The Beatles song John Lennon thought Jesus would dismiss: “Wouldn’t mean that much to him”
In the world of John Lennon, nothing seemed to be truly sacred.
He had more than a few causes that he was willing to fight for during his lifetime, but both in and out of The Beatles, there were often times when he could easily take the piss out of things that most people would hold in high esteem. A lot of it may have been in good fun, but there were always bound to be problems when bringing religion into the mix, and Lennon was ready to stick his neck on the line every single time.
Granted, it’s not like Lennon was deliberately trying to provoke people every single time he gave an interview. There were certainly cheeky moments in his past where he would make some backhanded comment, but ever since the “more popular than Jesus” moment in the mid-1960s, it was clear that he at least knew when he was pushing the wrong buttons. Then again, those buttons also demand to be pressed more than a few times.
After all, the song ‘God’ is practically one big condemnation against any kind of organised religion. In his heart of hearts, the idea of believing in false idols was always going to be a lost cause, and that applied to everyone from Christianity to Buddhism to even faith in his fellow rock and roll stars. But that’s because he also felt that he felt religion could turn its back on others just as easily.
And while he was never going to be able to get away with making a song about faithlessness in The Beatles, he could at least give his own perspective after the fact. Although a song like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was far from the most optimistic song in the world, Lennon was convinced that any kind of Christian doctrine wouldn’t have ever given a care for what Paul McCartney’s lonely people were really about.
Since the whole song is about working one’s way through loneliness, Lennon said that Jesus was never going to help people like Ms Rigby or Father McKenzie through their problems, saying, “I don’t like supposing that somebody like Jesus was alive now and pretending and imagining what he’d do. But if he was Jesus and he held that he was the real Jesus that had the same views as before – well, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ wouldn’t mean that much to him.”
While this was a bold claim to be making in the same year that supposed fans were burning Beatles records, it’s not like Lennon was critiquing religion outright. He had been aware of the teachings of Jesus for years at that point, but if you think about where he would be going in the next few years, the mentality he had here wouldn’t be fully realised until he started working in primal therapy.
Although those days of screaming through his pain could not have been easy, it did at least give him perspective. At the end of the day, there was never going to be anyone like Jesus who would come and save him, so the phrase “I just believe in me” in the song ‘God’ is practically an extension of what he was saying about ‘Eleanor Rigby’ all those years before. But that didn’t mean that Lennon denounced religion altogether, either.
When raising his son, Sean, he had taught him how to pray before, but if there was anything that he believed in by that point, it was the importance of empathy. Sure, he had anger issues just like the rest of us, but he felt that the best way to work through that pain was to try to find a way to spread peace throughout the world rather than keeping everyone in their own separate boxes.
That way, someone like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ didn’t have to be forgotten after all the rice has been picked up in those churches. He may have turned his back on religion later on in life, but ‘Eleanor Rigby’ wasn’t about him trying to find faith on the other side. It was about reaching out to people who couldn’t quell the loneliness inside themselves.
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