimensions of our human experience: the need to feel recognized, welcomed, and loved — not for what we manage to achieve, but for who we are.
Yes, someone might object: But this is the Olympics! Here, you have to prove your worth. Here, results, scores, and medals matter. And that is true: in a sporting competition, performance is decisive. But the real question is another: is this also true of our lives? Is it true before God? And if we think about it carefully, even in sport — when it is authentic — things do not really work this way. Behind every medal there are sacrifices, countless quiet hours of training, falls, defeats, and fresh starts. An athlete does not stop being valuable when he or she loses. No one loses their dignity because of a fall.
And this, in fact, is what fascinates us about sport: it tells, with disarming simplicity, the nobility of effort and, at the same time, the truth of our humanity — a humanity that is fragile, limited, exposed to failure, and yet capable of extraordinary courage and astonishing new beginnings.
The Gospel we have just heard, then, does not seek to pin us down to our miseries or our shortcomings. No. It calls us to give the best of ourselves, to dwell in the heights of love, to captivate the world with a way of living that carries the fragrance of Heaven.
As the Czech theologian Tomáš Halík reminds us: “The most authentic expression of our faith — or of our unbelief — is our humanity. Not what we say or think about God, but how we live our lives. And not only our moral life, our virtues and our sins, but also our imagination, our creativity, our compassion, our capacity for wonder and for laughter.
