I started running this year.  Like every bloke of a certain age I have been, to put it in polite terms, ‘thickening’ around the middle and I wanted to arrest the spread, so I began pounding the streets of South London every other day or so.  It hasn’t been a dramatic or life-transforming epiphany.  I don’t actually like doing it very much.  I haven’t entered any races or raised anything for charity.  But I have managed the tiny victory of keeping going – putting one foot in front of the other, gradually getting a bit quicker, going a bit further, getting a bit lighter – and not conking out in a fit of middle-aged wheezing.

When we think about victory we tend to think of a boxer standing over an opponent knocked out on the canvas; an army parading through a conquered city; or a footballer holding the FA cup aloft.

But victory doesn’t always look as we expect.  Christians believe that the greatest victory of all was the most unlikely of all, won by a man who was arrested as a troublemaker by his political opponents, given a farcical trial, mocked, tortured and executed.

Jesus’ victory wasn’t celebrated or accompanied by headlines.  Even his closest friends refused to believe it at first.  But gradually the news got out that he had come back from the dead – not like a football team escaping relegation on the last day of the season, but really back from the dead. It was a victory like nothing anyone had ever seen.  Out of weakness, self-sacrifice and love, Jesus defeated death itself, transforming our whole idea of what victory is: not the preserve of the powerful and the wealthy and not something won by force or aggression, but by the unexpected triumph of light over darkness, of hope over the most hopeless situation imaginable.  Forget the boxer, the army or the cup, then – that’s what real victory looks like.

I still run, five years on, though at the time of posting this, I have a crocked ankle and am stationary.