| Brand New – Jesus Christ Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I always believed that this song was about someone struggling with the implications of human worthlessness at the core of Christianity, and trying to reconcile them with the idea that God loves human beings and has made a personal sacrifice to save them. Christianity, as I understand it, holds that all people are irredeemably sinful, and that they could never possibly get into heaven on their own -- but God sacrifices himself out of love on their behalf. If you really think about, it, though, that's kind of weird: the message is that, no matter how well you live your life, you're scum. You get God's love, but you could never deserve it. So, you've got the narrator of the song: a profound believer who doesn't believe in *himself*. He's keenly aware of his religion's message about his sinful nature (for instance: "my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark") but also aware that God is, apparently, giving him a second chance. He's afraid of coming face-to-face with God and having to account for the fact that he's still a bad person ("I'm not scared to die -- I'm a little bit scared of what comes after"). What's more, he can't get the idea of Jesus' return out of his head: Jesus says that he'll come back subtly, and that true believers will know when it's happened. But what if the narrator's not good enough to know? What if he misses it, or worse, mistakes his Lord for an impostor and "crucifies" him all over again? These worries dominate the narrator's thoughts, and so, for all that his religion claims to offer him grace, it's only clouding his mind with pain and fear. |
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