Lament and Hope

AN OLD Buddy Guy song is titled “First Time I Met the Blues.” I don’t remember the first time I met the blues, but I do remember that I was captivated by the music. For many years now, two of my passions have been listening to blues and studying the Bible. Gary W. Burnett, a lecturer in New Testament at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and an amateur blues guitarist, shares those passions. This book, he writes in the introduction, is his attempt “to combine in some ways these two passions and to be able to reflect on Christian theology through the lens of the blues.” He succeeds with a well-crafted synthesis of U.S. history, African-American history, the blues, and New Testament scholarship.

Blues music is one of the great contributions of African-American culture to the U.S. While rooted in the oppression of slavery and post-slavery Jim Crow, it speaks meaningfully to the experience of all people. It’s a music that grabs your soul and won’t let go. And Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is central to his message of life in the coming and present kingdom of God. It can also grab your soul and not let go. By juxtaposing blues lyrics with passages from the Sermon, Burnett shows the common themes that emerge. “Both,” he writes, “are about a world gone wrong, about injustice, about the human condition, and both are about hope for a better world.”

We must hear the mourning—the lament—of those who are poor and oppressed, and learn to mourn with them, for “blessed are those who mourn.” In the blues laments of suffering and hardship, truth emerges in a society that would prefer to ignore it. Hearing the truth then leads to the struggle for justice, for “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice [righteousness].” The first step toward justice is telling the truth about injustice. Along with lament and truth, the blues also has a message of hope; as B.B. King sang, “There must be a better world somewhere.” Jesus taught us to pray for that better world with “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Other themes similarly explored in the blues include the anxiety of poverty, protest and resistance to empire through an assertion of human dignity, evil and the devil, and a message for worried minds.

In each case, Burnett places the blues and the Sermon in their historical context. For one, the brutal oppression of slavery and white supremacy, and for the other, the violent oppression of the first century Jewish people by the Roman Empire. And in both cases, he examines the words—citing the significance of the lyrics to many songs and contemporary scholarship on the Sermon on the Mount. Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, Walter Wink, N.T. Wright, and James Cone all make informative appearances.

In our current context of protest and resistance to poverty and to violence against African Americans, there are lessons we can learn anew. From a crucifixion in Jerusalem to the cotton fields of Mississippi to the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, the laments and protest continue to echo. The blues are still being sung, and the words of Jesus are still being preached, as there is a truth that must be told. Both are important and both are necessary. In their dual message, the need for protest and hope still resonates.

As Burnett concludes, “The blues, as an art form forged in adversity and suffering, becomes an appropriate point of departure for considering matters of faith and a gospel which itself was forged in the suffering of the innocent. If we let it, the blues can help us reach deep into our faith and understand the world, ourselves, and the gospel that little bit better.”