Jeremy L. Berg

One of the most well-known and enduring folk anthems of the past century is Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” As I bring my Bob Dylan acoustic show to different venues these days, the only song that gets a bigger reaction than this one is “The Times They Are A-Changing”. Here’s a few of the key lines:

How many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned
How many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free
How many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see
How many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry
How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died

On the one hand, “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a very simple song lamenting some of the perennial problems facing humanity. The destructive violence of war. Deep seated racism and prejudice. Closing our eyes and our ears to the suffering cries of others. The ultimate tyranny of Death whose shadow nobody seems to escape.

On the other hand, the genius of the classic refrain is its ambiguity. Its multivalency. Its many possible meanings:

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

I have heard and sang this song many times without pausing to really ponder what it might mean that the answer to all these existential problems is “blowing in the wind.”

For many years I thought it meant that the “answer,” or remedy, to our human struggles will forever elude us, forever escape our grasp. Like grasping at the wind, we will never be able to get a grip on or wrap our arms around what’s needed to set the world right. This is the somewhat jaded outlook of Ecclesiastes where all our best efforts in the end prove to be just a futile “chasing after the wind” (Eccl. 1:14). Does Dylan share the cynical conclusion of Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind”?

At other times I have thought the refrain simply means, “The answer is very near! Keep searching! It’s only a breath away. It’s as ever-present as the wind outside your window. The answer might just arrive on the wings of tomorrow’s evening breeze.”

More recently, I have begun to sing this song in a more redemptive key! In a crowded room full of seniors at my Bob Dylan concert this week, I snuck in a mini-sermon after my last note on the harmonica faded into applause.

“Does Jesus reveal how the answer to all life’s problems is blowing in the wind in his famous exchange with truth-seeking Nicodemus in John 3?” I asked. Nicodemus sees the power of God at work in the healing, liberating and loving ministry of Jesus. Could this miracle worker from Nazareth be God’s answer to Dylan’s probing questions above?

Jesus draws our attention to the wind: “The wind (or Spirit) blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit (or Wind)” (John 3:8).

This is not just any ordinary wind gust. The Greek word pneuma and the Hebrew word ruah both can be translated either “wind” or “Spirit”. This is the divine Spirit-Wind of God blowing into deflated hearts and spiritually dead souls, resulting in New Birth! Jesus came into the world as the Breath of Heaven to awaken people to the reality of the kingdom of God in their midst.

⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit-Wind. ⁶ Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit-Wind gives birth to spirit. ⁷ You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’⁸ 

⁹ “How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

¹⁰ “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? … ¹⁶ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

So, I now sing this song with the hope that the rushing Wind of God might blow over the room. That deflated hearts who think humanity is beyond hope might feel a refreshing breeze rattling and reviving their aching bones as in Ezekiel’s vision in valley. That we might dare to believe the answer to dark chaos of our current times is the same Blowing Spirit-Wind that hovered over the chaos waters in Genesis 1 and brought order and beauty in the beginning.

The answer my friend is that war and violence will only cease when the mighty rushing wind of Pentecost begins blowing through the upper rooms of power and underground war rooms.

The answer my friend is that people will only be truly free, and become agents to help others get free, when Jesus breathes New Creation oxygen into their nostrils like he did his disciples on that first Easter morning in John 20.

The answer my friend is that people will only have ears to hear the cries of the oppressed when, like Elijah, they stop listening for God in the loud, flashy, headline-grabbing earthquakes, fires or hurricanes, and instead find God’s healing movements and guiding voice in the still, quiet whisper of love we often drown out.

The Answer my friend is the blowing Wind of God who walks across the stormy waters of our present moment, steps into our individual and collective boat on the verge of sinking in despair, being capsized by fear, or dashed against the rocks of human Sin and folly. The Wind-in-Flesh raises his arm like Moses and his staff long ago, and says to the chaos wind, “Peace, be still!”

The answer my friend is to let your life be swept away by this Holy Wind.

The answer my friend is to raise up sails in your daily lives that help you catch more and more of this Guiding Wind.

The answer my friend is to be so firmly anchored in the teachings of Jesus that you will no longer be “blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Eph. 4:14).

But the most profound gospel note we might find Blowin’ in the Wind of this song addresses the most dire question: “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” Death, the ultimate problem in search of a solution. The greatest puzzle of existence in search of an ultimate Answer.

The four Gospels claim that is was in the suffering and death of the Breath of Life himself on the cross that God finally said, “Too many people have died! Now I will die and in my death, Death will itself die.” And as darkness covered the whole land, just as the dark cloud covers every graveside service today, the Gospel accounts draw our attention one more time to the Wind-Spirit-Breath of God.

John’s account says Jesus “bowed his head and gave up His Wind-Spirit and Matthew says he “yielded up His Wind-Spirit” (Matt 27:50). The Breath of Heaven surrendered to the stranglehold of sin and death.

Luke’s account says Jesus cried out and said, “Father, into your hands I commit my Wind-Spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last” (Luke 23:46). The Divine Wind stopped blowing. The life-giving Spirit that hovered like a white dove over the water of the deep in Genesis 1 returned to heaven, rejected by the world He gave life to.

(Interestingly, the second line of Blowin’ in the Wind asks, “How many seas must a white dove sail / Before she sleeps in the sand?” But the Spirit-Wind symbolized by the white dove that once tamed the sinister seas in Scripture, is swallowed up the sea on the cross and sleeps not in the sand but in a dark tomb for three days.)

But only Mark’s account curiously draws our attention to the effect Jesus’ final gust of redeeming Wind had on the onlooking Roman soldier: “When the centurion, who was standing right in front of Him, saw the way He breathed His last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God (Mark 15:39)!

What a curious detail? How many different ways are there to breathe one’s last breath? Yet, there was something in the way Jesus breathed his last breath that led the centurion to grasp that this man’s dying breath was somehow the same Wind that animates all life.

The answer my friend has always been blowing in the Wind, or has been the Wind blowing in us. But we keep finding ways to snuff out the wind. We try to capture the Wind in our bottles of dead, empty religion. The answer my friend, is to stop trying to tame the wind and instead let the Wind of God blow away all our pretenses, blow away all our man-made temples where we attempt to confine God and conform God to our personal agendas.

Jesus’ message to Nicodemus was that God moves like the Wind. God moves in the Wind. God is the Wind – the Ruah, the Pneuma. “He blows wherever He pleases…you cannot tell where He comes from or where He is going” (John 3:8 my paraphrase). But wherever this Wind blows, dead things come back to life. Old things are made new. “And so it is with everyone born of this Wind” (John 3:8).

Dylan’s later songs are full of similar biblical themes and images. None is more powerful and pregnant than the words in “Every Grain of Sand” from Dylan’s third “born-again” album released in 1981. We find ourselves back on the angry sea where the white dove used to hover with wings of hope and possibility.

But has God abandoned us and left us alone and hopelessly adrift in a world of cannonballs and nuclear weapons? Where ears are still deaf to the cries of injustice? Where people still long to be free and where death still seems to have the last word? The first verse voices this timeless reaching for an answer:

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

In the last line, Bob hints at an Ancient Presence that still comes and goes like the evening breeze blowing on our back as we traverse life’s stormy waters.

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

The Answer to the riddle of the reality of man is that the Wind-in-Flesh who once walked the Sea of Galilee is still blowing in the wind today. Will we let our lives be wind chimes of grace sounding off the notes of redemption in the cool evening breeze?If a meaningless life is a futile “chasing after the wind,” perhaps the most meaningful life is being swept away by the Wind who is chasing after us. 

The Answer my friend is blowing in the Wind, indeed.

“When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the LORD God walking about in the garden” (Gen. 3:8).