The World Cup and Jesus

No, this is not an article in which I highlight the testimony of one or more of the players currently engaged in the FIFA Women’s Football World Cup. Nor am I going to name them. There are a few Christians with exciting testimonies to explore currently involved in the tournament, but I will leave that to your own Googling efforts.

This World Cup has changed things for those, like me, who have been fans of women’s football for a long, long time. The gap between the highly ranked countries and the minnows has narrowed dramatically. The 2nd ranked country is knocked out; in the same group, the 72nd ranked country has made it through. European powerhouses are knocked out, a Caribbean nation is through. Even Brazil – who dominate all forms of world football, men’s and women’s – failed to progress.

For a long time, women’s football has been poorly understood and, accordingly, poorly watched. It flows differently to the way men play it, it is more precise, elegant, and reliant on skill, pushing brute force and strength into the background (don’t get me wrong, these two elements help, but they don’t define the game as much).

Women’s football is a sleeping giant (now the third biggest sporting event on the planet), and through the medium of this World Cup in our own backyard, it has seriously challenged all our preconceived ideas.

But in Melbourne - the self-proclaimed “sporting capital of Australia” - as recently as yesterday, I have heard it said on radio, “Well, we’re in the middle of our AFL season, so of course the MCG’s not available, and anyway … who really cares?”

And it makes me think about what it must have been like to live in the first century, in the lands where Jesus walked and ministered. Scripture records that the Messiah, as we now know the person of Jesus to be - repeatedly prophesied about, the subject of much speculation and anticipation in the nation of God’s people - was very different in reality.

He broke social norms – His treatment of all who were downtrodden, the foreigner, the social outcast, women, the disabled – defied established practices and standards and shone a light on the loving God who sent Him (and, indeed, who He was).

He taught differently – He opened up Scripture, providing readers and listeners with perspectives that were God-ordained, that released them to live in the grace God gives rather than under rules that people have a habit of making more complicated.

He lived differently – He placed no importance on material things. Relationship was everything to him; with God, first, and then all other humans in the light of that relationship with God. 

 Jesus said to them, “A prophet is treated with honour everywhere except in his own hometown, among his relatives, and in his own house.”

Mark 6:4 (TPT)

And yet He was rejected by those who should have known much, much better. The Pharisees and the Scribes, upon seeing a different Messiah to the one they had anticipated and taught, chose to get rid of Him. Because the narrative was different, threatening the established order, it was simpler for them to work to return things to "how they’d always been”.

Let’s not be like those Pharisees, or those local Israelites who would not stand for all that Jesus brought, in terms of liberation, excitement and future Kingdom perspectives.

As a community of His followers, let’s pray with excitement for what God has in store for us in the future – whether it is building on strong foundations we have, or some things that are totally new. I hope you will join me in this prayer.

Shalom