Thursday, November 01, 2007
'Revenge' by Switchfoot: An analysis
I'm the failure, I'm everyone's foolAnd I'm losing my cool at the endI'm the loser, my number's come upI've been hung up with thoughts of revengeRevenge, revengeI watched you from my terminal viewAs you struggled to rise to your endI laughed hard at the insults we threwAs the weight of the world found revengeRevenge, revengeHave hatred and gravity won?The world hung upside downI drew first blood, I drew first bloodWith my hate for a crownI drew first blood, I drew first blood, revengeI watched heaven dying todayAnd I'm gonna die here tonightI'm a villain, I deserve to be deadI've been hung up for wrecking my lifeRevenge, revengeSo I stopped for a momentTo look at the sun (or Son)Die in the dayThat's when the irony hit meThis was revengeThat love had decendedAnd stolen our pain awayWe consumed heaven's SonAnd I drew first blood, I drew first bloodAnd my hate was undoneI drew first blood, I drew first blood, revengeHere's a storyHow a thief had been robbedHow a murder had stolen my rageThink of me, Lord, I'm a few breaths awayAs my lungs finally rip from the cageRevengeThe analysis. From Switchfeed.com. By Philemon Thomas. Longest entry ever to be made on this blog. You have been warned.
Introduction: The New RevengeWhy does it bother us so greatly when someone who doesn't deserve to be wronged is wronged anyway? When he slaps you on your face, why is your basic impulse to turn his cheek a bright red in return? I think when Christ instructed his followers to show the other cheek, what’s more relevant than whether or not he actually expects us to do that, is that he was hinting at a great truth. I believe He was teaching us a higher form of revenge that He later epitomized with His death at the cross: a revenge that absorbs. A revenge that steals away rage. A godly revenge: where, by absorbing sin, and thereby nullifying it, you are exacting revenge not against the guy who slapped you, but against the hate in him which made him do it in the first place. You kill that evil (true revenge), rather than multiply it with a slap of your own (foolish revenge). “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” That instruction from Christ was a brief look into the deep-impact psychology of the Kingdom of God, that is baffling at times in how it characteristically turns common sense upside-down (“How can someone’s death on a cross save me?!”), yet amazing in its genius when you pause to think about it.
Coming back to the question at hand, why do we feel the urge to have that daughter’s rapist condemned to death, to have that wrongdoer brought to justice? When bad things happen to good people, why does that discrepancy bother us? I believe it’s because, deep inside, we feel an innate need for justice to be met, and when we rarely see that happening, or when our pride is hurt, we become short-sighted and are pushed to take matters into our own hands; and, in the process, while we may achieve an earthly standard (mostly an illusion) of justice, we understandably fail at achieving the higher, pure, complete justice (or ‘revenge’)—Kingdom justice, if you might—on our own strength. If we’d succeeded at forgiveness, mercy, grace, humility and such, our world would be a much better place, but the tit-for-tat justice-system of this world we instead resort to, instead of alleviating our problems, often multiplies them. Which is why I believe we need help. Someone Else who can accomplish a perfect, permanent revenge for us, someone who can settle the scores for us, on our behalf—for the wrongs we’ve committed and for those committed unto us—on a path to redemption.
A case for morality and retributionOur aforementioned desire for justice reflects an innate sense of right and wrong, of good and bad. This urge for revenge, I believe, is proof against the postmodern contention that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are merely ideas created by society: you don't seek revenge except because you think justice is good, or because it makes you feel good—just like no one seeks injustice or wrong purely because they delight in the idea of badness in and of itself, but because they have something they think is good to gain from it, whether it’s the pleasure or the loot. This reveals an inbuilt, involuntary ability to decide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’—even if only through our subjective understanding (or lack thereof) of them—making a compelling case for such value judgments.
When there's ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, it only follows that there be a reward system, as incentive to seek right over wrong. For 6 billion free wills to coexist in harmony, screw-ups need to be paid for. So, a perfectly just God's (if He may not seem so right now, look at His justice as a process that will one day be completed and revealed to all) universe was created with the principle that we are responsible for our actions – that goodness would be rewarded, and the opposite should have consequences. Keeping with His just character, He wisely decided retribution would be necessary (unless we were all perfect beings).
The weight of a world seeking revengeNow, we may originally have been perfect, as beings created by a perfect God (in His own image), but something went wrong somewhere. According to the Bible, it was Adam & Eve’s disobedience because of which we exist as imperfect beings in an imperfect world, where we enter the world bringing pain—that of childbirth—and leave it with the same, i.e. suffering and death: all terrible things that Adam and Eve would never have had to endure, had they obeyed God’s instructions to not eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Their disobedience brought death, labor pain, AIDS and all kinds of entropy into the world as consequence, when they could have lived forever in a perfect world with each other and God. For some of us, all that is myth—fair enough—while some others view it as fact, but there’s one thing we can all testify to: that the world is in a fallen state, crying out for redemption, for a savior. That not everything is hunky dory—the very reason why most people question the existence of a perfect-by-definition God. As Dan Haseltine laments, “If the world was how it should be, maybe I could get some sleep. / While I lay, I'd dream we're better, scales were gone and faces lighter, / [But] when we wake we hate our brother, we still move to hurt each other…” Can all this wrongness be avenged, and the world be brought back to perfection again? St. Paul once said, taking our tsunamis and natural disasters into consideration as well, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves … groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” Can this groan-filled period of perennial “revenge” (curse and consequence avenging sin) end? Can it be paid for, once and for all? Can we have a new world order?
Witnessed by those who later recorded the event, God’s selfless genius set out to answer those questions, through this ‘higher form of revenge’ I’d mentioned above: if His instruction to turn the other cheek was a footnote, then this would be the book; if that the trailer, then this the movie; that a hint, this everything He ever hinted at. Allow me to elaborate, using Jon Foreman’s (lead singer of
Switchfoot) song “Revenge”, which I believe masterfully tells the story of how this ‘godly revenge’ was executed, through a murder. A story that he or his bandmates didn’t feel like putting a price tag on. Maybe they felt the story was priceless. Maybe because it’s a story about the greatest free gift ever. “About a specific murder,” said Jon once, while introducing the song.
The Song: identifying the speakers, and a patternAs I set out to dissect the lyrics of this song, to understand it (that experience inspired this essay, hence my academic focus on it), it was difficult to identify the speaker in the song. I think it’s pretty obvious, if you
read the lyrics, that they indisputably refer to Christ’s crucifixion. Sometimes it seemed like it was from the perspective of the thief hung on the cross next to Christ (to whom He said “today you will be with me in paradise”), at other times I wondered if it was Jon’s voice, while some lines, though it seemed a stretch, sounded like it could be Christ’s. As I chewed the cud some more, I found holes in each of those arguments, and stopped looking for one voice, realizing that it needn’t have just one speaker, but may be a cocktail of multiple voices. Like in a movie, where the director captures the subject through different lenses—the subject in this case being the image of Christ hung up on the cross. But to be reasonably sure that this was the effect Jon was trying to achieve, I needed to find a pattern, some kind of structure in the song. And find a pattern I did: with a new character in the fray – the Roman soldier whose conversion experience at the foot of the cross brings to mind the line “that’s when the irony hit me, [that] this was revenge”. All three voices in the song—the thief, the soldier, Jon—were hearts that were forever changed by the experience of witnessing Him hanging on the cross. The first two were the only ones in the Bible who experienced such revelation through being physically present at the crucifixion of Christ (pattern, anyone?), while Jon, admittedly a believer, represents everyone that can bring themselves to visualizing and appreciating the magnitude of what was taking place on that hillock some 2000 years ago. The speakers of the first six stanzas of the song also revealed a looping pattern: thief-soldier-Jon-thief-soldier-Jon. The last stanza, while somewhat continuing the pattern by leaning towards the thief’s voice (the words “Think of me, Lord” allude to the thief's plea, “Remember me, Lord”, in the biblical account of the crucifixion), seemed to blend all the voices, for a fitting conclusion that voices the cry of many hearts, not just the thief's. Over the next three sub-headings, I will attempt to substantiate my claim that the aforementioned speakers are the main voices in this impressive work of poetry.
The Song: the “thief” stanzasI'm the failure, I'm everyone's foolAnd I'm losing my cool at the endI'm the loser, my number's come upI've been hung up with thoughts of revengeRevenge, revenge(stanza 1)
I watched heaven dying todayAnd I'm gonna die here tonightI'm a villain, I deserve to be deadI've been hung up for wrecking my lifeRevenge, revenge(stanza 4)The first stanza opens the song with clever subtlety, by making it hard to distinguish whether it’s Jon’s voice or the speaker is someone else—which helps artfully ease us into the story. It seems like it could be the voice of humanity: we, “the church of … the failures and the fools”, the soldiers who hung Him up, the thieves who made His death necessary. But, on a closer look at the song’s structure, and the lines “my number’s come up / I’ve been hung up with thoughts of revenge”, I felt I could safely assume the speaker is the thief, more than anyone else – the more repentant of the two thieves hung on crosses next to Christ’s for their crimes, the one who swallowed his pride, admitting that it was he who screwed up, aware that he was “losing [his] cool at the end”, rather than just losing it without pause and taking his bitterness out on the innocent Jesus who was hanging next to him, like the other thief did. In the fourth stanza (quoted above, which I’ve also identified as the thief’s voice), the lines “I’m a villain, I deserve to be dead / I’ve been hung up for wrecking my life”, seem to paraphrase the repentant thief’s words in the gospel account, “We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man (Jesus) has done nothing wrong.”
The Song: the “soldier” stanzasI watched you from my terminal viewAs you struggled to rise to your endI laughed hard at the insults we threwAs the weight of the world found revengeRevenge, revenge(stanza 2)So I stopped for a momentTo look at the sun (or Son)Die in the dayThat's when the irony hit meThis was revengeThat love had descendedAnd stolen our pain away(stanza 5)The Roman soldier watched Christ being persecuted and led to his death, from his “terminal” view, i.e. his limited view – his point of view that lacked understanding of what was going on, or of who Christ was. As the soldier watched Christ “struggle to rise to [his] end” (after falling down when trying to carry the heavy cross amidst flogging, I would imagine), and as he “laughed hard at the insults [they] threw”, “the weight of the world found revenge.” You see, the weight of a world made heavy by its sins, was seeking revenge. All the bad deeds ever done were crying out for justice, the wrongs were crying to be righted. The voice of a murdered Abel's blood was “screaming to [God] from the ground.” But Abel's (and every other victimized person’s) vengeance was met in the most unexpected yet effective way – through someone else who led Himself to the slaughterhouse, to take upon Himself the punishment that was due to the murderers.
But, at the foot of the cross, as the spear that pierced Christ's belly brought forth gushing water, the soldier “stopped for a moment”. The gospel accounts say, when the Son (of God) breathed his last breath, the sun darkened at noon, and an earthquake broke open tombs, bringing many dead people back to life– nature revolted while observing the brutal murder of its Maker, and the power of death was loosened, as if to hint at Christ's resurrection which was soon to come. The irony of it all may have struck the Roman soldier when he looked at the darkened sun, or when he looked at the Son, or both—Jon seems to intentionally play with these homophones—as he exclaimed, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” But wait a minute; what’s the irony in any of this? [We would be in a better position to approach the answer to this question, the heart of this essay, after exploring the “Jon” stanzas below.]
The Song: the “Jon” stanzasThe world hung upside downI drew first blood, I drew first bloodWith my hate for a crownI drew first blood, I drew first blood, revenge(stanza 3)We consumed heaven's SonAnd I drew first blood, I drew first bloodAnd my hate was undoneI drew first blood, I drew first blood, revenge(stanza 6)In the above confessional stanzas, Jon points the finger at himself, rather than the Romans or the Jews or at thieves and soldiers who have killed way more people than Jon would ever as much as touch to harm. When I think of “the world hung upside down”, I can’t help but be reminded of that scene in the
Passion of the Christ, where, after being cruelly flogged, Jesus was dragged along the ground by his arms, his body frontside-up and his head hanging upside-down, with the camera capturing the giddy, bloody-eyed view through Christ’s eyes. His world hung upside-down, and I drew first blood. With my hate for His crown (mine and humankind’s rebellion against God), I was necessitating His crucifixion. I necessitate His death, and metaphorically nail Him to that cross every day, because I’m not a good person. A far cry from His perfection, as I still live in my fallen flesh, in a fallen world. (Although we’re redeemed by faith, a complete, physical redemption of things is yet to come.) None of us are holy enough to have a relationship with a perfectly holy God, and we cannot achieve that holiness by our own strength, thanks to the corrupted bodies we're born with, and the corrupted world we're born into. But by His grace, and through His death, which wipes out my wrongs, God counts me as if I were good. Not only did Christ take up our sins so He was seen as if He were a sinner, but through His sacrifice, we can now take up Christ's holiness so we're seen as if we're as holy as Him. It's like we wear “Christ-masks”, because of which we can now have a relationship with a holy God even when we lead less-than-holy lives. “My hate was undone,” and gets undone still, when all the s*** in me was nailed to that cross, and gets nailed to it still. “We consumed heaven’s son”, while He let Himself be consumed – a once-and-for-all sacrifice for all sins.
The Beautiful Irony…Here's a storyHow a thief had been robbedHow a murder had stolen my rageThink of me, Lord, I'm a few breaths awayAs my lungs finally rip from the cageRevenge(stanza 7)The reason for his brutal death wasn’t, as straightforward thinking (and the previous paragraph) might suggest, merely mankind’s “hate for a crown” (hate for authority/God), or merely some innate thirst for blood to atone for what we had no idea about, but it was God exacting His revenge on the sins of the world, ironically, by sacrificing Himself. In a way, we weren’t really the vengeful ones in the picture; instead, we were the ones who “drew first blood”, who caused the offence in the first place – and God was the one taking revenge, by shedding His own blood to pay for our act of drawing first blood – by paying for original sin (Adam & Eve’s), as well as all the sins mankind ever committed or will commit. He took revenge by hurting Himself, not us (the ones who actually deserved it). And this is the amazing irony, in how it was an act of revenge, yet, at the same time, an act of selfless love. Never have revenge or justice met in such perfect harmony with mercy, love or grace, as at the Cross. His “love had descended and stolen our pain away” – it wasn’t His pain, it was ours, but He stole it. He “tricked” or outsmarted the mathematical (one for one, tit for tat) system that justice is, to defeat it’s power over us: by cleverly stealing away the punishment that was due to us, while at the same time meeting the requirements of this justice-system, by taking the punishment upon Himself. His “murder had stolen my rage”. This was a story of “how a thief [on the cross] had been robbed.” By God.
Jon has said the theme of their album “Oh! Gravity.” is the rarely-asked question “why do good things happen to bad people?” (not the oft-asked “why do bad things happen to good people?”)—a question they have also raised in explicit relation to the idea of grace, when discussing the previous album “Nothing Is Sound”. Evidently, he was pondering this mystery: how could such grace, such goodness, such love and selflessness from our Maker, be meted out to undeserving, “bad” people like us? In another Switchfoot song, Jon wonders, “Is this fiction, or divine comedy? Hope has given Himself to the worst … Where the last of the last finish first.” This ‘amazing grace’, this unmerited favor, is the very heart of the Christian faith.
Conclusion: Have hatred and gravity won?In conclusion, I think it’s fitting to consider the only line in the song “Revenge” that doesn’t fit into the stanza structure laid out above: “have hatred and gravity won?” Since the line is made to stand out in the song’s structure (and it’s not the bridge, but between stanzas 2 and 3), Jon might have intended the line to have extra importance. Interestingly, when explaining their song “Oh! Gravity.”, Jon referred to gravity as the force that binds everything, and said he was asking gravity why we couldn’t keep our relationships—our social world—together, like it kept our physical world together. In this sense, “hatred” and “gravity” are opposite ideas – one pulls apart, while the other binds. So, in light of the “Revenge” story, where other similarly opposing ideas like justice, mercy, revenge and love meet, I think Jon might be asking, “have hatred and gravity both won?” At the cross, in a way, they both did win, but briefly. The haters spat and killed and split the spoils, and love still descended. Love didn't take the hatred away, but absorbed it, paid for it, and then overlooked it because it was paid for – it was no longer messing up the equation. Just like even though we're sinners (i.e. hatred's victory), God now looks upon us as if we're holy, only because He paid for it (i.e. gravity's victory or essence now taken beyond just the physical world, through His death.) Though hatred and gravity seemed to have “won” temporarily at the cross, it was, in the end, gravity's (or God’s) victory, because Christ rose from the dead and thereby undid the work of hate, besides defeating death. The importance of this may have been best captured by Jaroslav Pelikan, right before he died, when he uttered the powerful sentiment, “If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen – nothing else matters.” That question, “have hatred and gravity won?”, and it's answer, I believe, summarizes this story, in a nutshell. The mystery of it, in a line.
Celebrating the risen Christ who overcame death and sin, many Christians sing Dr. Watts' old hymn on Sunday mornings:
Blood has a voice to pierce the skies:'Revenge!' the blood of Abel cries;But the dear stream when Christ was slainSpeaks peace as loud from ev'ry vein.Though the blood of Christ speaks peace from every vein, it is only because it afforded that peace by accomplishing the greatest act of revenge ever – the very revenge that Abel’s murdered blood cried for. The very revenge that you and I cry for when we’re wronged. When He died, His last words weren’t “I am finished”, but “it is finished”. “It” was a mission, the very reason He stripped Himself of His right to remain in His comforts as God, and came down to earth to be one among us, to save us vermins who, in our ignorance, spat on our Maker and cruelly put Him to death. But He was in control all the while, executing a selfless masterplan, becoming The Way by which we may be saved from what we truly deserve. And His name is Love.
Unknown at 1:35 pm
God is perfect, we are sinful, so there is a great gap between us. We may try to feel better through work, relationships, sport or religion. But all our attempts fail, because we have ignored the real problem - turning our back on God.
Jesus took the consequences of our self-centredness by giving up his life on the cross. He proved he had broken sin's destructive power by rising from the dead. Jesus offers us freedom from guilt and a bridge back to God.
