The Creed says that Jesus “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” It doesn’t say how or when. My hair brained theory says that it all comes down to baseball. My belief is that when the Chicago Cubs win the World’s Series that we’d better start looking to the East, and pronto.
I’m actually somewhat serious. I have no emotional investment in the Cubs, I’m a San Francisco Giants fan who has a fondness for the Oakland A’s. Willie Mays was and always will be the best baseball player who ever lived to me. So I think that I can honestly say that I am impartial observer of this prophetic event. Last year I was actually somewhat concerned. The Cubs were a favorite to reach the series and maybe win it. They appeared to have the best team in baseball and it was 100 years exactly since the last series that they won. I was worried because as much as I believe that Jesus will come again, I have to confess that I’d prefer he wait until some following generation to do it.
One has to look at history and see all the disappointment that Cubs fans have suffered over the years. Think of the times that the experts said it was the Cubs time. Remember the playoff a few years back against the Marlins? Up in the top of the 8th in game six and then everything fell apart shortly after the errant Cubs fan reached out and caught a foul ball that was almost in the glove of the Cub defender? What about last year and the way the Cubs folded in the playoffs? There has to be something to this. It is too eerily similar to guys like Hal Lindsey and others who keep reading the headlines and predicting Jesus’ return, and when he doesn’t they have to look at the headlines again, wait for another crisis and write another book. Those who follow them are like Cubs fans and are always disappointed when Jesus doesn’t come like their prophecy teacher said he would.
Thus, all this considered I must be right, there is a correlation between the Cubs and and eschatology. I could be full of spit, but I think I have something here. In the W.P. Kinsella novel The Iowa Baseball Confederacy a young man ventures to the end of a rail spur and ends up transported back in time to 1908 to a place in Iowa where the Cubs were playing an exhibition against a team of local all stars. The game took on mythic proportions, and not to spoil the book, which I highly recommend, it tells of cataclysmic and cosmological significance of the 1908 Cubs.
I’ll end here, but to those who expect the Cubs to win the World’s Series you’d better be careful what you ask for…when you are rejoicing that the Cubs finally have won, Jesus may come and spoil your parade.
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 