As a university professor, I read all the time. You could say that I am a professional reader. I show my students how to pull apart texts by identifying tacit premises and pinpointing holes in argumentation.
Being a professional reader has its drawbacks. It makes it harder to be an amateur reader: a person who reads for the sheer love (amor) of doing so. A bigger challenge has been reading for spiritual enrichment. Because my specialization includes religion and theology, it can be doubly hard to turn down the critical impulse and draw sustenance from the text in front of me.
Yet I have found a way to get that necessary sustenance. I have become a hearer of the Word, not merely a reader of words. After downloading the Audible app on my iPhone, I proceeded to explore the offerings on the New Testament. What I settled on was Johnny Cash reading the New King James Version of the four Gospels. It is just marvelous.
According to the Audible blurb, Cash was urged by his mother to record the New Testament for 20 years before finally agreeing to do so. He reflected that he approached the project with “fear, respect, awe, and reverence for the subject matter.” Cash added: “I also did it with a great deal of joy, because I love the Word.”
Not surprisingly, Cash not only loves the Word, but he also makes it sing. His deep and resonant voice perfectly channels the ongoing conversation between Jesus and the motley bunch of human beings he encounters. Cash conveys Jesus’s love, pity, hope and occasional exasperation toward his followers. He even manages to impart Jesus’s wry sense of humor, which I hear very clearly in his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4:16-18). As Cash delivers it to us, that encounter could be easily the basis for a country music ballad (“Lord Knows, The Man Ain’t My Man”):
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”
The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”
Even more strikingly, however, Cash communicates the desolation of those who turn to Jesus as Lord and Savior. His voice carries the desperation of parents seeking help for dying children, the resignation of the paralyzed seeking to walk again and the misery of demoniacs begging to be set free. He unerringly conveys the deadly weariness of those who are trapped in sin, looking (or not looking) for a way out.
Cash’s own personal experience saturates his voice. Of course, his outlaw image was as much style as substance. Although he performed at Folsom State Prison, he was never incarcerated within its walls. He spent a few nights in jail for misdemeanors, but he never did hard time. Yet Cash was haunted by his sickness (drug addiction) and his sins (familial betrayals). Indeed, they were threaded through his life in the same ways they intertwine in many Gospel stories. When Cash reads a passage from the Gospel of Luke (7:47), it is clear that he applies it to himself—and invites us to do the same. “Therefore, I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.”
When I encounter the Good News as read by Johnny Cash, I encounter it as a living proclamation (kerygma)—not as a dead letter. The very orality of the message helps to ensure I receive it fruitfully, by counteracting my ingrained habits of reading. The message keeps unfolding as the words flow into my ears. It is consequently much harder to perseverate on one phrase or image, or to engage in proof-texting (which is a form of intellectual perseveration). As one passage follows another, the words in an oral account are automatically contextualized for the listener. They are a living stream.
Moreover, in an oral account, the whole is greater not only than any single part, but also than the sum of its parts. It therefore encourages a constructive approach to the stories of Jesus, rather than an analytical approach, which by definition breaks things down to its components. One does not end up asking many small questions, such as “what does this one little verse mean?” or even “do we have sufficient evidence that Jesus really said or did this particular thing?” Rather, listening to the Gospels asks us to focus on one big question: Who exactly is Jesus of Nazareth?
We do, of course, have explicit attention to that question in the Gospel of Matthew (16:15-16). When Jesus asks Peter, “But what about you?…Who do you say I am?” Peter replies, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” That is a good start. But it is not the entire answer. In fact, it raises even more questions. What does it mean to be the Messiah? What does our recognition of him require of us? In their entirety and as a whole, the Gospels reveal to us the answers to these questions, which are not simplistic. In fact, they are as complex and demanding as the person Jesus himself—the person we are called to follow.
I still profit from reading the Gospels, of course. But I am aware of the spiritual dangers, at least for me. The fundamental problem with reading rather than listening to them is that it can tempt us to pin their meaning down, dissect it, and parcel it out in bite-sized, manageable chunks. But that is to treat the Gospels as a message to be decoded, not a person to be encountered. The Good News, ultimately, is the person of Jesus Christ—whose living voice we are called to hear and recognize in our own lives.
This article appears in November 2025.
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