BBC Radio 4 2016-06-11

Well the opening match has been played, the sticker albums are being filled, the sweepstakes organised, and football mania is well and truly with us for the next few weeks during Euro 16. Fans like me are no longer just fretting about the fortunes of our usual league teams – in my case, Brentford – but now our eyes are turning to England’s encounter with Russia tonight.

This kind of fervour would have been very familiar to St Paul whose epistles in the New Testament reveal him as a fan of the games which took place every other year close to Corinth. No doubt he would have known all about the more unsavoury end of sport – cheating, bragging, sometimes the aggression of those attending, as in scenes involving England fans in Marseilles – but he approved of sport too and used it as a metaphor for the Christian life.

“Don’t you realise that the runners in the Stadium, all of them run, but only one gets the medal? You are to run in such a way as to win”, he said in one of his letters to the Corinthian Christians, urging them to similar single-mindedness.
And he later told the Philippians not to be intimidated by their opponents and on another occasion reminded rivals to behave because they were part of the same team.

Another user of the sporting metaphor and simile was Pope John Paul II who once said that the Christian life is rather like a demanding sport, combining all a person’s energies to direct them towards the perfection of character.

But John Paul also understood that sport in itself is a good, that it encourages work, discipline, loyalty and perseverance. An athlete himself in his youth, he also saw sport as an opportunity to encourage peaceful understanding between peoples.

There’s another, more philosophical aspect to Christianity’s view of sport, which counters the profound influence of Descartes on western thinking. The French philosopher advocated the concept of dualism, arguing that there’s a distinct separation between the body and the non-physical - the mind, or spirit. Mental activity takes place, he argued, as if it is parallel to physical action, almost like a ghost in the machine, as the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle put it.

But in Christian thought, body, mind and spirit are all part of the same form. In the words of Pope Paul VI, sport is the gymnasium of the spirit. A game like football shows that not only the body’s strength and power are being used but so is the mind and spirit, all working in harmony on the pitch. Fans call it the beautiful game; it’s also a chance to see God’s masterpiece, the human form, at its very best.