Chariots of Fire is one of my favorite movies, so I was pleased to run across a recent article on Eric Liddell by Bethel McGrew. The great Scottish runner was one of two track and field athletes from the United Kingdom whose life story was featured in the film. Liddell (1902–1945) managed to win a gold medal in the 1924 Paris Olympics despite switching from his strongest event to a different event at the last minute to avoid competing on a Sunday, which he felt would have violated his strong Christian beliefs. After winning the gold, he became a national hero, and a plethora of prominent and potentially very lucrative career options opened up for him. But Liddell chose to forego all such opportunities in order to become a missionary in China.
As McGrew notes, Liddell began his missionary career as an honored member of the “high Christian society” in Tientsin (now Tianjin), where his Olympic achievement was well known and he served as a popular guest preacher. Liddell met his wife there, and they later began to raise their two daughters in that city. But eventually, Liddell felt the call to follow more directly in his father’s footsteps, and he chose to move his ministry to the “brutal outback” of Siaochang, where his only honor stemmed from being the son of the highly respected Reverend James Liddell. Realizing that the area was becoming increasingly dangerous, Liddell sent his wife and daughters to live in Canada in 1941, but he and other missionaries were forced to remain behind by what McGrew refers to as the “dangerously incompetent” London Missionary Society. Liddell never saw his wife and children again. He was captured in 1943 and was kept in a Japanese internment camp until his death from brain cancer in February 1945.
McGrew provides several interesting details about Liddell’s life in the internment camp, but there were a couple that particularly caught my attention. While discussing a devotional topic with one of the young members of the camp, Liddell suffered a stroke, which cut him off in the middle of the word “surrender.” Soon afterward, he had a second stroke. Annie Buchan, his fellow Scottish missionary, was present as Liddell was dying, and she reported the last words he uttered were “it’s complete surrender.” This was a man who had sacrificed much that the world values in order to answer God’s call to serve as a Christian missionary. It therefore seems entirely fitting that the word “surrender” was on his lips at the time of his first stroke and that he chose to make another reference to “surrender” his final words in this life. Liddell knew what lies at the heart of the Christian life and, indeed, at the heart of the divine life itself: self-surrendering, self-giving love.
In Jesus Christ, God has completely surrendered himself to us in love, and he asks us for a reciprocal loving self-surrender.
Hans Urs von Balthasar would have agreed. Balthasar made self-surrender (“Hingabe” in German) a central theme of his theology. He often wrote of self-surrender as the essence of the divine life, the core of the intra-Trinitarian relationships: God the Father, from all eternity and for all eternity, surrenders himself to the Son by completely sharing his divinity with the Son; the Son reciprocates the Father’s self-gift by surrendering himself in love to the Father. Together, their mutual gift of self spirates the Holy Spirit, who joins in the eternal exchange of self-surrendering, self-giving love.
Balthasar also speaks of God’s self-surrender with regard to the creation of the cosmos, in which God freely, and out of no necessity, conferred a share in being upon all that exists. But God’s self-surrendering love was revealed most clearly, and given to us human beings most fully, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and his self-surrendering death for our sake on the cross.
In Jesus Christ, God has completely surrendered himself to us in love, and he asks us for a reciprocal loving self-surrender. Not because God needs this from us; God is perfect in himself and needs nothing from us. Rather, he wills that we open our hearts to him in self-surrendering love so that we can share in his divine life and love and bliss (John 15:9–11; 2 Pet. 1:4). The more we surrender ourselves in love to God (and neighbor), the more fully we can share in the divine life. And the more fully we surrender ourselves in love to God, the more fully we can accept and carry out the mission of love in this world God has entrusted to us. Each of us was created to fulfill a mission of love within the universal mission of love of Jesus Christ. Fulfilling this mission enables us to become the person God intended us to be—what Balthasar referred to as God’s “bright image” of us.
Unfortunately, we tend to resist this loving self-surrender to which our Lord calls us, partly because we want to retain complete control over our own lives and partly because of some of the negative connotations of “surrender.” We tend to associate surrender with weakness, defeat, and failure. However, loving self-surrender actually involves the opposite of each of those negative connotations.
Who is stronger, the person who willingly gives the gift of self in loving service to God and neighbor or the person who chooses an exclusively self-centered life? Within the Trinitarian life of God, the greatest possible power, the divine omnipotence, expresses itself in the greatest possible self-surrender: the loving self-surrender of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to each other, in yet another one of those spiritual paradoxes of which our God seems to be so fond! When we imitate the divine self-surrender, our personal power—that is, our power to do good for God and neighbor—is actually enhanced, rather than diminished (2 Cor. 12:9). Balthasar expressed this truth by asking,
Where is life more conscious of its potency than in the pleasure of giving itself away? Must we not say that life is never more alive than when it gives itself up and dies over into the other? . . . Man is finite, but he is capable of giving himself infinitely.
In loving self-surrender, we achieve victory over those selfish inclinations that tempt us to turn away from God and neighbor toward a completely egocentric life that, in the end, will only lead to dissatisfaction and disappointment.
In loving self-surrender, we find success rather than failure. Actually, a better word than “success” would be fruitfulness. The loving gift of self can, of course, bear fruit directly in our service of God and neighbor, but it can also bear fruit for people we have never met, people who may live halfway around the world from us, even people who lived in the past or who will live in the future—all through the profound and beautiful mystery of the communio sanctorum, which transcends time and space.
Eventually, we will all be called to surrender ourselves into the arms of God when our life on this earth is at an end. The more we have tried to hand ourselves over to God in loving self-surrender throughout our earthly life, the more willingly and peacefully we will be able to do so at the time of our death. Eric Liddell seems to have been prepared for that moment of ultimate surrender to our Lord; may we be as well.