“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among
those with whom he is pleased!” Luke
2:14
With whom is he pleased?
"This is love: not that we loved
God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our
sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one
another." 1 John 4:10,11
Every December, I listen to hours
of Christmas music in a mix of styles on an mp3 player hooked up to my
speakers. I have a huge variety of artists, from Celtic bagpipes to Mannheim
Steamroller, James Taylor and Steven Curtis Chapman, Brooklyn Tabernacle and
Casting Crowns, Harry Connick Jr. and Point of Grace, Sting and Barbra
Streisand, and probably 20 other soloists or groups. I don’t like the Santa,
snow, or “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” party music, but I do have
medieval to contemporary music from numerous countries, so it doesn’t get stale
or repetitive.
But as beautiful and touching as
the songs are, the best are the choruses from Handel’s oratorio Messiah. One album is a traditional
choir with soloists and string ensemble, and the other is an album from the
traveling show in the late 1980s, Young
Messiah. The latter has Christian contemporary artists doing the solos and
duets, with a choir singing the choruses. (When the show came to my city, I
sang in the chorus, and it was fabulous!)
I love the Messiah’s choruses for their majesty and drama, and how their
repeated phrases allow us to think of familiar scripture verses in different
ways.
One of them is “All We Like
Sheep.” The chorus parts, so merry and cheerful and unmindful, chase each other around like spring lambs—let’s do whatever
we want because we have no cares, and no one's the boss of us. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way.”
Then the tragic consequence of selfish hedonism, and
the sudden change of tempo and mood. It’s like a lightning bolt, or a sudden
death: “and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all."
Instead of running off the cliff
onto the sharp rocks below, we are saved, pulled back by the crook of the
Shepherd. But he saves us by taking our rebellious sins upon himself, being
separated from the Father in death, and then rising from the tomb to assure us
that he is victorious over death.
Handel wrote the oratorio in
three weeks’ time. That doesn’t seem humanly possible. Many people, including
me, believe that the music was given to him by the Holy Spirit. And for 30
years, I’ve had a sort of time-space continuum notion that when Jesus returns
in clouds of glory, the victorious trumpet sound (predicted by John in 90AD) we’ll
hear will be from Handel’s oratorio, “The Trumpet Will Sound.” And then we
millions and billions who are changed into glory will sing Hallelujah from
Handel’s pen.
