A Theology of Sports: Part Two

Second in a four part series

For centuries sports have been universally recognized as a means of religious expression. The Greeks celebrated the Olympics as a festival to honor their god Zeus. Ancient Egyptians employed ball and stick games in their religious ceremonies; the ball represented fertility, and ritual hitting, catching and throwing were believed to encourage spring rains. In fifteenth century England and France ball games were often played to celebrate religious holidays, especially Easter.

In the United States, the YMCA was formed using sports to lure youth to their Christian ministry, giving them a wholesome alternative to other pursuits. In 1901 a writer describing the YMCA’s physical education programs proclaimed: “We are soldiers of Christ, strengthening our muscles, not against a foreign foe but against sin, within and without us.”

Sports can truly play a central--not peripheral--role in contemporary Catholic faith formation. Foundational to Catholic theology is that God made human beings body and soul united, inseparable, both now and for eternity. The health of one affects the other. Jesus sacrificed his earthly body so we could be restored to eternal life. How we live in our earthly bodies will affect how we live in our heavenly bodies; sports, and the sacrifice and physical discipline they entail, can play a major role in this scheme.

God’s original plan was for humanity to live forever in our earthly bodies. But our bodies, like our souls, became tainted through sin, and so both must be purified before we can enter heaven.

St. Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians: "What you sow doesn’t come to life unless it dies! What you sow isn’t your body as it will be--it’s a bare kernel, like wheat or something of that sort. God gives the body he’s chosen for it, and each type of seed has its own body.... There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of heavenly bodies is one thing and the glory of earthly bodies is something else." (1 Corinthians 15: 36-38, 40)

At the resurrection we are promised “glorified bodies,” but bodies nevertheless, for that is how humanity was fashioned. We remain human in death, but glorified to what God intended humanity to be in the first place: body and spirit united in the divine image.

Sometimes Christians view the body as inferior to the spirit, but this has dangerous consequences. Pope John Paul II, writing of the “culture of death” in Evangelium Vitae, stated: “Within this same cultural climate, the body is no longer perceived as a proper personal reality, a sign and place of relations with others, with God and with the world. It is reduced to pure materiality: it is simply a complex of organs, functions and energies to be used according to the sole criteria of pleasure and efficiency.”

We would do well to revisit this famous passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: For the body isn’t one member-it’s made up of many members. If the foot should say, “I’m not a hand, so I’m not part of the body,” it would still be part of the body for all that, and if the ear should say, “I’m not the eye, so I’m not part of the body,” it would still be part of the body for all that. If the whole body were an eye, how could it hear? If the whole body were an ear, how could it smell? But as it is, God arranged the members of the body-each one of them-as He wished them to be. If they were all just one member, what sort of body would that be? As it is, though, there are many members, but one body. The eye can’t tell the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor can the head tell the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body which seem the weakest are much more necessary, the members of the body which seem less honorable are the ones we grant the most honor to, and our private parts we treat with more modesty, whereas there’s no need to present our more presentable parts that way. But God has formed the body in such a way as to give greater honor to the members which lack it, so that there will be no discord in the body and the members will feel the same concern for one another. If one member suffers, all the members suffer; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice. (1 Corinthians 12: 14-26)

Next: Implications for Sports in the Body of Christ