A Maundy Thursday hallelujah

Now, I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah…

I want to understand the holiness and terror of Maundy Thursday through the love poems of Leonard Cohen. I invite you to listen deeply to Hallelujah. I am moved by this poem that is at the very same time utterly mystical, religious, romantic, platonic and sexual. This of course is the scandal of Leonard Cohen’s poetry; he weaves together a Hebrew faith story with the Christ Narrative and his experience of union with the Divine which you may call Nirvana, Enlightenment, Samadhi, Unity Consciousness or simply, Love.

Before Leonard Cohen, I would have told you that the word Hallelujah means praise God. I heard the word hallelujah only one way, Handel’s way: “Hallelujah!” What Leonard Cohen has achieved with his hallelujah, is something that no other artists has come close to. Leonard Cohen has made the word Hallelujah not only a verb of praise, but also a song of Lament, where failures, loss and life are mourned. He has made the word hallelujah a plea for help. Hallelujah is also a prayer of confession and at the same time the grace of total absolution.

This is why I offer the story of Maundy Thursday through the lens of Cohen’s hallelujah. The Maundy story is both joy and sorrow, loss and gain, betrayal and redemption, the end of the story and the beginning of a brand-new story. There is no better way to hold these opposites together, except through the hallelujah of Cohen’s chords that are both minor and major, nostalgic, and blissful. Cohen’s hallelujah enwombs us in a Maundy Thursday Meditation that entwines praise, lament, loss, joy, sorrow, and hope.

Cohen also doesn’t blur the boundary between sexual desire and spiritual longing – he obliterates it altogether. For Leonard Cohen there are no different strands of love. Cohen does not differentiate between our Love for God and our Love for each other – it is one and the same thing. In every moment of intimate love for our sexual partner, we are at that very same moment being desired by God and desiring God too. In every act of tenderness that we offer ourselves in self-compassion – we are loving and being loved by God.

In one word, hallelujah, Cohen combines both the holy and the profane, the sexual and the spiritual, the whole and the broken, the divine and the human. And that is what Jesus does in the foot washing. Jesus is ending separation, obliterating duality. Jesus is unifying the world as the great cosmic Christ that he is. The duality that is dissolved is the delusion that we are separate from God. The separation that is dissolved is the delusion that we are separate from each other. In Jesus’ world there  is no master and slave, god and non-god, teacher, and student. There is only the unity of One Love: the unity of friendship.

We are faced with choice: Are you willing to be part of a new world order, a new heaven and a new earth, where we are intimately related, where we are a part of each other, where I am who I am because you are who you are, where who I am is intimately related to who you are, where we understand that I am in you and you are in me, and that we are in Christ?  Or do you choose the “real” world of rulers and slaves, that includes being slaves to God, slaves to religion, slaves to the powers, slaves to empire and slaves to our own appetites?

Maundy Thursday is both the total failure of Jesus, and the utter success of his vision for a new world order. The crucifixion represents the victory of the Powers, of Empire. Yet in this failure Jesus still sings hallelujah: I will stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my lips but hallelujah. This is so close to psalm 22 that we end a Maundy Thursday Liturgy with it is scary. The end of the psalm 22 that Jesus quotes concludes with a promise of God’s vindication – “all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord and all families of the nations shall bow before him.”

Jesus dies like a mangled scarecrow on a rubbish dump outside Jerusalem. Failure? No. The vulnerable God of Love reveals the true love story: that God is broken, but God is broken open to all. When Love breaks, love does not break down, love breaks open. In the words of Rowan Williams:  

“Here indeed is encouragement to persevere when everything seems to be falling apart, and we are few and up against great odds, and history appears to be going against us. (In A ray of Darkness).