No More Curse

I’m just back from holidays and a little late getting to Mayo’s All-Ireland win. (Adapted from an article by my friend Pastor Warren Peel in Galway)

There can’t be anyone left in Ireland who doesn’t know that Mayo won the All-Ireland. 82,300 in Croke Park, a million more watching on TV, the green and red of Mayo fluttering from cars and lamp-posts.

75 years of pain gone. The infamous ‘curse’ broken. Legend has it that in 1951, the celebrating Mayo team drove through Foxford mid-funeral without slowing to show respect, and the officiating priest cursed them: none would live to see Mayo win again. There are holes in the story—there’s no funeral on record in Foxford that day—but Mayo didn’t win again until this year, their first final since the last of the ’51 squad died. Coincidence, or the power of a story? Either way, the ‘curse’ would appear to be broken.

It sounds medieval, the stuff of horror films—a frightening thing to be under!

Yet the Bible tells us that every single human being is under a curse—and this one wasn’t pronounced by an indignant priest but by God himself. Not on a team, but on the whole human race, the whole universe. Not for a few generations, but for every generation. Not for dishonouring a funeral, but for failing to give God the honour and obedience he’s owed.

This curse means death and brokenness for all, in this world and the next. It’s the reason the world is the way it is. We see it everywhere: in every cemetery and hospital ward, every broken home and angry voice, every famine and war, every weed in the garden and piece of rotten fruit. And it’s not only out there—it’s in our own hearts too, in the greed, selfishness, anger, pride, hatred, lust and envy that bubble up inside us.

The Bible says we are a cursed people in a cursed world. Is there any hope? And the answer of the Bible is a joyful, resounding ‘Yes!’

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. Instead, his astounding solution was for his own beloved Son to come into this cursed world to break the curse. The Bible puts it starkly: “Christ has rescued us from the curse… on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing”.(Galatians 3.13)

On the cross Jesus took the curse of judgment and death in the place of all who would trust in him, so that we, who deserve nothing but curse, receive nothing but blessing—forever.

Since the world is under God’s curse, surely nothing is more important, more urgent, than discovering how the curse can be broken.

Watch the last minute of the Mayo game. Hear the roar of those thousands of voices—Victory! The curse is broken! No more curse! Imagine what that felt like inside Croke Park.

And yet that euphoria is nothing compared to the last great day of human history when Jesus Christ returns to do away with every last trace of the curse and bring in a new world, when a countless multitude gather before God’s throne to live forever in perfect happiness in that new world—celebrating, as it’s put in the last chapter of the Bible: “No longer will there be any curse.”

That’s what Jesus offers.