"Scripture gives us access to God’s truth only to the extent that we let ourselves to be touched by God’s comfort, tenderness, forgiveness and love."
On the 10th of July 1741, George Frederic Handel received a letter from Charles Jennens containing the libretto of what was going to become one of the most beloved choral works in Western music, the oratorio HWV 56 also known as the Messiah. The performance of the Messiah is one of the highlights of the season of Advent here at Saint Thomas – it is so popular that our valiant choir will sing it twice this coming week, on the 10th and the 12th of December.
As you know, the Messiah is entirely composed of sentences drawn from the King James Bible and the Coverdale Psalter and begins with the very words we have just heard from the prophet Isaiah: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God” (Isaiah 40.1).
I have always been struck by the deep acquaintance with Scripture that transpires from Jennens’ libretto.
It is not a mere collage.
The way the various biblical passages are assembled gives expression to a brilliant theological interpretation of Scripture, starting from the strategic move of inaugurating the oratorio with God’s poignant appeal to bring to his people not warnings, instructions, or complaints, but comfort. Jennens’ organisation of the excerpts from the prophets and Haendel’s musical setting were crafted precisely with this intention: bring comfort to people by “speaking (or rather singing) tenderly to them” (Is 40,2), so as to encourage them, soothe their pain, and awake their hope.
Indeed, what more encouraging thought than the assurance which immediately follows these lines, in which God promises that he himself will make the hearts of his people ready and capable of welcoming the day of his coming:
“Ev’ry valley shall be exalted, and ev’ry mountain and hill made low: the crooked straight and the rough places plain” (Is 40.4).
Only after having emphatically conveyed this joyous assurance, the libretto introduces the gloomier note of God’s anger which Haendel entrusted to a bass.
To represent this theme, Jennens selected texts from the minor prophets Haggai and Malachi which state that God will “shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land, and all nations” (Haggai 2.6-7), that nobody will be able to abide the day of his coming because he will come as the “refiner's fire” to purify the sons of Levi (Malachi 3.2f)
From this sombre scene, however, the oratorio quickly reverts to Isaiah’s ‘comforting’ promise that in fact God will come not as fire, but as Emmanuel, that is as “he who wants to be with us” (Isaiah 7.14) – the promise that God will not shake us, but proclaim such good tidings to us (Is 40.9) that we will arise and shine (Is 60.1).
Then, once again, a bass broadcasts the threat that “darkness shall cover the earth” (Is 60.2), only to immediately uplift us with the promise of a great light, and more specifically of a child who is described as “wonderful, counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace” (Is 9.2,6).
In this way Jennens and Haendel exquisitely capture what later biblical scholars have described as the three benchmarks of authentic prophecy, that is of any form of true preaching or proclamation of God’s intentions for humanity - namely
o first “Give comfort to my people”,
o second “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem” and
o third be a “herald of good news” (Isaiah 40.1,2,9).
We are offered here a litmus test of authentic Christianity.
How can we make sure whether preachers, spiritual counsellors, theologians, and musicians, are really speaking, singing or acting in God’s name?
The answer is simple: only if their words and their acts allow listeners to experience God’s comfort, tenderness, and joy – to hear the unmistakeable tone of God’s real voice, not only in Scripture, but also in the many other ways in which God constantly tries to speak to us.
God speaks everywhere: through people, other religions, nature, music and even where we less expect to find him, through our secular culture. In his immense eagerness to bring us consolation, to let us feel his tenderness and to give us joy, God keeps speaking to us “many times and in many ways” (Hebrews 1.1).
There is one important reason why, out of Isaiah’s copious collection of prophecies, it is the oracle contained in chapter 40 in our modern bibles that came to embody the spirit of Advent and became the lens through which the rest of the prophets and of Scripture were interpreted in Christianity from the very beginning. The reason is that this oracle contains the following sentence:
O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain. O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, behold your God! (Is 40.9)
The expression ‘good tidings’ became the name of the new literary genre created by the first disciples to describe Jesus’s words and deeds, the gospels, which in Greek is euaggelion that is ‘good news’. The evangelists understood that the whole message and life of Jesus were good tidings, that is news intended to bring comfort to us and speak tenderly to our heart.
All this should invite us to reconsider our relation to Scripture and ascertain whether we resort to it just to prop up doctrine, establish ethical principles, or seek for practical guidance. This is legitimate of course but it is not enough.
· Scripture gives us access to God’s truth only to the extent that we let ourselves to be touched by God’s comfort, tenderness, forgiveness and love.
· Whenever Scripture has been mined for God’s truth as if it were separable from God’s comfort, tenderness, forgiveness and love, this has yielded pathological versions of Christianity and become a cover for infighting and discrimination, prejudices, exclusion, killing and war.
Jesus promises us the whole truth. Not, however, as something that we can repackage into sentences or ideas once and for all. Just as the gospel, the ‘good tidings’, the ‘good news’ is not only the written text but Jesus himself, so is truth: “I am the truth” says Jesus (John 14.6) – the truth is not just what Jesus says, but his whole person, his life, his actions, his compassion, his humble birth, his suffering, his death, and his resurrection.
This kind of truth will never be entirely at our disposal. Jesus’ sentence: “The Spirit of truth will guide you into all the truth” (John 16.13) means that coming into God’s truth is the work of a lifetime for each one of us and a task that will occupy churches and humanity until the end of times.
And there is a reason why only the Spirit can progressively guide us into the ‘whole truth’ – a reason linked to who the Spirit is - the Comforter (John 15.26), that the ultimate bearer of the comfort Isaiah refers to in the opening lines of Haendel’s Messiah.
Only the Spirit, the Comforter, can guide us into the whole truth because only the Spirit knows how to speak tenderly to us – that is in a way that not our mind, but our heart first can understand. Indeed, only the Spirit, only the Comforter can persuade us that neither the desert of our forgetfulness, nor the valleys of our doubts, nor the mountains of our pride, nor the rugged lands of our suspicion (Isaiah 40.4) - nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (cf. Romans 8.39).
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