The Background
1968 was a rough year. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated. Students were in the streets in Paris, Chicago, and just about everywhere else. A lot of people expected the Beatles to grab a megaphone and join the barricades.
John Lennon wrote “Revolution” instead, and it disappointed almost everybody. The radicals were annoyed that he wouldn’t endorse destruction. The establishment was annoyed that he was singing about revolution at all. The loud, distorted single version came out as the B-side of “Hey Jude.” A slower version, “Revolution 1,” landed on the White Album, where Lennon famously couldn’t decide whether to sing “count me out” or “count me in.” So he sang both. I have made many decisions the same way.
The song’s message is pretty simple. Sure, we all want to change the world. But if your plan involves hate and destruction, don’t count on me. Show me the plan.
Through a Christian Lens
Lennon wasn’t writing a sermon, but he stumbled near something true. Changing the world by force tends to produce new tyrants wearing nicer slogans. History has a long list of revolutions that started with liberation and ended with someone else holding the whip.
The disciples had their own revolutionary expectations. Many people hoped Jesus would raise an army and throw out Rome. Peter even pulled a sword in the garden. Jesus told him to put it away. Then He started the most radical revolution in history, and He did it with a towel, a basin, a cross, and an empty tomb.
Lennon sang that we’d all love to see the plan. God has one. It doesn’t start with tearing down institutions. It starts with tearing down the one in our own chest. “You better free your mind instead,” the song says. Paul said something similar about two thousand years earlier, with fewer guitar overdubs.
Romans 12:2 (KJV)
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
— JC
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