The Relay That Never Ends

In 2018, Kathrine Switzer returned to the Boston Marathon — fifty-one years after she became the first woman to officially run it. In 1967, race official Jock Semple had physically tried to rip the bib from her chest mid-race. Other runners shielded her. She finished anyway.

When Switzer crossed that finish line again at age seventy-one, something remarkable happened. Thousands of women runners lined the course, cheering her forward. Many wore shirts bearing her original bib number, 261. They were running because she had run first. And she was still running because the race mattered more than the pain.

This is the picture the writer of Hebrews paints. Abel, Moses, Rahab, the unnamed faithful who were sawn in two and wandered in sheepskins — they are not distant historical figures collecting dust in some heavenly archive. They are the great cloud of witnesses pressing against the guardrails of eternity, leaning in, urging us forward. They ran their leg. Now it is ours.

But the writer refuses to let us stare only at the crowd. "Look to Jesus," he says — the One who endured the cross, despised its shame, and sat down at the right hand of God. The witnesses inspire us. But Jesus is the one we fix our eyes on. He is both the starter's pistol and the finish line, the Author and the Perfecter of every step of faith we will ever take.