Friday Night Lights, the 1990 non-fiction book about the 1988 Permian Panthers high school football team in Odessa, Texas, gave rise to a 2004 film and later a television show of the same name. Both are excellent in their own ways. The TV show is a kind of spiritual interpretation of the book’s themes; the film follows the actual events much more closely. Accordingly, the movie is darker, less resolved, and even more unsparing in its examination of what it means to make a violent high-school sport into something just less than a religion.

My favorite scene in the film comes about halfway through. Having lost their star running back, the Permian Panthers (and by extension the entire town of Odessa) now rely on Mike Winchell, their competent but unspectacular quarterback. Winchell, now carrying more weight than any high-schooler ever should, confides in the head coach, Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton).

“You ever feel cursed, Coach?” he asks. “Like no matter what, inside your heart you feel that you’re gonna lose. Like something’s hanging over you, following you like a witch, or a demon … You can’t win. I feel like that all the time. Even when things are going good. When we’re winning, it’s there. When we’re losing, it’s there.”

A curse, literally, is an invocation for supernatural powers to do harm. One who is cursed has reality itself bent against him. No matter what he does, he will not prosper. Nowadays Westerners rarely use the term outside of baseball or Harry Potter, and when they do it’s tongue and cheek. But nearly universal is the experience Winchell describes: of knowing that what is required of you is more than you can possibly deliver, that the deck is stacked against you, that you can’t win.

A lesser film would have Coach Gaines launch into some kind of inspirational pep talk about finding one’s inner strength or refusing to give credence to one’s critics. Instead, Gaines offers this:

It took me a long time to realize that there ain’t much difference between winning and losing except for how the outside world treats you. But inside you, it’s about all the same. It really is. Fact of the matter is, I believe that our only curses are the ones that are self-imposed … We, all of us, dig our own holes.

It’s startling to hear a Texas high-school football coach dismiss the existential significance of winning or losing, but he’s right. Victory brings temporary euphoria but never inner peace. But, Gaines says, the universe is not stacked against us. There is no downward pressure being applied to us by a hostile, external source. We do it ourselves by holding on to wrong expectations and by giving weight to what the “outside world” thinks. Peace comes not from striving, but through detachment from false values.

This scene between Gaines and Winchell is interspersed with another. A major subplot of the film is Permian fullback Don Billinglsely’s relationship with his alcoholic, abusive father Charlie (played by Tim McGraw). Charlie had been a hero in the 1960’s who won a state championship for Permian; Don has problems holding on to the football. Charlie is vocal, frequently and bitingly, about his disappointment. During the scene in question, Don is driving a drunk Charlie through the Texan countryside at night. The latter is explaining how his own father used to hit him in the stomach with a knotted-up bullwhip.

“That’s how I feel when I watch you play football,” he tells his son. “You were sent down here to learn how to play football and you haven’t. You have not. And I got to take that as a personal failure.” Then Charlie hurls his own state championship ring out of the car window. Don pulls over and begins frantically searching for the ring, the symbol of the very thing weighing him down.

Of course Don should have just kept driving. He should have let the ring go, should have detached himself from his father’s lunatic equation of self-worth with holding on to a football. He should have told his dad to pound sand. But he didn’t. He can’t.

The truth is that we dig a lot of our own holes, but not all of them. Not all of our curses are self-imposed — that, at least, was the apostle Paul’s understanding. Incensed that the gentile believers at his fledgling church in Galatia are receiving circumcision in order to keep the Mosaic Law, Paul declares that this Law pronounces a curse on everyone. The curse certainly falls on those who do not keep the Law (Gal 3:10), but also upon those who do. “No one,” writes Paul, “is reckoned as righteous before God by the Law” (v. 11). Keep it or don’t keep it, there’s no winning.

Now, standing before a holy God may not seem as pressing a problem nowadays as it did in the first century. What hasn’t changed, however, and what never changes, is the sense that what is required of us is more than what we can offer. Our victories mute this sense, but only for a short while. We strive, we detach, but the curse remains.

Paul offers a third way by counseling neither striving nor detachment. There is no subjective solution waiting to be discovered inside of ourselves. Our only hope lies in God, who mysteriously does not simply declare us free from the Law and its curse. God doesn’t wave his hands at the Law, or tell us our anxieties are unfounded. The Law’s judgments must go somewhere; guilt cannot be swept under the rug of the heavenly court. Instead, God takes the Law’s condemnation upon himself in Jesus.  The awful sentence of the law was pronounced on Christ himself: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — as it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Gal 3:13).

And just as the curse no longer falls upon the resurrected Lord, neither does it fall upon those of us who are in him. Having died with Christ and now living in him, a little bit of space opens up between ourselves and the expectations of what those selves should be like. That space is genuine freedom, and we can breathe that much easier in the face of life’s mounting expectations — only for a short while at first, but longer and longer as we get older.

A little later in Friday Night Lights, Coach Gaines and Winchell are at a diner, waiting for a coin toss to break a three-way tie and determine which two teams would go on to the playoffs. It seems that mere chance will decide their destiny. Except Gaines knows better. He turns to Winchell, smiles, and says “Ain’t no curses.”

That was not always true, but it is now.

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