Have faith in football: there's no triumph without disaster
Christianity was founded in defeat, writes George Pitcher. Our folk memory of it will help if England lose on Sunday
For Rudyard Kipling, it was about parity of response to fortune and misfortune: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same,” he wrote in his slightly nauseous poem “If -”.
Winston Churchill, by contrast, thought it was about appropriately differing reactions to such impostors: “In Defeat, Defiance; In Victory, Magnanimity.”
We may be less liberal with our capital letters than these two creatures of the British Empire, but victory and defeat and our prospective and collective reactions to them are much on the minds of the English again. We prepare for one or the other at the hands, or rather the feet, of the Italians with our national football team on Sunday. And it is, of course, entirely co-incidental that our flag-wrapped government is preparing for Freedom Day a week later, when it will want to claim that we’re the first country in Europe (or out of it) to declare victory over the covid-19 virus.
Football doesn’t really lend itself to defiance in defeat, or to behaving the same way if you win or lose. The form is to sit on the pitch looking sad if you’re a player on the losing side. If you’re an England fan, I doubt you go out on Sunday evening to celebrate Italy’s victory magnanimously at the local Pizza Express.
Similarly, it’s hard to imagine the UK marking its triumph over covid by sending with magnanimity all its left-over vaccines to other countries that may still need them. Nor, frankly, a new lockdown in September being greeted with plucky defiance – though, come to think of it, one could expect fresh restrictions to be cheerily defied.
It might be nice to think our cultural responses were rooted in the national religion that constitutes so much of the rest of our collective folk memory. The Church of England tends to speak of a sure and certain hope in the future Kingdom and compassion for and solidarity with those who are oppressed in this world, rather than of defiance in defeat. But actually Christian theology, for all its talk of the victory of the cross over death, is solidly rooted in the grief of failure.
Miraculous goals
It should be hard to overstate the failure that Calvary represents. But that disaster is expunged by the turnaround on the third day afterwards. It’s as if a VAR reveals that the penalty of the Crucifixion wasn’t taken, but that there were simultaneously an infinite number of miraculous goals scored at the other end. No chance for magnanimity or defiance, just the universal joy of winning.
But that is to sail through Good Friday to Easter as if we’ve been given a bye in the trickiest game of life because the other side didn’t turn up. In fact, what the events of that Passover reveal are the utter and complete defeat and abject failure of the newly insurgent Jesus movement. And how we respond to that – whether with defiance, acceptance or sitting around on the grass looking dejected – is quite important.
Because, of the three Abramic faiths, only Christianity is founded in defeat. Judaism celebrates the delivery of God’s people from captivity in Egypt into their Promised Land – there were defeats before that, but they were always the chosen people. Islam is founded on the complete and universal revelation of the Prophet, which delivered a golden age of the Caliphate’s flourishing. Only Christians hold to a beginning in which there is not a shred of glory or triumph.
It’s precisely at this point that an evangelist will interject that this event is not the whole Christian story. And of course it isn’t. But it is the start of the story – it has to be – because the story cannot proceed to the victory of resurrection without the reality of the defeat of death. To be clear, death itself cannot be defeated without experiencing it.
No victory without defeat
Among all the implications of this is a very important one: We can’t have victory without defeat, just as we can’t have Easter without Good Friday. We can go even further than that – if this means that the Christian faith starts with the cross rather than the empty tomb, then (speak it softly) does it even need the Resurrection?
The great theologian John Macquarrie held that it does not – or, rather, stood up the notion that it does not. In what he described as Ending B (The Austere Ending) he writes:
Suppose in our account of the career of Jesus we had felt compelled to draw the bottom line under the cross?… Would that destroy the whole fabric of faith in Christ? I do not think so, for the two great distinctive affirmations would remain untouched – God is love, and God is revealed in Jesus Christ. These two affirmations would stand even if there were no mysteries beyond Calvary.
That takes no account of the reality and depth of depression of dispersed and defeated disciples – and what it would take to turn that around.
But it does encourage us to look at how other little turnarounds work in human life, the way little examples of resurrection are apparent in human reality all the time.
If England (or for that matter Italy) is defeated on Sunday and its players sit around like dejected disciples in Jerusalem on Easter Saturday, listen out for sentiments such as “We’ll be back all the stronger from this”.
Where does that come from? Maybe it’s defiance in defeat. But just maybe it’s that folk memory re-surfacing.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.