|
After the Hallelujah
I listened to Handel's "Messiah" the other evening, start to finish. The "Hallelujah" chorus is the moment everyone knows. It is the great summit of the oratorio, with its trumpets and timpani and the promise that "He shall reign for ever and ever." If the piece ended there, no one would complain.
But it does not end there. After the last "Hallelujah" settles, the next voice we hear is a single soprano singing, what to me is one of the loneliest lines in all of Scripture: "I know that my Redeemer liveth."
That line is not from the Gospels. It is Job 19:25, spoken by a man on the ash heap, abandoned by his friends, certain of nothing except that somewhere his vindicator lives. Charles Jennens, who assembled the libretto, placed Job's hope after the great hallelujah. I think he knew what he was doing. The order says something true about the shape of the Christian life.
We live in the space between those two pieces of music. We have heard the Hallelujah. We have been told, and on our better days we believe, that Christ has won and that every knee shall bow. The trumpet has sounded in the empty tomb. And yet here we are on a random morning, sitting with the diagnosis, the estranged child, the grief that will not lift. The chorus has finished, and alone, the soprano sings.
Sometimes we call this the "already and not yet." To me, it sounds like an academic phrase until I hear it set to music. The Hallelujah is true. Suffering is also true. And so, for now, we sing Job's song after the Hallelujah, holding on to a Redeemer we cannot yet see.
Notice that Job does not say I hope my Redeemer liveth, or I feel that He does. He says I know. It is a strange kind of knowing, the kind that survives when nearly everything else has been taken. His children are gone. His health is gone. His friends, still in the room, have become accusers. What remains is a conviction that does not depend on his circumstances and cannot be argued out of him. The soprano sings it the same way Job spoke it, quietly, without flourish, as a fact.
Job knew this. Jennens knew it. The soprano knows it. I know that my Redeemer liveth, not because the trouble has passed, but because the trumpet has already sounded somewhere out beyond our hearing, and one day we will catch up to it.
| 
