The Bible in the News: Sporting with the Sermon on the Mount
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In the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew’s Gospel), the author assembles a number of Jesus’ most telling and influential sayings.
In previous columns we have looked at many of the Sermon’s components as projected in the popular press worldwide. Here we limit ourselves to sportswriters over the past decade—although, if previous experience is any indicator, sports writing as a category is the most colorful and creative section of newspapers in print and online.
Let’s start with soccer, played just about everywhere. Within the international world of soccer, you don’t even have to be on the playing field to rate a Biblical reference, for better or worse. Thus, a member of “the BBC panel of [soccer] pundits,” an ex-player apparently nicknamed “the incredible sulk,” was tossed off the TV, while another panelist was retained, even though “you hate his interminably long questions, with one reader even suggesting his post-match style was more like the Sermon on the Mount” (so a correspondent for London’s Daily Mail). I can’t speak for this modern interlocutor, but no one even moderately engaged with the Biblical text could characterize the Sermon on the Mount as being filled with long questions—interminable or not!
From soccer to cricket—enjoyed if not fully understood by millions as the world’s second-most popular sport. In an interview with cricketer Rodney Hogg, a reporter for Australia’s Herald Sun asks the Australian player about sledging (i.e., verbally intimidating) an opponent, South Africa’s Hashim Amla. Hogg’s Biblically redolent response is this: “The Bible told me the meek shall inherit the earth. Amla is meek, and he makes no-fuss runs. He strikes me as someone who would concentrate harder if he was sledged.” To which the newspaper reporter replies, “The old Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:5—‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ Didn’t have you picked as a student on the Good Book.” Nonplussed, Hogg contends, “I used to read it to try to get material for my sledging. There is some good stuff in there.” Enough said!
Auto racing, at least as practiced at Bathurst in Australia, benefits (for our purposes) by joining together its locale, Mount Panorama, with some verbally dexterous reportage. Exhibit A, as it were, comes from a story in Australia’s Daily Telegraph with the title: “Fisher gears Up to Deliver His Sermon on the Mount”: “When Andrew Fisher is pushing the limits of his Supercar down Conrod Straight tomorrow, he will no doubt be asking himself: ‘What would Jesus do … if strapped into a V8?’ The devout Christian and fanatical motorhead says he won’t bump other cars off the track and will turn the other cheek if someone puts him into the wall. The Jesus racing team driver practices what he has been preaching on the Mount all week.” From what I’ve read about this particular racetrack, everyone is better off following Jesus’ admonitions.
For readers in the United States, who may be wondering if I’ve abandoned all home-grown activities, here’s a quick quip about basketball compliments of the New York Post: “You know you’re old when you can remember when, once a player was traded, he packed his valise without offering a Sermon on the Mount.”
And on we go to our final sport, horse racing, where intrepid writers can connect the several meanings of “mount” in relation to horses and their racing with “mount” as a geographical term, as of course in the Sermon on the Mount. Until conducting my characteristically thorough research for this column, I was unaware of the number of race horses whose owners have given them religion-related names, perhaps in the hopes that this might inspire the horses (and their riders) to greater speed. In this regard, we read (again in an Australian newspaper, this time the Sunday Times) of two horses, “Bridgestone and God Has Spoken, [both of whom] proved superior to their rivals [in a featured race] at Ascot.” Naturally, I would have put my money on God Has Spoken to win, in which case I would have lost: “Ultimately, Bridgestone did best, scoring by a half-length from his stablemate, with brilliant filly For Your Eyes Only a gallant third.” All of this is reported under the title “Winning Sermon on the Mounts.”
Enough for me of the racing forms, soccer statistics and cricket chatter. It’s back to the books, especially the Good Book, where we are assured: “Blessed are the column-writers, for theirs shall be the last (or next-to-the-last) word!”
In the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew’s Gospel), the author assembles a number of Jesus’ most telling and influential sayings.
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