Read time:
This started as an article about a song and turned into something unexpected. I could’ve hit the “Delete” button, but I decided to share it anyway.
I’ve got a blind spot: I tend to take a Christian reading of most of the secular music that catches my ear. But in that, I’m not sure if it’s the human habit of imposing order on chaos, or if there might indeed be something there for the finding.
Right now, I’m really really digging into U2, an Irish rock band whose lyrics keep circling faith. If they aren’t your band, you may have one of your own: the song or the voice that keeps getting past your defenses. Read it that way. I’ve been a fan for decades, through their early years of earnestness, the middle years of self-mockery, and these latter days of maturity. I started listening more closely to the aphorisms their songwriter and singer, Bono, likes to string together after this line from a 1997 song called “Mofo”: “Lookin’ for the baby Jesus, under the trash.” I like the metaphorical energy. Jesus, after all, isn’t found only in the houses of the holy.
My first memory of U2 is “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on NightFlight, a late-night music video show in the Eighties. Rock music was my jam, but I’d in church I loved the hymns I’ve felt a pull between the two ever since. A hymn is settled and sung together; it hands you the answer and asks you to stand and agree. U2 handed me the question: searching, unfinished, rarely tidy. I’ve never wanted one to be the other. The band reaches back toward that world too, though. “40” is Psalm 40 nearly word for word, and they’ve closed shows with it.
Something in the band’s own story speaks to me. Bono (vocals), the Edge (guitars), and Larry Mullen Jr. (drums) were seriously Christian; Adam Clayton (bass), not so much. For a moment there, the three couldn’t reconcile their faith with being a rock band. So they decided to live in the tension between the two. In a way, for me, this is like the person who finds Jesus, puts on their holy Joe persona, then realizes that stinks and begins to learn how to live their faith in the real world. I’m not saying that’s what these guys have done, but I’ve been there and know the smell.
My wife and I have long contested Bono’s credibility, ever since they reinvented themselves (1991’s Achtung Baby) right out of the neat little pigeonhole they’d built for themselves (1987’s The Joshua Tree). I see him as a man in love with words (and especially his own), but he’s written some great songs. My wife sees him as a man who’s best heard from less. Period.
Both are valid stances, and from each we find enjoyment (or not) in the band. Following them over the years has been like riding a rollercoaster, since it’s the one band I know of that seems to struggle in its music with authentic faith in a fallen world. I’ve heard Bono’s answers to direct questions about Jesus, even to his invoking C. S. Lewis’s trilemma case1. (clip; entire interview). Yet the band stop short of underlining Jesus Christ as the answer, but it’s there if you look hard enough.
I don’t need them to be perfect icons of faith. I don’t need to share every conviction they voice. But I do expect them — as I do of anyone —to be good stewards of the power they wield from the platform they’ve built. Accountability will be required. But that still doesn’t stop me from finding beauty in the poetic gems Bono writes, words that capture a moment of the journey of faith, that give me a fresh way to look at faith, love, and the excitement of the gospel and a life following Christ.
The songs aren’t sermons or worship songs, they’re not meant to be, and I wouldn’t want them to be. Some folks even go so far as to preach from the band’s song catalog, but that’s a step too far for me. What I find in the broken, searching words of some secular songs is Jesus speaking to a reality, a world, I shouldn’t turn my back on, or face on my own.
Or maybe I just need to sit down until the fever passes.
The song that’s been my earworm this past week is “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” from their 2009 album No Line on the Horizon. The official video is an animation of several people in a city undergoing hardships, whose lives interconnect as each decides to make a change. The band never appears.
“A change of heart comes slow.”
That’s a line from the song, and to my ears, it’s a pointer to a capital-C Change: handing my life over to Jesus and letting Him, not me, be in charge. The same longing runs through “Mofo,” where Bono sings “Lookin’ for to fill that God-shaped hole,” a phrase that packs a lot of theology into very few words.
I won’t bore you by “decoding” the lyrics as I hear them, but I’ll point out all the singing about hills and mountains, believing, shouting and doubting, and not seeing the truth…well, it gets me thinking: shouldn’t I be as restless to share the news of salvation…tonight? Of course, that’s an application, not an interpretation. I’m not claiming it’s what the song means.
So, imposing or finding? Some of each, I suspect, and I’ve made peace with that. I can’t prove Bono meant any of this. I can only say what it stirred in me, and I’m not asking the song to be a sermon.
I’ll keep looking for the baby Jesus under the trash, and by that I mean everything we pile on top of what it means to be true to Christ: the Luke 9:49ers, the slogans we use, that Sunday-morning sheen, the rules we add and the ones we quietly drop. I part ways with the band on some things that they stand for, and I won’t argue that here. I suspect I add to the heap too, and that Jesus is under all of it, mine included.
“Listen for me, I’ll be shouting”
The trash was never the people. It’s what gets heaped on them: the record, the reputation, the way they look walking into the room. I meet people like that now in a recovery-based Bible study groups, and what I see first is rarely what I find. These are not Christians who get hairlipped judging their brother for sitting during the worship service. Nope. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, as we say down South: these are grateful people saved from lives the stories of which would curl your toes, whose aim is to die to themselves daily, to follow Him in obedience for what He did for them. That’s sobering. And some of these folks know Him better than I do. That’s a reality I should sit with.
But don’t misread me here. This kind of searching doesn’t cancel Philippians 4:8’s focusing on whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable. If anything, it keeps it honest.
If the songs aren’t sermons, the speaking is up to me. The danger is getting lost in the weeds and forgetting the simple truth: God made us, we’ve turned away from Him, and that’s sin, and we can’t fix it on our own. Jesus Christ, God become man, lived the life we haven’t, died in our place for our sin, and rose again, so that anyone who turns to Him and trusts Him is forgiven and made new, a gift and not a wage.
And that’s the news. And sooner or later, you have to decide what to do about Jesus.
I try to speak the truth in love, but I tread carefully, because the truth will step on enough toes without my help. If any of this does anyone some good, it won’t be my doing.
Footnote:
- The trilemma (or three-optioned choice) is in C. S. Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity, Book II, chapter 3, “The Shocking Alternative.” The passage often summarized as “Jesus must be either “lunatic, liar, or Lord.” Lewis, a converted atheist, settled on “Lord.” For more on the see this article at The Gospel Coalition. ↩︎
Image Credit:
- Photo by Cord Allman on Unsplash