Because you have kept the word of my patience I will keep you from the hour of trial which is about to come upon the whole inhabited world to test those who live on the earth. Rev 3:10.
The game wasn’t a sellout, by any stretch of the imagination. It lured 25, 623 fans, more than half of them black Americans, to the 32,000 seats in Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, New York. What those who were present saw was a slice of history in the making: a black man playing in a major league game for the very first time.
Of course, Jackie Robinson didn’t break the color line in baseball all by himself. He needed Branch Rickey, the president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to help him do it. Rickey was the one with the will and the power to upend the idiotic myopia of the sport’s other leaders. Were the rulers of baseball afraid that blacks couldn’t play baseball? Or were they afraid that they would play it too well?
For some time Rickey had been searching for a special black athlete, someone whose poise matched his skills. Robinson needed to be able to swallow the racist insults sure to be directed at him by players and fans. Rickey told Robinson at their first meeting that he had to have “guts enough not to fight back.”
Robinson proved to be that man. He was the first four-sport star at UCLA, an Army veteran, a budding Negro League phenom. Robinson neither smoke nor drank and possessed a heroic reserve off the field to complement his fiery resolve on it. As he stepped to the plate in a Dodgers’ uniform, he was a mature 28 years old (by contrast Derek Jeter was playing in his eighth major league season when he turned 28).
But in a magnificent 10-year Hall of Fame career Robinson made up for lost time, his and that of the great Negro League ballplayers who never got the chance to shine in the big leagues. When Robinson stepped on the field and conducted himself with dignity in the face of insult, the game of baseball truly became the “national” pastime.1
In our world today people prize athletes who brag and posture, doing their deeds “in your face.” But real greatness is found in patient endurance, the kind that finds its greatness in service and the self-sacrifice of the Lamb. Philadelphians are praised, not for their skills, their wealth or their worldly success, but for their patience in the face of poverty, weakness and persecution. The message of Revelation turns the philosophy of this world on its head. Anyone can fight back when rage takes over. It takes strength of character not to respond to provocation.
