The Beautiful Game

"I watch soccer to be amazed..."

Christ Healing the Blind, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)

After Jesus had left that place, he passed along the Sea of Galilee, and he went up the mountain, where he sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them, so that the crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.
Matthew 15.29-31

The UEFA European Championship (a.k.a. the Euros) begins this Friday. It's a competition between the best European men's national soccer teams. I grew up playing soccer and enjoy watching it at pretty much every level. Even though soccer’s popularity in the U.S. has grown exponentially in my lifetime—when the U.S. hosted the World Cup in 1994, only twenty percent of the country even knew about it—every soccer fan still knows someone who complains that soccer is boring. I get it. Years ago, Brian Philips wrote that soccer is sometimes boring because of how mercilessly hard it is to play at a high level combined with the fact that gameplay almost never stops. So the result is that sometimes it is not beautiful or entertaining to watch. But, he insists, these same qualities also mean “soccer is uniquely adapted to produce moments of awesome visual beauty.” Here’s Brian:

Soccer is, in other words, both romantic and tragic, and the soft agony of a bad game is an inescapable part of this. You spend all your time hoping something will happen, and it never does. You get a surge of adrenaline every time the ball flies anywhere near the goal, and you’re always disappointed. But then, every once in a while, James McFadden will score from 30 yards at the Parc des Princes to give Scotland an impossible 1-0 lead over France, and a ponderous game will go all kinds of nervous-breakdown crazy. And for fans it’s practically an out-of-body experience — not just because it was a great play, but because it was so unlikely that this match could have been graced with a great play to begin with.

In the end, Brian admits, “I watch soccer to be amazed.” He says the beauty of the game matters more when you know you can’t take it for granted. When it arrives, it’s a “miracle.” This, of course, applies to much more than soccer. In the gospel reading for yesterday, Matthew tells us that the crowd was “amazed” at the miracles Jesus performed before their very eyes. Maybe they had spent their lives hoping something would happen, only to discover it seldom does. But then Jesus arrived on the scene and graced them with exactly the kind of thing they had hoped beyond all hope would happen. My friend John says that faith is sort of doubting what seems obviously true about the world. I love that definition. Faith allows us to entertain the possibility that something good may be around the corner despite all the evidence to the contrary. And every once in a while, we are amazed. Thanks be to God.

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