On Saturday morning James Anderson marked out his crease in effort to prevent the England cricket team capitulating to a hefty first innings deficit. The previous night Stuart Broad has played a few shots and helped Joe Root nudge the scoreboard towards respectability, and then the final batsman – not a batsman in any conventional sense of the word, but the final player in the team to come out to bat – hung around long enough that his bowling duties would be delayed until the next day.

All through Saturday’s morning session Root and Anderson pushed the total up, with Root, the recognised batsman, initially protecting Anderson from most of the play before they went on to bat as equals with the teams talismanic bowler trading the red leather for the bat as his weapon to do damage to the opponent. That morning all sorts of records fell. It was the first time both number 11s had scored fifties, first time both teams had a final wicket partnership over a hundred. When Anderson finally succumbed shortly after lunch England had carved out a lead from this granite of a wicket in Nottingham.

Cricket is a strange sport, it asks everyone to play their part. Only a fortnight before Anderson had fallen two balls short of the most redoubtable defence against Sri Lanka, turning down shot after shot, refusing to risk his wicket for anything. When he was out to his fifty-fifth ball it was the second longest duck ever. There were tears in his eyes when he was interviewed after the match. In most walks of life we play to our strengths, we do what we’re good at, and we avoid those things where failure is likely. Bowlers have no such option. James Anderson is not in the team for his batting, as a number 11 he is sent out onto the wicket as a final sacrifice at the tail end of an innings. He is not expected to score, but still he marks his crease and waits for the bouncers designed to scare him, the yorkers which will put him off balance and the reverse swing, of which he himself is a master, designed to tempt him into playing a shot.

A couple of years ago I was working with someone who had cancer, I didn’t know all the details, but I knew he had cancer, went into remission, then was no longer in remission. In May 2012 he passed away, but a few months before he wrote about his experience and his thoughts on assisted dying. Yesterday his thoughts were published in the Independent ahead of a debate in the House of Lords this week on legalising assisted dying for the terminally ill. Christopher Jones writes, that had the proposed law had been in place it would be for people like him:

“I might have been open to the option of ending my life by legal means, had these existed. The legal prohibition of this course was immensely helpful in removing it as a live option, thus constraining me to respond to my situation more creatively and hopefully. In hindsight, I now know that had I taken this course, I would have been denied the unexpected and joyful experience of being ‘recalled to life’ as I now am.”

Over the weekend the unexpected revelation that Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, supported the proposed change in the law sent shock waves around the Christian community, uniting those from often hostile factions in disagreement with his stance. This was followed by the support from Desmond Tutu, a seeming momentum of support from senior Christian leaders to change the law to one that is ‘more compassionate’. But, as current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby wrote in the Times, “Helping people to die is not truly compassionate”.

I cannot imagine the suffering many people who are terminally ill face, or the life of those who are not terminally ill but suffering from illnesses that render their lives hard to live. There are cases that go through the courts of people who want their loved ones to have the freedom to end their lives, there are heart wrenchingly painful accounts.

And yet, and yet, I don’t think life can be subject to those choices. There are some choices we should not be allowed to take. I firmly believe that restricting the choice available to assist in someone’s death is the more compassionate thing to do.

We all have our part to play in life, and whether that’s for a few more months than we might expect. I am grateful for having known Christopher, and I am grateful he left these words.

Number 11 batsmen are sent out at the end of the innings when it is nearly over, but for them this is their chance to play some shots before the end. And sometimes it is remarkable. In twelve tests the winning shots have been struck by a batsmen disregarded as really a batsman. We could limit the batting to those who are good at it, those who train day in day out to receive the bullets of fast bowlers, the turning balls of whirling spinners.

Sometimes playing out of position leads to unexpected results. Sometimes things happen that should not. What looks like a lost cause can be the gateway to something new. After Anderson’s heroics on Saturday the epilogue on Sunday evening was even more remarkable if irrelevant to the outcome of the game. On a pitch that yielded few easy wickets a draw was the inevitable conclusion as India batted through the day yesterday. As the sun dipped beneath the horizon and the match proceeded towards its close Alastair Cook took the ball to bowl his second and third ever overs in test match cricket. And took a wicket. The batsman out of form became a bowler, and the country’s greatest bowler was a batsman when it mattered.

In yesterday’s sermon at ChristChurch London Liam Thatcher talked about how Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians from his chains while under arrest in Rome. He writes to the church that started when revival broke out in another jail twelve years before. His chains were not the method he would have chosen, but they were the way the gospel was spreading throughout the palace guard. Paul was chained up but the good news could not be.

Playing out of position can be awkward, being somewhere we would rather not can be painful, and it can be difficult, and sometimes we wish we could choose otherwise. But sometimes we learn something in those places, sometimes the unusual is where the unexpected happens. When it does, it’s more exciting. Anderson taking wickets isn’t worthy of headline (and nor should Cook scoring runs – but that’s another matter altogether), but when his heroics were with the bat people sat up, refreshed the live updates, and paid attention. There is something about let everyone play there part, even if it is out of position, and allowing assisted dying could stop that: and it’s just not cricket.