Forty years later, the Vatican newspaper announces it’s ready to forgive John Lennon and the Beatles for their boast about being “more popular than Jesus.” The paper has realized that these were just working class lads coping with unexpected success.
Truth is, they probably were more popular than Jesus! After all, “popularity” was never a value Jesus seemed attracted to. If he had, he surely wouldn’t have hung around with poor peasants, or worse, sinners and prostitutes. Nope, the Beatles always had it all over Jesus on the popularity scale.
Maybe Christians shouldn’t have become so worked up over this forty years ago. We should have just paid more attention to what Jesus was about – not popularity but mercy, peace, and hungering for righteousness (Matthew 5). Even John Lennon, it seems, wasn’t really dissing Jesus, just his followers – and that goes on all the time. Christians should be used to it, but we don’t take it well.
If Jesus doesn’t give two hoots about popularity, he does care about following. “Follow me,” he said, and he says to us. Which amounts to leaving behind what we were, and becoming someone new. End of the old, beginning of the new. Drowning our self-centeredness, coming to new life where God and others matter most. Following Jesus is, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, is the equivalent of being baptized in St. Paul’s New Testament letters. There’s not too much room for popularity where God’s doing a makeover in people.
But Christians get sidetracked too. It’s time to forgive the exaggerations of the Beatles, that’s true, but it’s an even better time for Christian self-examination. Arguments about popularity go nowhere, following Jesus does. That’s a bit of baptismal spirituality – letting go of ourselves to find our true selves. Jesus wants that. That’s where Lennon’s remark should take us too.
Tags: Beatles, Bonhoeffer, Jesus, John Lennon, popularity
