Holy Week Hallelujah

Holy Week. Hallelujah.

Holy Week. Hallelujah.

But not Handel’s exuberant, joyous hallelujah chorus, where listeners erupt in utter elation, standing. Who can possibly remain seated when the hallelujah in both the highest notes and lowest tones commands otherwise?  Handel’s Hallelujah has at least three exclamation marks after it – it is an uppercase hallelujah exclaimed from the rooftops, the hilltops, the mountains. HALLELUJAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Holy Week hallelujah is Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Cohen’s Hallelujah is at the same time somber and content. A Holy Week hallelujah is in small case letters, followed by the sigh of a full stop. It contains the mind’s commitment to praise God even when one’s heart is not in it. In between each ha-lle-lu-jah syllable, is the pain of broken dreams, regrets, and sorrows that are yet to be mourned.

Leonard Cohen’s holy week hallelujah has the marriage of joy and sorrow, major and minor chords: “the major fourth…the minor fifth, the baffled king (David) composing hallelujah.” This is precisely the marriage of emotions that cradle us through Holy Week: sadness and delight,  wholeness and brokenness, extravagance and bitterness, the ups and downs of life that we in the second part of life know intimately. 

As Cohen writes: “Love is not a victory march; it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah…”A holy week hallelujah encourages us to praise God through the pain, sadness and struggle that life drags us through, expressing our gratitude in the blessing that life is still good… hallelujah.

May we sit with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane,

brave enough to acknowledge our human blessings

and our divine imperfections

…hallelujah.

May we watch with Mary on Friday as Christ and cosmos are rent asunder,

bold enough to lament our defeats and losses,

yet grateful for the mixed blessing we call life

…hallelujah.

May we sit with Christ in the tomb on Saturday,

courageous enough to hold emptiness with compassion

yet able to announce a broken, but authentic …hallelujah.

I heard there was a secret chord

That David played and it pleased the Lord

But you don’t really care for music, do you

Well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall and the major lift

The baffled king composing 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 did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

© Leonard Cohen