A Death in the Colosseum
In AD 404, according to the church historian Theodoret, a monk named Telemachus traveled to Rome. He walked into the Colosseum in the middle of a gladiator fight, climbed into the arena, and stood between the two combatants, begging them to stop.
The crowd didn’t see a peacemaker. They saw someone ruining the show. They stoned him to death, right there on the sand.
Emperor Honorius is said to have been so shaken by what happened that he outlawed gladiatorial combat shortly after. One man’s death, a death the crowd wanted, cheered for, ended a “sport” that had defined Roman entertainment for centuries.
I’ve been thinking about Telemachus a lot lately, because I don’t think we ever really got rid of the Colosseum. We just gave it new lighting, put it on pay-per-view, and shaped the cage like an octagon instead of a circle.
The Same Arena, Just Better Lit
The UFC didn’t invent the octagon. The octagon-shaped cage isn’t an accident, it’s a direct nod to the Roman arena. Fighters put their bodies on the line for a fraction of what the sport generates; plenty of undercard fighters make around $10,000–$12,000 a fight, unless they’re a headliner like Conor McGregor. Meanwhile Dana White, the man running the show, is worth billions.
That’s not so different from what Rome did to its gladiators: men, sometimes slaves, fighting for scraps of glory while the wealthy profited off the spectacle. We’ve just made it legal, licensed it, put it on pay-per-view, and convinced ourselves that consent and a paycheck make it something other than what it is.
My Own Excuses
As a Christian, I’ve had an issue with combat sports for a while now, if I’m honest with myself. But I kept masking it. “It’s legal entertainment.” “It’s just a sport.” Or sometimes it was the red-pill logic: that you’re not really a man unless you can throw hands, that watching men fight is somehow proof of your own masculinity. I’ve dabbled in MMA and boxing myself, and I’ve followed the sport as a fan for a long time. None of that was hard to justify to myself.
Then a few months ago, one of my favorite fighters lost, and it cracked something open.
The Fight at the White House
Ilia Topuria came out of nowhere and beat three former champions on his way up. Undefeated. Confident to the point of arrogance. He was booked to headline UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House, the biggest stage the sport has ever had, against Justin Gaethje for the lightweight title.
On paper, in my opinion, this was a mismatch. Topuria was 17-0 and heavily favored. He believed it too, he called it a “farewell tour” for Gaethje all fight week and promised a first-round knockout in every interview he gave.
But fight math rarely works the way it’s supposed to.
Gaethje broke both of Topuria’s orbital bones. Topuria lost vision in one eye in the first round, and in the other by the end of the second, and fought two more rounds barely able to see his opponent. His corner finally stopped it after the fourth. The man everyone, including Topuria himself, was sure would win, lost. Badly.
Here’s the part that stuck with me: both men are professing Christians, by their own account. But one of them spent fight-week publicly declaring exactly what he was going to do to another human being, and the other quietly said he’d give his best and leave the rest to God.
You could say God stopped the proud and raised the humble. But really, I stopped watching combat sports after I watched two Christians hit each other in the face for a title belt, in front of a screaming crowd that enjoyed the blood, on the White House lawn.
A Life Ended by a Sport
Last week, Prichard Colón died at 33, eleven years after a 2015 fight against Terrel Williams left him with a catastrophic brain injury and needing round-the-clock care for the rest of his life. He was 23, undefeated, 16-0, considered one of the brightest prospects in boxing. He took repeated shots to the back of the head, was hospitalized after the fight, and never really came back. His family cared for him for the last decade of his life before he passed away last week.
Let’s be honest about it. Human beings were not created to hit each other in the head, over and over, to the point of losing consciousness. It’s a lie hegemonic powers have fed us for centuries, and we’ve just accepted it as truth.
Could You Picture Jesus Cheering?
Here’s the test I keep coming back to: can you picture Jesus sitting next to you, laughing and clapping His hands while two men try to knock each other unconscious, permanently damaging each other’s brains for entertainment?
If you can’t picture that, that tells you something.
We’re called to love one another. To carry each other’s burdens. To love our enemies and pray for the people who strike us. Nowhere in that is room for cheering when a man’s eyes swell shut, or getting a rush of adrenaline off someone else’s suffering.
The Pattern Behind the Belts
There isn’t a single honorable fighter at the top of this game. Look at Mike Tyson, Jon Jones, Conor McGregor, look at almost anyone great in sport’s history, and you find the same pattern: domestic abuse, sexual assault, drugs, violence outside the cage, and plenty of jail time. Jon Jones, often called the greatest fighter of all time, spent much of his career fighting through drug addiction and doping allegations. Greatness built on that foundation isn’t really greatness.
Where I’ve Landed
I can’t keep pretending it’s a neutral hobby for me. The excitement I used to feel watching people hit each other, the entertainment I got from press conferences where grown men curse each other out and drag each other’s families into it, none of that was coming from a good place. I can’t watch that and then go read my Bible.
I knew, even while I was doing it, that I was participating in something that pulled me away from God rather than toward Him.
Paul actually uses the image of a boxer to describe the Christian life. In 1 Corinthians, he talks about disciplining his body “like a boxer”, not swinging at the air, but training with purpose, making sure he isn’t disqualified after preaching to others. But the fight Paul describes isn’t against another man’s body. It’s against himself, his own flesh, his own impulses, his own tendency to drift towards sin.
Because the truth is, our real fight was never against each other. Scripture is clear about that: we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers of this dark world, the spiritual forces we can’t see.
And here’s the thing underneath all of it. Jesus loves you, no matter who you are. He existed. He walked this earth. He died. And after He rose from the grave, over 500 people saw Him over the course of 40 days after He came back. There are tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts, more than any other document from the ancient world, carrying that eyewitness testimony forward to us.
With the Chrisitan walk, there isn’t a single fight you have to win on your own strength. Everything has already been won.
God bless you.