[CHAPTER 2] — JESUS IS COMING SOON
The music of Willie Johnson
In the year of 19 and 18, God sent a mighty disease.
It killed many a-thousand, on land and on the seas.
2020 was supposed to be a great year. It turned out to be the start of what became the worldwide COVID-19 Pandemic. The impacts of the Pandemic were felt around the world, but depending on where you lived, your experience of the pandemic was vastly different. We all had an experience of the Pandemic, but the commonalities of that experience were limited to several major restrictions, like international travel or needing to wear a mask for the first time. Living in one of the most isolated and affluent parts of the world meant that, in any sort of objective terms, my family and I suffered the least of just about anyone on the planet from the worldwide disaster that was COVID-19.
Living a life that was heavily sheltered and shielded from the Pandemic's direct impacts did not alleviate my exposure to the social upheaval that was going on, largely due to the digital world that is now integrating with our physically embodied lives. Debates about the right to gather, the wearing of masks and the use of vaccines were heated and often divisive. Generally, polarized camps developed that had the potential to split up families and churches. The issues were almost always complex, and most of us were in no position to take an informed position on the policy debates; we needed to trust someone we considered to be authoritative on the topic. Unfortunately, social media and the internet have created a world that allows people to be put into a particular tribe and then fed a curated tribal diet of news information. We were suffering from a crisis of trust and authority.
The crisis we were suffering in, I suspect, at least in part, was due to us being in a generation that had never experienced a global interruption to our daily lives in the way that this Pandemic was affecting us, all of us. Only our very elderly had known what it was like to live through a world war, and next to no one alive could speak of experiencing a global Pandemic. How could the football season be shut down? What do you mean there’s no Olympics this year? In my part of the world, during the early times of the Pandemic, the big decision to be made was whether schools would be kept open. People were sent out of offices to work from home, but many “essential workers” worked jobs that did not have the luxury of being done at home. The challenge was, if you send the kids home from school, how will you keep your essential workers out in the field? In my part of the world, the restrictions on gatherings were possibly the least restrictive of anywhere in the world. Whilst it is true that in-person church services were shut down, this only lasted a few short months where I lived and even the requirement to wear masks at church came and went fleetingly.
Well, the nobles said to the people, "You better close your public schools."
"Until the events of death has ending, you better close your churches too."
We thought the COVID-19 Pandemic was unprecedented. The reality is that they come around pretty regularly in history. Although I had not known it, there was a Pandemic in my own grandparents’ lifetime. As the words of Johnson’s song proclaim, “Great disease was mighty and the people were sick everywhere. It was an epidemic, it floated through the air.” This sort of disease had been around before, and the story from a hundred years ago seems eerily familiar; “The doctors they got troubled and they didn't know what to do. They gathered themselves together, they called it the Spanishin flu.”
What was really eerie for me was the way that Johson starts the song; he proclaims a warning about the coming Christ, “Jesus coming soon”.1 In case you were thinking this was an encouragement, Johnson is explicit in telling us that it is a warning: “We done told you, our God's done warned you”. Not only that but we are told that God sent the disease. What do we do with that? Should we think that God also sent the COVID-19 Pandemic? To ask these questions is to face up to the problem of evil. It also prompts us to discuss matters of God’s sovereignty and the manner in which God’s judgement is enacted in the world in which we live.
For people like me, and I hazard to guess Johnson himself, we take what we read in the Holy Scriptures, what we now call the “Bible”, very seriously. In a real sense, we stake our lives on certain claims made in that book. The book also contains numerous accounts of plagues being sent by God. Johnson mentions in the lyrics of this song the book of Zechariah speaking of a plague, one of rotting flesh. Zechariah’s plague prophecy, like all Scripture, requires interpretation. If I am honest with you, I would have to say that these stories of plagues being sent by God are some of the most difficult passages in Scripture to interpret. The difficulty comes from the dissonance between what I understand deadly plagues to be and the morality of sending such plagues, whether it be on the firstborn of Egypt or any of the other seemingly innocent victims of supposed God-sent plagues.2 My moral intuitions could be wrong; then again, as far as I can tell, they are and continue to be shaped by the same Jesus that Johnson tells us is coming soon.
In reading Hebrew Scripture, I am only invited to do so as one grafted into the family of Abraham because of my commitment to follow in the way of that first-century Jewish Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. As such, I read it with a couple of guiding principles: as promoting love of God and love of neighbour; and as words about Jesus.3 Although some may object to my approach, I believe that the Scriptures often read us more than we read them. By this, I mean that sometimes we assume things are happening in the text that may not be so; other times, the Scriptures bring out and confront beliefs that we already hold about God. I suspect that, at times, what we read makes explicit fearful things we already believed about God, but the process of encountering it in the text is an encounter with the Spirit of God that is “true like a measurement, like a cut, dividing the bone of the soul from the marrow of the spirit, laying bare the hearts of our hearts”.4
My take on these really tough questions is to always approach them with as much patience and humility as possible, and at the same time, as boldly as I can, I want to say what I believe to be the truest thing I know: God is good. And another thing; God don’t never change.
The first time I heard this song was the Cowboy Junkies cover version, which samples Johnson’s original track, making the song have an even eerier feel.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Translated by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1978, p. 75. Gregory, the fourth-century bishop, experienced similar dissonance and offered wisdom for the interpretation of such historical accounts of plagues; Gregory is an ancient Christian who is worth reading.
This approach is built on Jesus’ own teaching. For examples, see Matthew 7:12, Mark 12:29-31 and Luke 23:27.
Chris Green, Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture, 2 edition (CPT Press, 2020), 147.