No More Curse!
I don’t think there is anyone in Ireland who doesn’t know that County Mayo won the All-Ireland men’s Gaelic football cup on 26 July. Every one of the 82,300 seats in Dublin’s Croke Park stadium was taken and a million more watched on TV. Mayo fans the world over, including ex President Joe Biden and the Gallagher brothers (of Oasis fame) have been celebrating, as the green and red of Mayo flags flutter from cars and houses and lamp-posts all over Ireland.
The intensity of the celebration is not just because Mayo is one of the most football-mad counties in Ireland, or even because it has been 75 years since they last won the cup, but because of a strange legend that claims Mayo couldn’t win before now.
In 1951, the last year Mayo won the tournament, the team was celebrating all way home on the back of an open truck. Allegedly the truck passed through the village of Foxford where a funeral was taking place, but it didn’t slow down and the team didn’t stop celebrating to show respect to the mourners. So the officiating priest, Canon Thomas Curneen, is said to have put a curse on the Mayo team: none of them would live to see Mayo win again.
Now whether it’s due to coincidence or the psychological power of the legend, after eleven finals and eleven defeats in the years since, it is a fact that Mayo didn’t win again until this year—in their first since the last member of the 1951 squad died (Mick Loftus in April 2023).
There do seem to be a lot of holes in the legend, which have been pointed out over the years (not least that there is no record of a funeral taking place in Foxford on the day the team returned home). And it doesn’t seem that too many people really believe in the Mayo curse, but it has certainly been talked a lot about over last thirty years especially. TG4 made a documentary about it (Mayo God Help Us!); a book has been written by Keith Duggan (House of Pain); the BBC made a three-part podcast series called The Curse of County Mayo; countless newspaper articles went over the story every time Mayo made it to another final.
It seems medieval doesn’t it?! Or the stuff of horror films! How many movies can you think of with the word ‘curse’ in the title. Being cursed is a frightening thing.
But the really terrifying thing is that the Bible tells us that every single human being is under a curse.
· This curse wasn’t cast by a Mayo priest, but pronounced by God himself.
· This curse wasn’t placed upon a football team but whole human race—in fact, the whole universe—and not just for two or three generations but for every generation.
· The reason for this curse wasn’t failing to show respect at a funeral, but failing to give honour and glory and obedience to God.
· This curse said not that a football team would never win a cup, but that the world and its people would experience death, in this world and the next.
This curse is the reason why the world is the way it is today. We see the curse every day, wherever we look: every cemetery, every hospital, the flashing blue lights of an ambulance, a Garda car, a fire engine, in every broken home, every angry voice, every stab of pain or tear of sadness; every famine, war or drought; in every piece of rotting fruit or mouldy bread, in every broken heart and broken limb.
Nor is the curse just in the world outside—we see it in our own hearts as well—in the greed, selfishness, anger, self-pity, pride, hatred, lust and envy that bubbles up inside us. The Bible says we are cursed people in cursed world, because the wages of dishonouring God is death.
The question is, is there any hope for a cursed world and a cursed people? And the answer of the Bible is a joyful, resounding ‘Yes!’
The Christian message offers hope to a hopeless world—blessing in the midst of curse. God himself—the one who pronounced the curse—is the one who breaks it. How? He can’t just cancel it and pretend that dishonouring him doesn’t matter.
His astounding solution was to send his own beloved Son into this cursed world to break the curse. The Bible says in Galatians 3.13: Christ has rescued us from the curse... When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing.
On the cross Jesus Christ, the blessed Son of God who never once dishonoured his Father, stood in the place of anyone who will trust him to save them from the curse. He absorbed the curse in our place—he took all its infinite bitterness into himself. During those three hours of darkness on the cross, God poured out every last drop of judgment on Jesus—the curse of death—so that men and women like us, who deserve nothing but curse, receive nothing but blessing forever!
If this world and its people really are under God’s curse, this explains why everything is the way it is. Surely nothing is more important or urgent or wonderful than finding out how to break the curse?
Go online and watch the video of the last minute of the Mayo game. Try to imagine the joy and relief—the catharsis—as you hear the cheers of those thousands of voices. ‘Victory! The curse is broken! No more curse!’ What must that experience have been like for those Mayo fans in Croke Park stadium on 26 July?!
And yet that euphoria is nothing compared to the last great day of human history when Jesus Christ returns in all his glory to do away with every last trace of the curse and bring in a new world and a new age, when a countless multitude gather before God’s throne to live forever in perfect happiness in that new world, when innumerable voices join in praise and worship. It’s described for us in the last book of the Bible, in Revelation 22.1-5:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city.
On each side of the river stood the tree of life… And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
