This is but three pages of a ten page rhetorical criticism piece I did for a class of mine. I loved writing about this! Here’s a little part of it. Lemme know if, for whatever reason, you want to read the whole thing! -JD
Songwriting and metaphor have long been friends. This album could probably be looked at as an extended metaphor for one thing or another, but is better understood as a retelling of a greater and unimaginably more elaborate metaphor for the relationship of the redeemed human to God. The most common, and perhaps the most under quoted recounting of this metaphor is found in Romans 6:4 from the Bible. It says, “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life.” The death is cold and permanent, save for the overcoming “glory of the Father” that brings back to life the slain, creating a being that has seen the grave but has not been held by it, now to live forever above it in the victory of Christ. The Medicine begins with a call to the Dead in a song called “Reckoning Day.” The band pleads, “Would you come alive, everybody? Would you come alive, everyone?” (McMillan) In a later song on the record, called “Out of the Ground” they sing “One by one, come undone, come alive, come alive!” Their words are not addressed to the living, but the dead. This has rhetorical significance. A person cannot understand their need for Resurrection if they do not understand the spiritual grave of their unredeemed life. John Mark hails his listeners in a way that does not merely suggest their condition, but instead informs them of it. To listen to this music, you are asked to assume this identity or acknowledge it as a person whom you were at one point. The listener, in this state, must operate out of a different ideology. Death is a hopeless and usually final state, because who can be rescued from being dead? The bible speaks of this state in Ephesians 2:5, “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” This “Dead” identity makes possible Christ as rescuer, Christ as champion over the grave, making of Him not a mere Sunday school lesson or a helpless baby in a manger but the “First born of the slain,” as sung by John Mark McMillan, leading us as well into a glorious new life with Him. Just as this story does not leave the “Dead” in the grave, so The Medicine does not let it end there, but calls the sinner “Out of the Ground.”
The other identity, as has already been introduced, is this, the “Resurrected.” The theme is consistent throughout the record, but three songs in particular speak well of it. The first of these songs worth mentioning is “Death in His Grave,” a sort of modern-day hymn. “So three days in darkness slept the Morning Sun of righteousness, but rose to shame the throes of death and overturn his rule.” Later in the song it is recounted that Jesus “Laid down in grief, but awoke with the keys of hell on that day, first born of the slain. The man Jesus Christ laid death in His grave.” (McMillan) It should be understood here that “His grave” is the empty grave that Jesus left behind. It is as if to say that the place where Jesus was meant to stay became the place where death was forever conquered. This victorious idea is a necessary framework for understanding one’s position as “Resurrected.” The ideological mindset of the redeemed must place Christ at the center, in the understanding that you have not “saved” yourself, because you could not save yourself. This oft-forgotten principal of the Christian faith may be drawn from the book of Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8) When McMillan, with gristly voice, sings of this great narrative climax, it is to glorify not the “Resurrected,” but the Resurrector. To better understand this position of the “Resurrected” as constructed by The Medicine, consider lyrics from another song.
In “Dress Us Up,” McMillan sings “Dress us up in Your righteousness, bring us in with a ring and a kiss. When you walk into a room, You know we can’t resist, every bottle of perfume always winds up on the floor in a mess.” (McMillan) In this first verse, McMillan references two key New Testament stories, the parable of the prodigal’s son (Luke 15:11-32) and the woman with the alabaster jar (Mark 14:3-9). Although these two stories could be analyzed at great depth, for the purposes of this paper only McMillan’s use of these stories will be discussed. By saying “Bring us in with a ring and a kiss,” John Mark is equating the “Resurrected” with the prodigals youngest son, whom was “with a ring and a kiss” welcomed back into the family after demanding his inheritance and squandering it. In the same way, the woman with the alabaster jar understood the significance of Jesus coming to her house in Bethany, and responded by pouring out her most valuable possession at his feet to show, if symbolically, that nothing she had was more valuable to her than Him and His presence. By referring to “us” in these terms, McMillan constructs the “Resurrected” as living with the ideology that (1) Even though we did not deserve grace, it has been given to us by our generous Father, and (2) that Jesus’ presence in our lives becomes more valuable to us than any other thing, which we demonstrate symbolically by our “bottles of perfume” that “always wind up on the floor in a mess.” These bottles of perfume are, in a sense, our acts of worship to Jesus, who has taken us from the “Dead,” and placed us among the “Resurrected.”
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