Give Me Jesus
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Julian Davis Reid is an artist-theologian who looks at music, faith and rest through his lens as a Black millennial Christian. Julian is also one of many speakers and creatives who will be joining us for our Enfleshing Witness gathering taking place virtually October 10-11. To get you better acquainted with Julian, we share the following piece he wrote on his blog earlier this summer.
“Give Me Jesus” is the Negro spiritual that I play to conclude my Rest Assured album and my Notes of Rest retreats. It is perhaps my favorite spiritual because of its familial, political, and spiritual significance to me.
My mother, Rev. Adonna Davis Reid, is a pastor in the United Methodist Church. When she was getting ready to move from her old appointment to her new one, she asked me to play “Give Me Jesus” at her send-off service. She requested this tune because it was a favorite of hers and one that she had received from family growing up. So starting with my distant enslaved ancestors and coming down through the annals of Black Church history to me, ending the record with Give Me Jesus reminds me of how my Black family and the Black Church has kindled my faith. (As an aside, the record begins with an inherited hymn as well: His Eye is on the Sparrow, bequeathed to me from my Grandma on my Dad’s side.) What songs do you sing that speak to how your faith has been kindled by your family?
Alongside the familial importance is the fact this song is an act of resistance. The refusal happens in the lyrics: “In the morning when I rise/give me Jesus/you can have all this world/give me Jesus” and “When I come to die/ give me Jesus/you can have all this world/give me Jesus.” It is a rebellious move for my enslaved ancestors to compose and sing a song that insisted Jesus was what they really wanted more than the world that was being denied them.
Normally those who are denied access to something are baited into wanting what they cannot have. Exhibit A is in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve are forbidden from eating from the tree but are then coaxed into desiring it by the serpent. Exhibit B is the commercial hip-hop and pop music industries today. The industry spends a lot of time and effort foregrounding music that depicts the astronomical wealth of the performers, levels of financial accumulation unattainable for most of the listeners. But we listen because we are formed to respect, admire, and even imitate the ways these entertainers have navigated late capitalism to amass the wealth that they have.
But the antebellum songwriters’ sang of the wisdom of Jesus: what good is it to gain the world but forfeit your soul? I’m amazed at the self-possession of these slaves to reject the desire to prioritize the goods of the world over a relationship with Jesus. To be sure, this isn’t to say that freedom from chattel slavery and loving treatment of Black folk are not goods worth having; they most certainly are. That said, “Give Me Jesus” reminds us that material gifts should always be put in their proper place. That's the relationship I yearn for all of my listeners to have to worldly success. Worldly goods can come in this life and we should celebrate that! But I pray we don’t hold fast to those at the expense of the rest of our souls. How can this song help you rearrange priorities about what matters in this life so that you and those around you might better rest amidst the excesses of late capitalism?
This leads to the third point: the spiritual significance. “Give Me Jesus” call us to rest assured. We can have “the assurance of Jesus” no matter what comes our way, be it a sunrise of a new day to work or the sunset of our lives. My ancestors demonstrated that a certain kind of rest is possible even when you don’t have the economic or political means to take a day off. That is, they chose to rest their souls by singing about their Crucified God. This is rest that emerges from a clear sense of purpose, one that even the crucifying slavocracy we still endure cannot wrest away. How would your life look different if you rested in Jesus’ assurance?
This post originally appeared on Julian Davis Reid’s substack called “Julian’s Note,” a weekly newsletter about music, Christian faith, and rest to promote the practice of contemplation & creativity. Read more and subscribe here.
