The Whirlwind and the Thorn Tree
Johnny Cash on Judgment, Hope, Living, and Dying
Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath. Psalm 58:9
My father was buried on my son’s 9th birthday. It was the symbolic end of Dad’s struggle against the Devil’s eraser of dementia. Across these three generations, few ties truly bind us, but one surely does.
I did not grow up in an overly musical household. Not a single Smith kept with an instrument, and only some can carry a tune. The car regularly played a horrific easy listening station in Indianapolis, WXTZ Radio, “Ecstasy 103,” elevator music that made you pray a cable might snap to put an end to the aural suffering.1
Still, music found a way. Church was full of rich, old hymns. Oldies radio stations were allowed at home, so I grew up more familiar with the 1950s than my own decade. And, there were some records, stowed in a living room side table. Prominent in the collection was Johnny Cash.
My Dad loved Johnny Cash. I love Johnny Cash. My son loves Johnny Cash. The Man in Black sings across our times and our places.
My father grew up in a West Virginia “hahl-ur”2 and worked his tail off to send me to private school in Indianapolis. My son grew up in small town Ohio, the son of a professor. My Dad’s boyhood was hunting in the woods. Mine was playing basketball and reading history and Stephen King. My son played golf and devoured The Lord of the Rings along the way. The same blood. All of us tall and broad shouldered. But different people.
But Johnny Cash abides.
My father resonated with his deep voice, relentless guitar, and country roots. When I think of my Dad, I think of Jackson, the incredible duet with June Carter Cash. They got “married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.” I think the song captures my Dad’s love for my Mom about as well as possible: full, funny, touching, and real.
The Man in Black speaks to me deeply. It is a song with a conscience, a recognition that while many people have it good, many have it worse: “But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back, up front there ought to be a man in black.” It was a song of courage. Cash tackled poverty, criminal justice, war, peace, and patriotism, and he did it in 1971, a time of tumult. He was sure to lose as many fans as he might gain when he debuted it on his television show.3
My son heard Johnny Cash from me, for certain, but I know he fell in love with Cash when he encountered his music in different media forms. Cash’s music has been popular in video games and films. Rusty Cage was in one iteration of Call of Duty, and it is full of absurd beauty, like “Too cold to start a fire, I’m burning diesel, burning dinosaur bones.” However, its absurdity is used to point to the liberation of the afterlife.
What is life but a rusty cage from which we long to be free?
The Man Comes Around defines the end of Logan, a brilliant, moving story, probably the most human of any superhero film. Logan is about the final days of Wolverine, the once indestructible hero who is now dying. Logan, the character, sacrifices himself so that others might survive.
The song fits the tone of the end of the movie perfectly, but the lyrics speak to bigger things. “The Man” is Jesus and he comes to judge the quick and the dead. “Will you partake of the last offered cup? Or disappear into the potter’s ground, when the man comes around?” Salvation is a free gift, but turning it aside brings punishment.
This core message is translated into the song’s repeated metaphor when Cash sings “the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.”4 He borrows it from Scripture, which often refers to God’s power as a whirlwind and sin as a tangle of thorns. That Christ’s crucified brow was pierced by a crown of thorns was no accident. The image, of the whirlwind and thorns, is one of eternal justice, a promise that God will right all wrongs, that he gives grace, through the death of his Son, who triumphs over sin, to those who believe. For the rest there is damnation.
There is, we learn early in life, a persistent gap between temporal and eternal justice. While God appoints those who govern, Paul tells us, and they are called to reward the good and punish the wicked, we know they regularly fail. How we behave in that gap matters a great deal.
Despair is a temptation we must resist. Instead, we embrace hope. But as believers, especially those nurtured at the knee of St. Augustine, we know our hope lies not in a policy, a president, an election, or a court decision, but in the Heavenly City. There, God’s justice will reign, and that justice includes eternal rewards through his grace and punishments for unrepentant sin. The end of days carries a gavel and that gavel both brings a hope for the future and curbs our present.5
This hope is not the Christian gospel, but it is a necessary consequence of belief in the gospel. One of the great mysteries of today, at least for me, is that America has tens of millions of Christians who claims these beliefs, but I see a Christian politics entirely devoid of meaningful, godly, eternal hope. I have devoted myself to that mystery over the last couple of years, and will continue to ponder it, hopefully here and elsewhere.
Putting a lovely woman in the service of such an abomination hopefully earned some producer, ad executive, copywriter, or agent a bowl full of brimstone.
If you are confused, just say it out loud. If you are still confused, ask someone familiar with Appalachia.
I need to go back and look at the discourse around how the song was received. Cash’s call for justice would have surely vexed many country music fans, while appealing to the young student movement—which was not exactly associated with this genre, though it has strong folk crossover, obviously.
I have no idea if it is true, and I will not chase it down right now, but Wikipedia says this phrasing came to Cash in a dream, where Queen Elizabeth called him a “thorn tree in a whirlwind.” He later found Scripture to anchor the language.
This notion of eternal rewards and punishments has dramatic consequences for politics writ large. When a people broadly believe in it, their politics and their government look and feel different. Tocqueville knew religion’s political impact in America was great because it was indirect, for it shaped the people themselves (See Vol. 1, Part 2, Chapter IX of DA). Eternal rewards and punishments also pull people from the darkest temptations of the present—nihilism and consumerism in particular. Maintaining a sense of eternal rewards and punishments is vital for democratic health, for Tocqueville, but not through the union of church and state or the political activism of pastors or priests (See Vol. 2, Part 2, Chapter XV).