I have never been a great fan of sporting films because the dramatic presentation of an outcome you already know can never match the visceral excitement of watching it unfold, unscripted, in real life. For this reason I suppose I could not bring myself to watch the film Invicta, however worthy its aspiration in using the Rugby World Cup Final in 1995 as the prism through which to observe post-apartheid South Africa being reconciled by the donning of a green and gold Springboks shirt by a rather distinguished former prisoner of Robben Island.
Perhaps history is on the side of fractured countries reuniting through sporting conquest – only a few years earlier Germany had celebrated unification by winning the football World Cup – but memory of the All Blacks team being deliberately poisoned by the chef the night before the final against South Africa casts a pall over that day. Learning from England’s drubbing in the semi-final, South Africa won the World Cup by marking the formidable Jonah Lomu with two men, proving the value of strategy in a game of erstwhile bruising strength.
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The England team would shortly respond
with their traditional morris dance. |
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In a funny way, rugby tells us a lot about the business of prayer. If you struggle to understand either the game of rugby or the practice of prayer, perhaps this small metaphor might help you.
Think of a rugby ball as the word of God. When you drop a rugby ball from a vertical position, you can never be sure which way it will bounce – a factor that adds such drama to the game. In a similar way, the word of God is unpredictable, surprising us with the direction it takes. In rugby it is the eight forwards who fall on top of one another, scrapping to win the ball back for their team at the breakdown. They are like those who do the praying for the church. One completes the hard, demanding, unseen work of releasing the ball for the backs to use; the other removes any hindrances to the spread of the word of God in life. Once the ball is released, the backs run with it until they are tackled (unless it is England, in which case the ball is kicked meaninglessly up-field for the opposition to catch it and run at speed at a disorganised defence – an unusual and counterintuitive tactic which tends to lose games).
Scripture often describes the sharing of the word of God as like someone running (as shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace: Ephesians 6:15; how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace: Isaiah 52:7). We run with this message until we meet an obstacle, then those who pray come quickly to free the word of God from its hindrance like forwards rushing to the breakdown after a back is tackled.
When the ball is released in rugby the team has several options. One is to get rid of the ball by kicking it but the exciting option is to run. The word of God should not be thrown away but run and passed with, again and again in imaginative and incisive ways. If we run into trouble our forwards – the intercessors who pray – are there to help us out.
And when we cross that try line with the word of God, a conversion usually follows.
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