Scotch College

Chaplains Page - Hallelujah

The final assembly was over. The singing was done, the doxologies, the hymns, the school songs had all been sung. We were standing round in the quad, saying goodbyes and signing the odd shirt when Nick approached rather diffidently. He asked 'Sir, do you remember that Jeff Buckley song you sang in assembly?' 'Yes', I remembered, how could I forget! 'It's not a Christian song, it's about sex.'

I was pleased that Nick had not only remembered but had done some research on the song and wanted to square with me before he left school. I only used the first verse of the song. It runs like this

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

I thought it would be OK to suggest from this that there is a desire we have that our lives can be a kind of 'Hallelujah'. A song to 'please the Lord'.

But Nick was right; the song is about sex. Leonard Cohen, who wrote the song, uses the David and Bathsheba incident as the basis for expressing disillusion about love and life. He supplements the imagery with other Old Testaments allusions:

Well 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 her kitchen chair

She broke your throne and she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.

 

They're Cohen's lyrics, but listening to Buckley sing, I think he is even better at communicating disillusion than Cohen. His life was probably a better testimony to disillusion as well, but then, who would want that distinction? A reality just the opposite of hallelujah. What about hope?

Can the reality of our lives be like a song of praise to God?

Another school's recent staff in-service closed with the presenter suggesting that the final overhead be read without comment. It contained a number of questions, and the intensity of the silence as the staff read through them was later remarked on to me. It was a potent testimony to their force.

What questions were asked? The overhead asked 'When did you last... sing, dance, have a good laugh, enjoy the silence?' What difficult questions! We all know how hard it is to make time for what we enjoy.

Final Assembly

This year's final assembly was based on the exhortation to 'offer praise to God' (the reading was Hebrews 13:10-21). The Christian gospel calls us to make time with to sing of the great love of God. This is why Luke's Gospel begins with such sustained emphasis on song, the names in Latin, the Magnificat, the Benedictus and the Nuc Dimitis somehow familiar. In 1982 U2 scored a hit in Australia with 'a song whose chorus translated from the Latin as 'Glory to you, Lord' - an unlikely springboard for the world's most popular band of the past decade-and-a-half', says Patrick Mangan in EG.

The song was Gloria, which sadly, is missing from their latest release, 'The Best of 1980-1990'.

But the song begins in the Old Testament, as the Hebrew word 'Hallelujah' ought to remind us. In the 80's the finale at all U2 early concerts was always, simply, '40'. Yes, they sang words from Psalm 40

I waited patiently for the Lord

He inclined and heard my cry

He brought me up out of the pit

Out of the mire and clay

I will sing, sing a new song

How long to sing this song

A stadium full of young people would respond with the chorus:

How long...how long...how long...

How long...to sing this song

 

What a tragedy if our song ended with the final assembly! Imagine if young and old Scotchies ceased to sing their Gloria; imagine if there was no 'hallelujah'. Make time to sing this song!

Rev Graham Bradbeer