Whichever teams advance to this year’s Super Bowl, they will be hard-pressed to top last year’s thriller: both the longest Super Bowl ever and only the second to go into overtime, the game came down to the last play. Both teams carefully managed the clock to get the most out of every remaining second. In plenty of football games, though, the last seconds or even minutes tick away in complete irrelevance. Down by more than a few scores, the losing team has no possibility of closing the gap. They have to keep playing, but the game is already over. Yet there’s obviously an appeal to this format, as the most watched sport in America (football) and the most watched sport in the world (the other “football,” soccer) both play against the clock, and a team wins by having scored more points than its opponent when the final buzzer sounds.
For all the potential thrills that these “timed sports” offer, though, I’ve always found myself drawn more to the other category—those “time-less sports” with an objective goal that one side must achieve, however long it takes. That goal might be getting three outs for nine innings, or winning three sets in a tennis match, or finishing with the lowest score after four rounds of golf. I would include horseracing in this category. There’s a clock, but it’s there to record the race, not to end it.
Part of the attraction, I find, lies in putting time aside. The clock governs so much of our lives—how long it takes us to get places, how far we might be running behind, how much time we allot for all the activities in our over-scheduled world. Sport, as a form of leisure, becomes most enjoyable as an antidote to the rat race, where time itself is suspended. When we watch a baseball game or a tennis match, we have no idea how long it will take. We have entered a world unto itself that will last until a particular mission is accomplished. No matter how far ahead you might be, you still have to strike out that last batter, sink that final putt on eighteen. It lends to that world a sense of completeness, where someone has attained an actual goal and wasn’t just saved by the bell.
We have entered a world unto itself that will last until a particular mission is accomplished.
These time-less sports also offer a metaphor for the spiritual life as they caution against both presumption and despair. On the one hand, they remind us never to become complacent, to sit on our lead, as it were. I’m an avid squash player, and I’m still smarting from a game I blew not too long ago. I was playing a much higher-ranked opponent, but I had managed to get ahead ten to one (games are to eleven). It’s a fast sport, and I thought I had it in the bag even as the point differential kept shrinking. Before I knew it, the game was over, and I had lost. It offered me a cautionary tale, not just for athletic competition, but for the spiritual life as well. Even someone far along the path to salvation can lose it all in the blink of an eye. Nothing is assured until the last breath, whenever that moment comes.
At the same time, though, we always have reason to hope. When a football team is behind by three touchdowns with mere seconds left on the clock, there’s no chance of victory. But regardless of how many runs a baseball team might be behind, or how many points a squash player might be down, until that final out or point there’s still a chance for a comeback. Poker players say that all you need is a chip and a chair, and if you play your cards right you can win despite the odds. We believe the same is true when it comes to salvation. Someone may have wandered far from God, but there’s always the possibility of coming back. That turnaround relies not on the luck of the draw, but on the grace of God who holds out the crown of victory to everyone who wants it. After all, Christianity is the ultimate comeback story. When the human race was lost and it seemed like it was all over, God joined the team, as it were, and gave us the playbook to win. Whenever we find ourselves down and falling behind, we remember that we’re never out so long as we stay in the game. Victory lies precisely in the effort, in not giving up, in letting God carry us over the finish line.
That finish line is heaven, of which these sports offer us a foretaste. When the race of this earthly life is over, with all its upsets and defeats behind us, then time itself will disappear in the eternal now of God’s love. We will rest and play in his presence and we won’t have to worry about the outcome. We will have already won.