Years ago, one of my Bible students at an evangelical college, upon discovering my distinctively unusual, if not contrarian, tastes in music for that subculture―no insipid, saccharine "Contemporary Christian Music" or blues-stripped "Christian Rock," let alone no Christian Rap―asked in disbelief, "Don't you listen to Christian music?" I replied, "Sure I do. I listen to Bach … and U2." Of course, this was an exaggeration. Besides the sacred works of Bach, Handel, Beethoven, and others in the Western canon, I also love the hymns of such venerable men as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, not to mention the long, storied tradition of English choral music. And I also love the early, 1980s, output of the Irish rock band U2, three of whose four members are professing Christians.
This was a fact of which I was unaware when their anthem, "New Year's Day," made its way onto the AOR radio waves in early 1983. The song was so riveting that I immediately went out and picked up the album, War, which to this day I still consider the band's best, rawest work. And my jaw dropped when I listened to the record's closing cut, simply titled "40:"
I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He lift me up out of the pits
Out of the miry clay
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long, how long
How long to sing this song?
He set my feet upon a rock
And made my footsteps firm
Many will see
Many will see and fear
These were the words of the first three verses of one of my favorite psalms since childhood, Psalm 40, a song of thanksgiving for YHWH's rescue of the psalmist from an undisclosed calamity. Interestingly, Bono's lyrics extended only to those first three verses. Far from simply being lazy or happy to recite the words without context, a la so many sappy evangelical "praise choruses," Bono, I think, has set his own context for the words within the album itself.
The key is to be found in the question Bono introduces after his rendering of Psalm 40:3: "How long to sing this song?" Those with ears to hear will remember this lyric from the album's epic opener, "Sunday, Bloody Sunday:" "How long, how long must we sing this song?" These nearly identical questions bookend the album, forming a literary inclusio of sorts and encouraging the listener to hear the songs as mutually interpretive.
Psalm 40 is an unusual psalm, in that it reverses the normal structural order found in the classic psalms of lament (i.e., lament, petition, assurance, praise). Here the psalm famously opens with thanksgiving, and only later introduces the themes of lament and petition (Psalm 40:11-17), in which the psalmist's plight is implicitly linked to "sins" that have "overtaken" him (verse 12). Whether the psalm, as it is currently configured, is the result of the merging of two originally discrete songs, or the introductory thanksgiving is written in anticipation of forgiveness and restoration, is neither here nor there. What I would like to suggest is that Bono has used the earlier "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" as the "lament" for which "40" is the response of praise for the anticipated deliverance.*
The harrowing "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is one of the band's most famous songs. It harkens back quite obviously to the awful "Bloody Sunday" of 30 January 1972, when British soldiers inexcusably shot 28 unarmed protesters, killing 14, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Less well known is the additional, implicit, allusion to the "Bloody Sunday" of 21 November 1920 precipitated by Michael Collins in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence. Though the song is often labeled as a "political" anthem, its point of view is that of a weary observer of the barbarity, and it is deliberately nonsectarian. The singer sees the unimaginable carnage―Bono brilliantly weaves in an allusion to Matthew 10:35 ("And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart") and an ironic twist to Isaiah 22:13/1 Corinthians 15:32 ("we eat and drink while tomorrow they die")―yet "won't heed the battle call" while he insists that "tonight, we can be as one." Indeed, in one of the most profound observations of the song, Bono notes that sectarianism is futile because the indictment at the heart of human hate and violence is universal: "The trench is dug within our hearts." And whatever "victory" one side might seem to achieve will inevitably prove illusory, simply feeding the perpetual cycle of violence: "There's many lost, but tell me, who has won?" Indeed, the real battle has only begun, "to claim the victory Jesus won." And how did Jesus win this victory, you might ask? The answer is profoundly simple: By enduring violence rather than inflicting it; by suffering all the onslaughts of Sin and the various other "principalities and powers" and thereby exhausting them. "Victory" is only possible by following Christus Victor and implementing, peacefully, the victory he won at the cost of his very life at Calvary.
Bono's use of Psalm 40 fits nicely in this context. He praises the Lord for his rescue of him from the hate and violence that universally mars humankind and distorts the "image of God" which is the human vocation. But the struggle is real. "How long?" he asks. Well, the victory was won by Christ on the cross, but it is not total, at least insofar as its implementation is concerned. Jesus himself gave us the answer to this question, when he told his followers to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Even so come, Lord Jesus.
*This was argued persuasively by Andrew Zach Lewis, "Stravinsky and U2 Fix Psalm 40," Journal of the Bible and Its Reception 2 (2015) 69-85.
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