QUARANTINE BLOG # 635

December 25, 2021

I love it when the comic strips get it right!

🛐  On this Christmas day, allow me to share two gifts with you, two videos of beautiful songs for the day, and a Christmas card.

First, the “Hallelujah Chorus” as you perhaps have never seen it performed.

George Frederic Handel’s father tried to discourage his musical interests, preferring that he enter the legal profession.  But it was the organ, harpsichord, and violin that  captured his heart.  Once, accompanying his father to the court of Duke Johann Adolf, George wandered into the chapel, found the organ, and started improvising.  The startled Duke exclaimed, “Who is this remarkable child?”

This “remarkable child” soon began composing operas, first in Italy, then in London.  By his twenties, he was the talk of England and the best-paid composer on earth.  He opened the Royal Academy of Music.  Londoners fought for seats at his every performance, and his fame soared around the world.

But the glory passed.  Audiences dwindled.  His music became outdated, and he was thought of as an old fogey.  Newer artists eclipsed the aging composer.  One project after another failed, and Handel, now bankrupt, grew depressed.  The stress brought on a case of palsy that crippled some of his fingers.  “Handel’s great days are over,” wrote Frederick the Great.  “His inspiration is exhausted.”

Yet his troubles also matured him, softening his sharp tongue.  His temper mellowed, and his music became more heartfelt.  One morning Handel received by post a manuscript from a long-time friend, Charles Jennens.  It was a word-for-word collection of various biblical texts about Christ.  The opening words from Isaiah 40 moved Handel: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people . . .”

On August 22,1741, he shut the door of his London home and started composing music for the words.  Twenty-three days later, the world had Messiah.  “Whether I was in the body or out of the body when I wrote it, I know not,” Handel later said, trying to describe the experience.  Messiah opened in London to enormous crowds on March 23,1743, with Handel leading from his harpsichord.  King George II, who was present that night, surprised everyone by leaping to his feet during the “Hallelujah Chorus.”  No one knows why.

No matter – from that day audiences everywhere have stood in reverence during the stirring words: “Hallelujah! For He shall reign forever and ever.”

And the second present is “The Christmas Hallelujah.”

🛐  A CHRISTMAS CARD, from David Sisler

I apologize for not sending you a Christmas card.  I hand-delivered many, but I mailed fewer than twenty.

I do have a card for you, however, but it has no gold foil and no Holy Family with cherubic smiles or polished halos.  Instead, the picture on the front is of a teen-aged girl, pregnant before marriage, drenched in sweat – she has just pushed her first child into the cold night air of an unheated, smelly barn, and the baby is still covered with afterbirth and blood.

In 1980, we were living in South Carolina, and my wife, Bonnie, was teaching in a middle school.  One afternoon, late in the school year, she asked a group of eighth graders their plans for high school and beyond.  One girl, thirteen years old, said the current year would be her last year of formal education.

When Bonnie asked why, the teen-ager replied, “I’m going to have a baby, and live on welfare like my mother and my grandmother.”

In a day when hundreds of thousands of teen-agers become pregnant outside of marriage, that middle-schooler’s comments scarcely raise an eyebrow.  Two thousand years ago, the discovery of Mary’s pregnancy would have been the scandal of the town.  Indeed, it would have been enough to have caused Mary’s execution – to be engaged, and to be found pregnant with another man’s child drew the death penalty.

Joseph, who was more than a fiancé, but less than a husband, could have demanded that Mary, an obvious adulteress, be stoned to death.  Instead, he planned to hush up the whole incident to protect Mary if he could.  Then an angel told Joseph that God was the baby’s father.  The good citizens of Nazareth may have called it a cock-and-bull story, but Joseph believed it.

An outcast, a social pariah, Mary went to the one person she thought might understand her embarrassment, her cousin, Elizabeth, who was pregnant under circumstances which were obviously miraculous.  But while everyone rejoiced with Elizabeth, they cast long looks of anger and disgust at Mary.

The disparity continued into the births of the two boys: John was born at the parsonage, into the joy of a minister’s home; Jesus entered the world far from his parent’s home, an outcast with only his mother and his step-father to welcome his birth.

The Roman government had ordered a census.  As the head of the house, Joseph could have gone by himself and registered his small family.  But although she was almost nine months pregnant, Joseph took Mary with him, to protect her from the small-minded and the gossip mongers.  When his step-son was born, Joseph had to help Mary with her delivery; there was no mid-wife.  If he had been in Bethlehem and Mary had been alone in Nazareth, her life and the life of her son might have been in jeopardy.

Nine months earlier an angel had shown up, uninvited, and unannounced in Mary’s living room.  Gabriel had scared the little Jewish girl half out of her wits.  She was so afraid that before Gabriel could give her God’s message, he had to calm her young heart which threatened to beat right out of her chest.  Then the angel spoke beautiful, powerful, indeed, over-powering words about God’s plan of salvation.

“God is pleased with you, Mary,” the angel said, “and you will become pregnant.”

Mary heard the rest of the message, but it was the “P” word that stuck in her mind.

Debate the Greek, discuss the Hebrew all you wish, but Mary settled the dispute: “How can this happen?” she demanded.  “I am a virgin!  I have never had sex with a man!”

Then her periods stopped, she got morning sickness, her clothes no longer fit, and her stomach started to swell.  Somewhere on a dusty Judean road, the birth contractions started.  Somewhere in a strange city, with the “No Vacancy” sign hung out all over town, her water broke.  And from somewhere deep inside of him, Joseph summoned one more tremendous act of courage and convinced a hard-hearted inn keeper, a skin-flint only interested in his balance sheets, to at least let his young wife have her baby in the barn and not out on a Bethlehem street.

“You will give birth to God’s Son,” Gabriel had said.

“Push!” Joseph prompted.

“The Messiah.  Christ the Lord.  Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior.”

“Push!”

That night an angel chorus sang to shepherds, but their notes were drowned out by the screams a young woman, a little girl, a baby who was having a baby.

The Savior of the world?  God’s Son?

“Come on, Mary.  I can see the head.  Just one more push!”

And somewhere in the darkness, Joseph held his son, God’s Son, by the heels and swatted the baby’s backside and Jesus communicated with sinful mankind for the first time.  Just like babies have always done, he cried out.  The fluid cleared from his lungs and the coda to the angel’s chorus was a healthy wail.

Then Mary cleaned off her bloody son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.

Thirty-three years later, another Joseph, Joseph of Aramathea, cleaned off the bloody, dead body of Mary’s son, wrapped him in burial clothes and laid him in a tomb.

But death could hold him for only three days because he really was, really is the Savior who is Christ, the Lord!

Merry Christmas!

And with equal joy, Happy Easter!

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