If you know me you probably know that I really enjoy movies. If you know me well you probably know that “The Sandlot” is one of my favorite movies of all time and that I can pretty much quote the entire thing. Needless to say that I was super excited that on the 700th time of watching this movie I saw a really good picture of the Gospel of Christ. If you have never seen  The Sandlot, shame on you (jk), but spoilers alert.

In The Sandlot, new kid Scott Smalls learns how to play baseball and also gets himself and his friends into an unexpected adventure. One day team leader Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez busts the guts out of the baseball and is upset that they can’t play anymore. Smalls, not wanting to stop the fun, claims he can get a ball from home. So he goes home and grabs his stepdad’s baseball, signed by Babe Ruth, and then hits it over the fence into the clutches of “The Beast”. Smalls and the team try everything they can think of to recover the ball from the beast. They even build a robot! But no matter how hard they try they cannot get the ball from the Beast. All hope seemed lost. Smalls even says that his life is over. It was then that Benny understood that this was his opportunity to do something great, to hop the fence, challenge the Beast, and get the ball back. Benny describes the Beast as, “A giant gorilla-dog thing, that ate one kid already.” As Benny prepares to hop the fence everyone is telling him not to do it and that it is suicide. Smalls says, “Benny, it was my fault. You don’t have to do this!” To which Benny responded, “Yeah I do, Smalls. I have to do this.” Long story short, Benny hops the fence, looks the beast in the eye, gets the ball and starts an epic chase scene with the Beast.When Benny gets the best of the Beast, he becomes the team mascot. How does this relate to Jesus?

Smalls taking the ball is like Adam and Eve taking the fruit in the Garden of Eden, and hitting it over the fence is like the fall. When Adam and Eve sinned they cause a separation between mankind and a holy God. So think of the Babe Ruth ball as our soul. Because of our sinful nature it is separated from God and is in the territory of a “beast”. Although we as mankind try everything to bring our souls back to God by our own strength and wit, ultimately we come up short, much like how the team couldn’t get the ball back. The only way they could get the ball back was for Benny to risk his life, hop the fence, and look death in the eye. Similarly, the only way we get our heart/soul back is when Jesus came down to earth, died on the cross, and resurrected. Benny didn’t just hop over the fence, he emerged victorious with the Babe Ruth ball. Jesus didn’t just die on the cross, he rose victoriously. Benny defeated the beast and ultimately tamed him so that he was the team mascot. By his resurrection Christ defeated death and we are able to say, “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Although The Sandlot it a great movie, it is just a shadow of an even better story: Christ coming to bring hope and new life to mankind.