Handel’s Messiah really does open up a plethora of other questions for evangelical churches to consider about the overflow of our hearts to the actions we take within this world, to the things we say, the things we sing, and the things we create and build for the blessing of future generations.

To the evangelical pietist, Handel’s “Messiah” presents a strangely warmed problem.

One of the paradoxes of evangelical history is the tension between cultural excellence and religious piety. We have often been suspicious of aesthetic excellence or complexity, opting instead for simplicity and heart-level devotional experience at all costs. To such attitudes, Handel’s Messiah offers a strangely warmed problem.

What is especially interesting to me is that this Jesus-centred masterpiece—performed every year in numerous choral performances in some of the most prestigious historic buildings in Britain—was composed at the very same time as the Great Awakening, where churches were springing up all across the highways and byways of this same nation not as a result of artistic brilliance but by the urgent preaching of the need for heart conversion to Christ. How did Handel’s immensely popular and immensely complex musical extravaganza “fit” with that revivalistic vision to awaken the dying embers of cultural Christianity to true salvation?

Did it even “fit” at all, or was it seen as part of the problem of stultified high Anglican culture which the Great Awakeners were challenging?

Handel’s Awakening in the Age of Reason

Well, for one thing it seems highly relevant that one reason the Great Awakening had such a dramatic impact on Britain and the US was its challenge to the malaise of the Enlightenment.

Though well prior to the destructive crescendo of the French Revolution, this was still “the Age of Reason” where many were beginning to turn their hearts and minds away from the “primitive” faith of their medieval and reformational forebears, embracing the brave new world of scientific progress and human autonomy. Whilst this may seem hope-filled, it was also culturally traumatic.

Into this increasingly secularising and despair-tinged context steps Handel and his cosmic operatic masterpiece which, even to this day, remains curiously unsurpassed. As Jan Swafford of The Atlantic writes in “The Genius of Handel’s Messiah”:

Reasons for the Messiah’s enduring power are manifold, though certainly they begin with the music itself, which manages to join the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s ability to convey, era after era, “a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.” King, who embarked on the book during the pandemic, found renewed comfort in the Messiah’s arc, especially its message of hope in difficult times, starting with those first words: “Comfort ye.” He also felt moved to recover “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins in the murkier currents of what is remembered as the age of reason.

It seems that the sheer force of this masterpiece broke through the dim fog of the Age of Reason with blazes of unstoppable light. The libretto (words) was not arranged by Handel, of course, but by his poet friend, Charles Jennens, who was himself described as “a depressive man struggling to find his way toward hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment vision of religion.”

He certainly seems to have found such hope in his writing of the libretto, which is essentially a selectively edited arrangement of passages from the King James Bible. Jennens is said to have delivered the libretto to Handel in a parcel, with a note claiming he had been inspired by God.

Handel was an Anglican of sorts, but was certainly no paragon of holiness, nor a heartfelt evangelical heaven-bent on converting lost souls to Christ. It is also said that, at first, he scoffed at Jennens’ notion of “divine inspiration” for the libretto. Yet it is clear that even Handel was markedly changed by the Messiah. He would never be the same again. Despite facing fluctuating finances (as did many composers of his time) he donated the proceeds from the performances of Messiah to charity, and he notably yearned to see people not merely entertained but affected by its substance.

Handel felt this way about it no doubt because the Messiah had affected him first. It had done something to him. It had “awakened” him, almost as if he had experienced the enthusiasms of a revival meeting.

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