Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel according to Johnny Cash

by Richard Beck

The gospel according to the Man in Black is a gospel rooted in solidarity. The cross of Christ, in this view, is an act of divine identification with the oppressed. On the cross, God is found with and among the victims of the world. More, given that crucified persons were considered to be cursed by God—“Cursed is anyone who is hung upon a tree” (Deuteronomy 21:23)—God is found in Jesus among the cursed and godforsaken. Again, the first place to look for Jesus is in hell. By standing with the poor and beaten down, the music of Johnny Cash shows us how a gospel of solidarity begins as an interpretative activity: the cross is a way of seeing and reading the world. Specifically, the cross helps us answer this most important question: Where is God?

That is the gospel according to the Man in Black: drawing near to and loving the lost, unnoticed, unremarkable, excluded, powerless, broken, condemned, and despicable. Solidarity is a love that grows warmest in the coldest places. That vision prompts us to take the second step in the dance of divine solidarity. After we read the world to locate God among the victims and the oppressed, we are called to action, to move ourselves to stand with those who are suffering. As Bonheoffer said, God “goes right into the middle of it.” God draws near.

Our trouble is this: We want solidarity and salvation to be the same thing. But they’re not. First of all, when we confuse solidarity with salvation, we tend to objectify others. Whenever we see ourselves as saving people, we make ourselves the hero of the story, a moral drama in which we’re riding in on a white horse. In that story, the people we so nobly rescue are just moral props, passive recipients of our kindness and generosity. Aren’t they lucky that we showed up? A lot of compassionate people fall into this trap, failing to see how our desire to save others can be both selfish and dehumanizing. Solidarity is different from salvation. Solidarity doesn’t presume we have the answers or the ability to save anyone. Solidarity makes us available to others, but it recognizes other’s competencies, seeing people as possessing the resources to help themselves if we’d just get out of the way. That’s not to say we’re useless, just that we don’t dictate what, how, or if we can be useful. When we’re trying to save people, we’re talking and giving directions. With solidarity, we’re listening and receiving directions. We’re not the heroes of the story; we bear witness to the heroism of others. In solidarity, we are the ones being saved.

The currency of solidarity isn’t moral heroism—rescuing, fixing, and saving people. The currency of solidarity is relationship, mutuality, and friendship. And if that’s the case, we come face-to-face with the reality that relationships are risky and that we can’t guarantee the outcomes, no matter how hard we try. We aren’t in control, and some stories end sadly and tragically.

I’m just pointing out that our messiah complexes are often strategies for delaying and avoiding grief. And if we’re not careful, this can lead to burnout and despair. In trying to save the world, we’ll either exhaust ourselves or fall into depression—often both at the same time.

But this is what I did say to my friend: “The economy of love is paid in tears. Sooner or later, grief is the price we will pay for loving someone deeply and well. There is a price to love.” So I told my friend, “I don’t know the right choice; I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you this much. If you get to the grief, you’ve loved a person well. Most people don’t ever get to the tears. They’ve given up long ago. But you,” I told my friend, “you’ve loved a person deep into the pain. So the sadness, while hard, is holy ground. Our tears are sacraments, visible signs of the invisible grace of a loved poured out.”

Lament isn’t a failure or lack of faith. Lament is an act of bold, trusting faith in the midst of pain, suffering, and confusion. In fact, if we ignore lament, if we avoid giving voice to despair and rage, the gospel loses its ability to speak honestly, realistically, and truthfully. Without lament, faith grows naïve and superficial—a happy, fake, glossy façade we paint over the pain and confusion. In addition, lament is the cry of the oppressed, a song of resistance. When we avoid lament, we are marginalizing the voices crying out in pain around the world. In sum, lament is the shadow of the gospel, the moon to the gospel’s sun. The bright hope of the gospel creates sharp, dark outlines of contrast around all that is unjust and broken. Lament is that gap separating the new heavens and the new earth from the shattered world we find around us. In pointing toward that gap, we are not failing or denying the gospel; instead, we are praying with tears and raw, cracked voices, “May your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”

As the liner notes of Bitter Tears read, “Hear the words [of this album] well and you will discover that simply because we are white, that does not make us pure.”

But the drama of solidarity that plays out in “Give My Love to Rose” is more intimate, more personal. Solidarity isn’t just expressed in prophetic speech and action but also in acts of tenderness, gentleness, and kindness—like passing on the final request of a man dying alone on the railroad tracks or praying for the addict who just threw a rock through your car window. The gospel according to Johnny Cash calls us to kindness.

Kindness—at least the sort of kindness that Jesus calls us to—is difficult.

Yes, Jesus’s beauty will save the world, but there is something transgressive about this beauty. Transgressive is a word from the art community, used to describe artwork that goes against our artistic, aesthetic sensibilities. Transgressive art shocks, offends, and startles us. In a similar way, Jesus displays a transgressive beauty, a beauty that moves through the world in a way that shocks, offends, and startles us—mainly because Jesus’s kindness stands in solidarity with people we’d rather ignore and exclude. Jesus practices a transgressive kindness.

But on the other hand, evil exists, and many feel morally compelled to resist it, with force if necessary, to protect the weak and the innocent. We are not hawks, but we’re not quite doves either. We find ourselves caught in the middle. My point here isn’t theological, political, or ethical. I’m not trying to make an argument for or against pacifism, an argument for or against Christians using force to face evil in the world. My point is that we’re psychologically drawn to the “dove with claws” position.

So the gospel according to Johnny Cash is this: violence is always tragic. Christians can never cheer, applaud, or baptize a nation’s use of violence and force.

Yet in America today, there’s nothing more conformist than being a nonconformist, nothing more predictable than being a rebel, and nothing more mainstream than being alternative. Much of this is due to how our consumerist culture sells us the image of being a rebel. We live in a world where you can buy designer jeans with holes already ripped for you, and “alternative” is a genre of very popular music. As Thomas Frank writes, “We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock ’n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer.”[3] Here in America, all you need to be a rebel is a credit card.

As John Carter Cash observed about his father, “My dad identified with the Old Testament character of Job, who lost all. Dad was also familiar with suffering. . . . Like Job, I believe Dad never cursed God, but rather came to accept his burden as best a human could.”[13] We’re attracted to the image of the rebel because it makes us feel powerful and confident. But the gospel according to “Hurt” is that we are closest to God when we are at our weakest. Here we find the deep rebellion at the heart of the kingdom of God. Nothing attracts us to suffering. Nothing draws us to those places where we are broken, needy, and dependent. But that’s exactly where grace comes to find us. God comes to us in our hurt.