What the World Cup Reveals About the Kingdom of God

Every four years, billions of people become emotionally invested in a game. Nations stop. Productivity collapses. Grown adults cry. Why does sport have this kind of power over us?

I reckon the World Cup is one of the very few (along with the Olympics) events in the world where nations come together for a short time to celebrate just playing together. It inspires millions of children all over the world to just kick a ball around and dream of what could be.

If your country is anything like mine, you’re currently getting blanket media coverage of every match, and many of us turn up to work bleary-eyed having been up in the wee hours watching our heroes do their thing for their country.

Where I live, in Australia, sport is part of the fabric of our nation’s identity. We celebrate our sporting heroes like no other. The job of Australian cricket captain is considered only second in status to that of our Prime Minister. And in the city where I live, Melbourne, we have a public holiday on the first Tuesday of November to celebrate…a horse race. The Melbourne Cup is known as the race that stops a nation (personally, I just enjoy having the day off!). During the Great Depression years of the 1930s, it was sporting heroes like our greatest ever cricketer, Don Bradman, and the racehorse, Phar Lap, who brought such hope into the hopelessness of Australians battling through those hugely difficult years.

We pretty much punch above our weight when it comes to our sporting achievements. For a country of about 28 million people, our sporting achievements are something I’m personally proud of.

Of course we’re not the only nation that loves our sport. In South America, football is almost a religion. It’s not much different in England, where the mood of supporters is reflected in the weekly fortunes of their favorite club. The seriousness with which they take their football was epitomized by former Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly, who once famously remarked,

“I’m tired of all this talk of football being a matter of life and death; it’s much more important than that!”

I’m a bit of a tragic when it comes to sport. I grew up following Australian football and cricket. I cried as an eight year old when my football team lost a game. I’d seen them win about three games in a row, so I was inconsolable when I had to face the fact that my team could actually lose! The lessons that sport teaches a young kid!

The unifying power of sport

Sport has this incredible capacity to bring the world together, and the World Cup, despite the well-documented corruption of football’s governing body, FIFA, is one of the best examples of that. For four weeks every four years, most of the world watches as occasionally, nations which have been at war with each other are able to come together in a sporting contest and display a spirit of friendship which puts their political leaders to shame.

What sours sport for me though is that professionalization of it has taken some of the soul out of it over the years. But in communities all over the world, you can watch children playing football out of a ball made

of the most basic materials. In India, millions of children play cricket in the laneways and byways of that vast land. And events such as the Paralympics demonstrate that anyone of whatever ability can participate.

The idea that participation is open to anyone is a great analogy for the kingdom of God.

Jesus talks in Luke’s Gospel of the great banquet to which everyone is invited, regardless of status. Sport should also be a celebration. It can be seen in places like Senegal where they celebrate the end of harvest season by having wrestling matches where the whole community comes along to watch. And on nearby Gorree island, the children play football in front of hundreds of people from the local community. When someone scores a goal, everyone runs onto the ground and celebrates. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. They see sport as a God-given gift.

We all have gifts, and to watch someone with a sporting gift is a sight to behold. I used to watch in awe when Roger Federer played tennis. They didn’t call him the Rolls Royce of tennis for nothing. I see the beauty of God’s creation in such tennis perfection. It was poetry in motion, beautiful to watch.

It’s probably most famously seen in the life of Eric Liddell, whose life and achievements are shown in the movie Chariots of Fire. Liddell was a committed Christian and saw his running ability as a chance to glorify God. When asked how his running was being Christian, he replied, “When I run I feel God’s pleasure.”

Gifting or not, sport offers a chance to celebrate for poor communities around the world. Just like in Senegal, children in Rwanda play football with a ball made out of plastic bags tied together. They see playing football as a chance to get out of the shackles of poverty. In indigenous communities in Australia, it’s the same. Ask any young indigenous boy what they want to do when they grow up and they all say they want to play AFL.

Sport gives hope for millions of children all over the world, and when it’s played in the right spirit, everyone walks away a winner. Gordon Preece of the Evangelical Alliance in Australia has said that we can see sport as “a part of God’s good creation and even a glimpse of a new, perfect, playful world”. And Marcus Curnow, a pastor in my city of Melbourne, says that sport is “an opportunity to reconcile differences or experience a sense of belonging that some have rarely known.”

The power of sporting ethics

Perhaps the most wonderful piece of sportsmanship in Australian history was the gesture of John Landy running a mile race in 1956 and going back to help opponent Ron Clarke who had fallen over. Marcus Curnow goes on to say that,

“In an increasingly disconnected…world where we often passively consume highlight packages of the ‘unbelievable’ feats of a sporting elite…such characters and moments bear witness to the value of the ordinary and the believable.”

We see the life of Jesus mimicked in gestures like John Landy’s. They’re gestures that bring out the good in us, the good that we all, deep down, long to be like. Landy’s incredible gesture reflected the Olympic Charter whose goal is to

“place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”

That’s of course exactly along the lines of what Jesus is on about. In fact, when Pierre de Coubertin made his famous statement in 1908 that the importance of the Olympics is not so much to win as to take part, not the triumph but the struggle, and not to have won but to have fought well, he

was inspired in his thinking by a sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of Central Pennsylvania. His words held so much significance that they’ve become part of the Olympic Creed.

Events like the World Cup and the Olympics are a reflection of the renewed creation that we all long for, and the embodiment of what’s possible when we live in service to something bigger than ourselves.

Now please excuse me while I get some sleep in time for Australia’s next game!