The Man Comes Around

I get up an hour or so before the rest of my family on Sunday mornings to make a large breakfast of animal protein, gluten-rich carbohydrates, and clarified caffeine products in order to fuel the morning service. As a spiritual discipline, I take advantage of the solitude to carefully attend to appropriately edifying music. In addition to listening to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme a hundred times or so, I like to work through Johnny Cash's American Recordings. A highlight, of course, is "The Man Comes Around." Given that we repeatedly hear how Americans are turned off by Christianity's claims to exclusive truth, the broad appeal of a song about the impending divine wrath is a bit surprising. It's not just evangelicals who love this song; in fact, I get the impression the majority of its fans have never darkened a sanctuary door.

I think two factors explain its appeal. For one, no one is actually interested in moderation or vague, life-affirming sentiments. People want truth and clarity, both of which must, by definition, be direct and hard-edged. Our Lord's return in glory and judgment must terrify because it is true. When it comes to the divine, most people prefer the clarity of terror to the uselessness of generic affirmation.

The second factor, quite simply, is the King James Version. Johnny Cash thoroughly absorbed its vocabulary and, more importantly, its cadences, and here produced his own impressionistic rendering of John's Apocalypse. Listening to "The Man Comes Around," one is never entirely sure how each word or phrase is to be understood, but the cumulative imagery is quite plain, and undeniably grand. There's nothing quaint or humorous about 

It's hard for thee to kick against the prick.
In measured hundredweight and penny pound,
When the man comes around.

In context, those words hit just about as hard as

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still.
Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still.
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still.
Listen to the words long written down,
When the man comes around.

Just, righteous, or filthy, nothing quite sounds as much like the Bible as the good old KJV, and nothing terrifies or comforts so much as the clear truth our Lord Jesus Christ shall come again to judge the quick and the dead.