Luz Long and Jesse Owens were polar opposites. Long was a German Nazi and looked the part. He was blond, white, and an educated lawyer. Owens was a black American who grew up in poverty under segregation. In the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin, Luz and Owens competed against each other in the long jump. Hitler wanted to show the superiority of the Aryan race. Long was a poster child for Hitler’s vision. In the Führer’s eyes, Owens was a despised, inferior human being.

Owens won the event, and Long came in second. But the two men walked arm in arm in the stadium in front of Hitler. Long and Owens developed a strong friendship and even exchanged letters after the Games were over. Their respect for each other’s athletic skills overrode any animosity their respective countries expected them to have.

When WWII broke out, Long served in the German army. His last letter to Owens asked him to come to Germany after the war and talk to his son about their friendship. Long died in combat in Italy, fighting for Germany against the United States. Owens would fulfill his close friend’s request. He would later fly to Germany and tell Kai-Heinrich Long about his father and the friendship they had shared. They met at the stadium where the two athletes had met and competed against each other.

Luz Long and Jesse Owens lived in a world in which insignificant things, like the color of one’s skin, were the things that set men apart. A black American and a white German simply could not be friends. They were to hate one another.

But these men realized that such things were superficial. They were both human beings who shared the love of a sport. They were more alike than different.

The world has always emphasized people’s differences. In the NT, we see how the early Church had to deal with the mentality of the world. The Church began in Acts 2 with a group of Jews. Religious Jews saw themselves as superior to Gentiles. For example, these Jews would not eat with Gentiles. They saw Gentiles as being unclean in a religious sense.

When the Lord added Gentiles to the Church, these cultural differences presented problems. The animosity between Jews and Gentiles manifested itself in the Church. Believing Jews wanted Gentile believers to become Jewish. Those Gentiles needed to eat the right food, and the men needed to be circumcised. Until they did so, Jewish believers would see them as inferior (Acts 15:5).

But the Lord made it clear that such sentiments concentrated on insignificant things. The Lord had made believing Gentiles equal to Jewish believers in every way (Acts 10:15). Both groups were part of the same body, the Church. That should have taken away all animosity between them (Eph 2:14-16). The most important aspect of their lives was that they were brothers and sisters in Christ. In his letters, Paul encouraged his readers to be like Long and Owens were centuries later: Jewish and Gentile believers should walk arm and arm with each other before a watching world.

The same thing is true for us. We may not completely understand the animosity between Jews and Gentiles in the first century. But we meet people who have believed in Jesus for eternal life who are not like we are. They do things differently. They have different interests. Maybe the color of their skin does not match our own. It is all too easy to avoid any kind of close relationship with them.

As believers, however, what we share is much more important. Christ has placed us in His Body. This is an eternal reality. If Long and Owens could walk arm in arm in 1936 Berlin because of their love of a sport, surely we can today because of our love of the Lord.