FEBRUARY 2005 - ISSUE 4 - ISSN 1448 - 632

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THE FAILED MESSIAH – A BROKEN HALLELUJAH?

MARY VELING

ABSTRACT

A reflection on the paschal mystery with the help of Leonard Cohen’s poems, “Hallelujah” and “If it be Your Will” [1]

Somewhere between suffering and hope lies poetry, somewhere between the Cross and the Resurrection lies the “cold and broken Hallelujah.” This broken hallelujah is something we all feel and experience, regardless of who we are or where we come from. It is the cry of the hope-less, the agonized, the weary. It is the cry that echoes from defeat, the cry of failure. It is the ‘cold shoulder’ of the lover after an argument. It is the “I hate you!” from the lips of the teenage child, rebuked and angry. It is the cry of the ‘poor ones’ in the world who suffer poverty and injustice. It is the cry of shame when Jesus “turned and looked straight at Simon” the night of his arrest, and Simon ran out and wept bitterly. (Luke 22: 61-62) It is the agonizing cry of Jesus, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) It is the “long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other.”[2]

Baby I’ve been here before

I know this room I’ve walked this floor

I used to live alone before I knew you

I’ve seen your flag on the Marble Arch

But love is not a victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

GOOD FRIDAY –  JESUS’ FAILURE

Jesus, the man the disciples had put their trust in, failed them. The cause of God, which Jesus had made his own, was not realised. He and his message were rejected. The disciples witnessed the decline of a Jewish man who hoped for the reign of God and who died in that hope. He had failed them, failed to provide the ‘promise’ and left in its stead, silence. The disciples had believed in a restoration of God’s people where their enemies would be judged and they would have authority and influence, where their questions would be answered and their roles clearly defined. However, the ‘new Israel’ that the disciples had imagined, believed in, fantasized about, never came to fruition. In the face of Jesus’ failure the disciples were left despairing, their faith shattered, their God, silent. The hallelujah broken. Jesus lived and preached his message, particularly toward the end of his life when he ‘opted for Jerusalem’, with a profound sense of the danger both of his message being rejected and his own person being rejected, even unto death. As Edward Schillebeekckx notes: “Jesus was no fanatic – and this is quite certain from what we know about him – that from a particular moment in his career he must have rationally come to terms with the possibility, in the longer term probability and in the end actual certainty of a fatal outcome.”[3] 

This is not to suggest that Jesus ‘knew’ that salvation and hope lay ultimately in his facing a horrific death, his failure. To suggest such amounts to accusing Jesus of “play acting about his commitment to his message of metanoia and the rule of God”.[4] Rather, Jesus’ death was a result of his message being rejected. It was a dangerous message and it was misunderstood. As Rowan Williams notes, “His actions and words [were] sufficiently inflammatory, sufficiently a relativizing of the existing forms of political and religious sense, that the administrators of political and religious power … combine to bring about his death.”[5] Although Jesus “made for Jerusalem” knowing the probable consequences, he was hoping for more. “One can hardly maintain” writes Schillebeeckx, “that Jesus both willed and sought after his death as the sole possible way of realizing the kingdom of God…the truth is he died just as he lived, and he lived as he died.”[6] Jesus took a risk and failed. He was rejected in his own home, and rejected by those closest to him. His message was misinterpreted, there was no ‘new Israel’ in the sense that the disciples had projected and in the end, according to Williams, “Jesus in yielding to his failure, his appalling mortality, finally refuses these projections – as if only by this failure of all that has been fantasized and longed for he can at last ‘say’ what is to be said; as if the silence of his dying is the only rhetoric for his gospel.” [7]

If it be your will

That I speak no more

And my voice be still

As it was before

I will speak no more

            I shall abide until

I am spoken for

If it be your will.

HOLY SATURDAY – OUR FAILURE

We don’t rest easy in the face of a broken hallelujah. It is a cry that exposes the naked fear of both the one who utters it and the one who witnesses it. As the scriptures tell us, the disciples “stood at a distance” when confronted with the cross – Jesus’ failure. They witnessed the hopeless cry of a man struggling in the face of failure, and they did not know how to respond; they became despondent and afraid. Jesus had failed them and they in turn had failed Jesus.  He was left “to die alone and despairing, because his failure was too difficult and strange to continue with”.[8]

It is easy perhaps for some to believe that after the death of Jesus a ‘miracle’ occurred and somehow all that had gone wrong, the failure, the defeat, the shame, was instantly redeemed. That Jesus in all his resurrected glory stepped into the world once again and the disciples this time ‘got’ his message. This type of understanding, however appealing, denies the real sense of despair, of alienation and of loss that the disciples experienced after the death of Jesus. It denies the overwhelming sense of failure and guilt that they lived with, before, during and after Jesus’ death, and ultimately it denies any true continuity between the historical person and message of Jesus and the resurrected Christ. “Faith” according to John Caputo, “is a read we have on the human condition; it is not a supervening miracle that lifts us up out of our boots.” [9] The disciples were left despairing and confused after the death of Jesus. They were left alone to mull over, read and re-read the ‘condition’ in which they found themselves. As Caputo suggests of Simon Peter: “Fishing and thinking, Simon is trying to bring into words what had happened to him in the short space of a year or two. Simon was trying to unfold, explicate, lay out the implicit horizons and content of an experience…to reach an interpretation…this man, he thought, had knocked him off his pins. What to make of that? Who was he?”[10]  In the aftermath of the cross, the followers of Jesus were stripped bare. They lived marginal to their “inherited identities” and confused about the “embryonic new identities that they had begun to learn in the company of Jesus.”[11]  They had a “brush with the deep undecidability in things, with the wavering instability in things, with what we call the silence of God that we cannot avoid.”[12]

There was a time you let me know

What’s really going on below,

But now you never show it to me do you?

I remember when I moved in you

And the Holy Dove was moving too,

And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

EASTER SUNDAY – FAILURE AND GIFT

“Undecidability” according to Caputo, “is a condition of choice, not an excuse for sitting on the sidelines.”[13] What ‘choice’ did the disciples make? What possible choice could they make in the face of such deafening silence? In the face of such shame?  Perhaps, the only real choice available to the disciples was the choice to admit defeat, to both accept their failure and to accept Jesus’ failure - to accept the ‘silence of his dying’. But, to be able to do this, admit this defeat, claims Williams, “depends upon a transformation of self-perception.”[14] The disciples had to ‘let go’ of all their conceived notions of who they thought Jesus was, and what he had come to ‘do’. They had to ‘let go’ of their perceived notions of where they fitted in. In other words, they had to let go of an obsession to control. They were not in ‘possession’ of either Jesus nor his message, they had no control; rather, they were left bereft, alone and found that beyond those bounds they couldn’t survive with their own resources. “The person who faces and acknowledges inner contradiction, failure, the breakdown of performance and the emptiness of gratification”, says Williams, “is the person who is capable of hearing and answering the invitation to loss and trust… this invitation is in practice an invitation to accept the ‘hospitality’ of Jesus himself … and so this invitation is put at its most baldness and most alien when Jesus himself  fails.” [15] 

If it be your will

If there is a choice

Let the rivers fill

Let the hills rejoice

Let your mercy spill

On all these burning hearts in hell

If it be your will

To make us well

The disciples realised at some time during their time of guilt and shame, anger and loss, that defeat is not the final word. They accepted the invitation, God’s gift that “selfhood is given not achieved.” And this, according to Williams, is the essential point. This is resurrection, the transaction in human beings where they realise that their identity is gift. Resurrection is judgement upon the attempt to control, to construct impregnable systems. Resurrection is dying to the illusion that we possess the final word – even in death. The disciples had come face to face with Jesus, his gaze had penetrated them, and in that gaze they saw the face of the ‘other’, and upon reflection, in their darkest hour, they knew that “the arm of the murderer is not long enough to reach the other, not in the other’s true otherness, which is infinite, which exceeds everything empirical, and thus is an invisible excess, an irreducible transcendence.”[16] According to Robert Schreiter, the resurrection accounts in the gospels are primarily stories of reconciliation.[17] Jesus appears to the disciples in narratives of healing, forgiveness and hospitality. Jesus forgives Peter’s three denials, he heals Thomas’ doubts, he cooks breakfast for the disciples on the beach. As Williams notes, these resurrection stories tell us that  love is stronger than death, that the night will end. “The narratives of the resurrection of Jesus show the centrality of forgiveness, restoration and gift in the apprehension by the apostles of the risenness of Jesus… the assurance that failure and loss do not mean final destruction or emptiness.”[18]

And draw us near

And bind us tight

All your children here

In their rags of light

In our rags of light

All dressed to kill

And end this night

If it be your will

HALLELUJAH

To acknowledge defeat, to say the words  “I have failed” (and to truly mean it) does not come easy to us. Today we are still mistrustful of failure. We see it as a weakness, an aberration of humanity. We have, according to Williams, “a public rhetoric in which repentance, provisionality, openness to judgement, the acknowledgement of failure, are all apparently unthinkable.”[19]  Is it not true that when faced with the recovering alcoholic we ‘congratulate’ them yet walk away as quickly as possible, thank God I’m not so weak? That when confided in by a parent whose child has gone off the deep end, we placate them, “you’ve done the best you could”, and shy away, secretly thinking, “I would have done better”.  Even  whole societies shirk away from failure – how difficult is it to give an apology to the indigenous peoples that we failed and robbed and massacred? How important it seems that we must ‘master’ our identity in the world – lest we fail, lest we appear weak! We control to the point that we envisage ‘defense’ systems that will ultimately keep the ‘unwanted’ at bay! We live in a world that places too much certainty on its ability to posses, to control. The world today denies its vulnerability, its ‘long holy Saturday’. The poets write about it, the artists sketch it, the populous admire it – from a distance. The enmity we know, we feel, and retreat from, stems from an urgency to resist failure, to resist that which we cannot successfully control.

We do not rest easy in the face of the broken hallelujah. This ‘hallelujah’ is broken when we try to own it, describe it, and shape it. This ‘hallelujah’ is utterly gift, when we accept our limitations.. And gift it is. It creeps upon us silently and requires that we respond. This hallelujah is the moment when we utter the words of St. John, “ I believe, help my unbelief”. It is the face of the other that lies beyond our control and yet demands our attention. ‘Here I am!”  This comprehension, this ‘hallelujah’ is what dawned on the disciples when the moon waned on a lonely Saturday. As Caputo exclaims, “Had Simon come up with something that made no sense, it would not have caught on, and that would have been that. Something extraordinary happened to them and Simon found a way to formulate it.”[20] And this is resurrection. This is hallelujah.

I did my best, it wasn’t much

I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch

I’ve told the truth. I haven’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.

If it be your will

That a voice be true

From this broken hill

I will sing to you

From this broken hill

All your praises they shall ring

If it be your will

To let me sing.

APPENDIX

Cohen wrote Hallelujah over a period of two years. He has modified and added new verses to the song. The first version below is the original, taken from his CD, Various Positions (Sony Music, 1984). The second version below reflects Cohen’s modifications to the original verses, and is taken from his CD, Leonard Cohen: More Best Of ( Sony Music, 1997).  If It Be You Will is from the CD, Various Positions.     ***

Hallelujah

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

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof

You saw her bathing on the roof

 Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

She tied you

To a kitchen chair

She broke your throne, she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the 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’ve 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

Hallelujah

Baby I’ve been here before

I know this room, I’ve walked this floor.

I used to live alone before I knew you.

I’ve seen your flag on the Marble Arch,

But love is not a victory march,

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

There was a time you let me know

What’s really going on below

But now you never show it to me,

Do you?

I remember when I moved in you,

And the holy dove was moving too,

And every breath we drew was

Hallelujah.

Now maybe there’s a God above

But all I’ve ever learned from love

Was how to shoot at someone who

Outdrew you.

And it’s no complaint you hear tonight,

And it’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the

Light –

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

I did my best; it wasn’t much.

I couldn’t feel so I learned 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 lips but Hallelujah.

 

If It Be Your Will

If it be your will

That I speak no more

And my voice be still

As it was before

            I will speak no more

            I shall abide until

            I am spoken for

If it be your will

If it be your will

That a voice be true

From this broken hill

I will sing to you

            From this broken hill

            All you praises they shall ring

            If it be your will

To let me sing

If it be your will

If there is a choice

Let the rivers fill

            Let the hills rejoice

            Let your mercy spill

            On all these burning hearts in hell

            If it be your will

To make us well

And draw us near

And bind us tight

All your children here

            In their rags of light

            In our rags of light

            All dressed to kill

            And end this night

If it be your will

[20] Caputo. More, 239.

 

*** Photos of Leonard Cohen used with permission of © Hans Arne Nakrem

Mary Veling earned her Bachelor of Teaching at ACU and is currently enrolled in ACU's Master of Arts in Theology. She is married with four teenage sons and teaches theology at Chaminade-Madonna Preparatory College in Hollywood, Florida. Email: mtveling@earthlink.net

 

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