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For a child has been born for us, a son given to us. --Isaiah 9:6
For such a familiar composition, Handel’s Messiah is full of surprises. Not until I got to college did I learn that it’s not right to call it The Messiah. It’s simply Messiah. This may seem like a small distinction, but it’s the kind of shibboleth that one encounters at those all-important community chorus auditions. Ditto the disconcerting revelation that the most famous of all the choruses, “Hallelujah,” doesn’t occur in the Advent section of Messiah at all. Rather, it concludes the second part of the oratorio, the Passion section.
But even bigger than the revelation that “Hallelujah” was not some kind of Christmas carol was the revelation that a key moment in the second most famous chorus in Messiah, “For unto us a child is born,” could be thought of quite differently.
I mean the moment when after all the arduous “boh-ho-ho-ho-horns” the singers finally reunite for the triumphant proclamation, “And his name shall be called, Wonderful! Counsellor! The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace!” So compelling are these musical exclamations that I was shocked to find in the New Revised Standard Version translation of Isaiah, the one we typically use in worship at St. Stephen’s Church, that the child is not named Wonderful! and then Counsellor!, but instead Wonderful Counsellor. My surprise then changed to curiosity. What is a “wonderful counsellor”? Gradually I understood that both splendor and relationship, sublimity and counsel, combine in the radical idea that God is both transcendent and near, radiating glory as well as imparting guidance.
So, pace Handel and the King James Version he set to such glorious music, I eventually found my way to a new perspective on Isaiah’s portrait of a God who passes understanding and gives direction to every moment of our lives. A splendid mystery and our daily bread, both at hand. God with us.
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