The Miracle and the
Theology of Handel’s Messiah
The Rev. Dr. Erik E. Sandstrom
E
veryone loves Handel’s Messiah. It pins down the sacred scripture texts
prophesying the Lord’s Advent, and then the Advent itself, including the
whole life of the Lord to the resurrection, and ending with our own resurrection
as a promise. Everyone knows the score almost by heart and it stirs us every
Christmas and Easter season, to hear it again, and again.
I have often wondered whether Handel’s Messiah, celebrating the Lord’s
First Advent, was somehow part of the Second Advent, the revelation of the
Heavenly Doctrines as the Word of the Lord, explaining how the Lord was the
Messiah and was glorified to reign in heaven forever. For after the Resurrection,
the Lord could inspire music as well. Having glorified the rational level of the
Human and the body itself, He rejected or wiped out the body parts, replacing
them with Divine “counterparts” which “took their place, instead of the body.”
(Arcana Coelestia 6872)
The Lord from then on could “enlighten not only the internal spiritual man
but also the external natural,” thus both the rational and the sensuous parts of
the human mind “simultaneously.” (cf.
Arcana Coelestia 2776.3, 3195.3, 4180.5;
True Christian Religion 109.2)
Part of this new influx would
be of “harmonious sound [which]
corresponds to states of joy and gladness
in the spiritual world, [which] . . . spring
from affections, which in that world are
affections for what is good and true.
Music flows into the sense of hearing,
which does not originate in the natural
world but in the spiritual world; from the
correspondence of things in the natural
world – which flow into it in accordance
Ca. 1726 portrait of George Friedrich
Handel by Balthasar Denner
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