Strata: The Bible in the News: Sporting with the Sermon on the Mount

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!