A THOUGHT FROM WIMBLEDON

Many of the prophetic pictures or visions which the prophets of the Old Testament received were very simple. Amos saw a bowl of ripe fruit and was simply told Israel was ripe for judgement; he also saw a plumb line against a wall and was told God would spare the nation no longer. It’s actually the very simplicity of the images that makes them very pointed. It’s the same with prophetic actions: Jeremiah was told to buy a clay pot and then to break it in front of the elders of Jerusalem to tell them what God would do to their city. Jesus himself uses the simplest of images for the most important of truths.


I was not, then, really surprised by what seemed a rather simple episode from the Wimbledon tennis. One afternoon, during a ladies match, there was an outburst of thunder and some torrential rain. The only match playable was on the Centre Court where the glass roof had been closed. The rain pounded the roof and seemed desperate to get inside. Only a few drops managed to get through. Apparently the players were unable to hear the ball hit their rackets (a great distraction according to the experts). Very disconcerting!


As I watched this I immediately thought, “This is a picture of God trying to get a hearing, trying to say something to a very engrossed people. He’s desperate to get a hearing, but he’s kept out by a protective glass roof. The people are hearing but not listening”. The crowd seemed to typify people everywhere in the nation, for the rich, the great and the good were there and vast numbers of people across the nation were of course watching on their screens. It was quite a strong thought, but perhaps I might have given it no further attention except that a few seconds later one of the commentators remarking on the storm said, “Somebody somewhere is not very happy about something!", and he was quite clearly alluding to the author of the weather! The commentator had also significantly discerned a note of anger in the storm. My response was very quick, “Too right he’s not!”


A further thought, however, had also been going through my mind before this incident, namely that I felt so grateful to God that he had given us physical bodies and also sorts of thing to do with them (like games) that gave great human pleasure to so many. So there was nothing fundamentally wrong at all with tennis. The tennis was OK, then, but the problem lay in what was happening to the humanity at large that was watching it. The problem was, of course, that it had switched off from God, supposed him to be in a sense irrelevant to life and was not ready to grasp things that were essential to real well-being in life. Tennis and so many other pleasures had become the absolute centre of life; pleasure was the goal and the god.


It was the “glass roof” that really laid bare the problem; this elaborate and expensive protection against anything that might interfere with the game, with the pleasure. It was so hard to penetrate. It was as though the nation had an elaborate, hard, glass roof over it – a roof of indifference, built out of sophisticated thinking and sophisticated pleasure. No way in for God! He would have to smash the roof, and even then there was no certainty that the people would listen.


Oh, well, just a simple thought? I wish that was all it was, but sadly it rang too deep a bell.




Bob




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