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A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. It depicted Bob Dylan’s rise from obscurity in the folk music scene of Greenwich Village in 1961 to his ultimate superstardom four years later. But, as I’ve sat with the movie, it’s occurred to me that the movie isn’t really about Bob Dylan at all. What the movie is about is all the people around Bob Dylan. The people who were at first amazed by him but by the end of the movie are infuriated with him.
There’s Pete Seeger. He sees Dylan as a youthful face who will bring folk music to the masses.
Joan Baez is similarly amazed when she hears Bob Dylan perform one of his fiery protest songs, Masters of War. She sees Dylan as a powerful ally shining a spotlight on the causes she cares about.
Even more amazed at Bob Dylan are the crowds who flock to see him perform. They are a mix of earnest young folkies who see him as one of their own, pouring over his lyrics for clues and messages, and rebellious teens who see in him an icon of sixties cool. They see Dylan as the voice of their generation.
But by the mid-sixties, Dylan is itching to break away from the folk scene. He wants to make music that is less political and more universal. And he feels constrained by the expectations of his rabid fan base. He starts getting interested in forming a band and making rock music. But every step he takes in that direction, he feels people tugging on him trying to pull him back. Seeger wants him to stay acoustic. Baez wants him to stick to protest music. The crowds want him to play the hits, not the new stuff.
The movie culminates in Dylan’s legendary set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. It had been billed as a homecoming for the now-international superstar. And the festival organizers were leaning heavily on him to play the old acoustic music that made him famous.
Bob Dylan took the stage that night, “went electric,” and plugged in his electric guitar and played a set with his rock band, the scene was pandemonium. The crowd of earnest folkies that had shown up to hear their idol turned on him. Someone in the crowd yelled “Judas!” Many booed and covered their ears. People began throwing things at the stage.
It’s easy to understand why everyone was so upset. In a way, the folk scene had created Bob Dylan and they felt like they had a certain ownership of him. He was one of their own. He was their avatar. But now he had turned his back on them, and there was no going back. He was leaving the folk music scene behind.
Jesus has been quickly gaining fame in larger Galilee. He doesn’t yet have disciples. He’s a solo act. He’s been going from town to town, preaching the message of the Kingdom of God, and performing miracles. He’s gaining the reputation of a prophet and many are hoping he will take up the mantle of Messiah.
Now he has come back to his hometown of Nazareth. While he is there, he is invited to preach in his home synagogue. It starts out well enough. Jesus stands and reads from the scroll of Isaiah.
This is a big hit. This is exactly the kind of scripture the crowd had come hoping to hear. The people of Northern Galilee are a famously nationalistic and anti-establishment group. They resented their Roman oppressors as well as the aristocratic temple priests that seemed to always sell the little guy out to stay in power. There had been more than one peasant revolt in the area when Jesus was a kid. In fact, Galilee was the birthplace of the zealot movement.
Reading from Isaiah’s famous declaration of the year of Jubilee with its promise of good news for the poor and oppressed and disruption of the status quo brought the house down.
When he sat down to teach, all eyes were on him. Then he delivered a message about the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise happening right here and right now. The crowd was amazed not just at the force of his anti-establishment message but the eloquent way he delivered it.
As he spoke, they whispered to each other, “This is our guy! He grew up just down the street from here! And he talks like that!”
They were bristling with pride that their very own Jesus was now a folk hero. And here he was, also claiming the mantle of Messiah. Who would have thought, a man from Nazareth— Joseph’s boy! —would be the one to raise an army, overthrow Rome, and restore Israel to its former glory?
They saw in Jesus someone who would lead a movement, achieve their political purposes, and bring honor to their community. And now he would surely seal the deal by performing some signs and wonders like they had heard he had done in other places.
The crowd was hearing everything it wanted to hear.
Then Jesus put on his shades, plugged in his Fender Stratocaster, and went electric.
“You think I’m here to perform for you? To achieve your ends? You think I belong to you?
“No, No prophet is ever accepted in his hometown! Why should I be any different?
“Remember Elijah? During the famine, there were widows everywhere in Israel, but instead of helping them, he went outside of his country to a pagan widow.
“Remember Elisha? During his day, there were lepers everywhere in Israel, but instead of helping them, he helped a foreign leper named Naaman.”
The people’s amazement quickly turned to fury. What was this talk of going outside Israel? The Messiah was supposed to make Israel great again by driving out the foreign element, not embrace them. How could he possibly sit there and say his message wasn’t for them? Exactly what kind of Messiah was he going to be?”
The more Jesus spoke, the more outraged the crowd became.
It was pandemonium. They tried to take him to a cliff and stone him, but Jesus broke away in the confusion. He just walked away from the people who had raised him and invested so much in him. He walked away from all their dreams and expectations. He walked away from all the things they wanted him to be.
“Errantry” is a three-page poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published in The Oxford Magazine in 1933. It was included in revised and extended form in Tolkien’s 1962 collection of short poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
It was written in a meter of Tolkien’s own invention, iambictetromiter, a meter so complicated that Tolkien only wrote in it once. The rhyming pattern is ABAB, but the end of A lines also rhyme with the beginning of B. He uses alliteration, assonance, and consonance.
J.R.R. Tolkien Errantry
…
He sat and sang a melody,
his errantry a tarrying,
he begged a pretty butterfly,
that fluttered by to marry him.
She scorned him and she scoffed at him,
she laughed at him unpitying,
so long he studied wizardry,
and sigaldry and smithying.
He wove a tissue airy thin,
to snare her in; to follow her,
he made him beetle-leatherwing,
and feather wing of swallow hair.
He caught her in bewilderment,
with filament of spider-thread.
He made her soft pavilions,
of lilies and a bridal bed,
of flowers and of thistle-down,
to nestle down and rest her in,
and silken webs of filmy white,
and silver light he dressed her in.
…
This section of the speaks of the character seeking to capture a butterfly. It speaks to the problem trying to capture beauty or power, something that comes up in Tolkien’s writing (the one ring in The Lord of the Rings).
It is a problem when we try to hold on too tight, when we try to claim for ourselves, power or beauty, and often at the expense of others–to hold the butterfly so tightly, the beauty is destroyed.
We have been living in a time, like many times before, as it turns out, that there are many, many who have decided to claim Jesus as their own. They have claimed Jesus for them, their personal ideas, their… nation. There are those who have claimed the power and might of Jesus for the sack of their politics, for winning, to be on their side.
And here’s the thing about holding on to Jesus as if he can be owned, as if he will only work for them, as if won’t work outside boundaries of those who claim–that Jesus is exclusively for (as the podcast is called) Straight, White, Americans. And not only that, that Jesus is in service to a particular group, at the expense of others, at the expense of everyone else.
Christian Nationalism is folks trying to capture Jesus for the purpose of winning, of claiming power over and against others. And what happens when we claim as our own, when we hold on too tightly, the music is stifled, the butterfly is crushed, those on the margins are captive, or killed, or left to suffer. And when they realize that Jesus isn’t working exclusively for them… well, that’s when they try to throw Jesus off a cliff, kill on a cross, or turn him into something completely different.
Jesus can’t be own, wont’ be owned. We can’t claim Jesus as exclusively as our own–we can’t let others claim Jesus, we must continue to see, to name all the places that God, that Christ is at work in lives and communities that are different from our own, in the lives of those outside of the power structures. We have to be expansive in our love of Christ, to name and live and manifest abundance. The abundant and expansive and radical love of God that is for all people, not just for people that look like me, maybe especially for people who don’t look like me. Not because we are not worthy of that love but because God gives special care to the margins. And that love and care might come from us.
It’s been a hard time. It’s been hard for me to see Jesus used as if he is power to be claimed and wielded as weapon against other people. And I don’t think it’s going to get any easier tomorrow, next week, indefinitely. We have a responsibility, to hold the love and teachings and yes, even the power, of Christ dearly and lightly–that it isn’t our to claim but our to share. Ours is to love Christ, and love the world, with open hands, hands that love and move in compassion and fully and abundantly and expansively.
Love is our calling, love is our mission, love is expanding. loving open handed, abundantly, expansively, lightly, and completely.