Dylan’s gospel songs make a fitting soundtrack to Holy Week (Kenneth Craycraft, April 15, 2025,, Our Sunday Visitor)
The title track of “Slow Train Coming” is a lyrical indictment of the moral and social pathology of American political life. It describes both various aspects of moral decadence and corruption, and the false gods and solutions invoked to address it. “Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted,” the narrator begins the song, setting the tone for a catalogue of various social and political maladies. The source of his disgust, however, is less the particular ills he describes than the assertion that we can save ourselves by our own effort. He asks of his companions, “Are they lost or are they found? / Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down / All their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon?”Many people who hailed Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday fundamentally misunderstood the nature of his kingdom. Expecting a violent insurrection against imperial Roman rule, many welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem only as a political liberator. He was greeted not as the eternal savior, but rather as a political revolutionary. They reduced Jesus’ role to a this-worldly political hero who had come to replace one kind of coercive earthly politics with another. They sought a human solution to a divine problem.