HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!

It is such a beautiful word. I seldom hear it without thinking of the great hallelujah chorus in Handel’s Messiah, with a few bars of that hymn trailing through my mind, the majestic crescendo of hallelujahs ringing through my soul.

And I hardly think of Handel’s Messiah and the hallelujah chorus without recalling those times that I heard the chorus of Bethany College present it at Christmas season when I was on the faculty there. An unusual scene comes to mind. At the beginning of the hallelujah chorus, the Bethany community would rise to its feet, as auditors have done for centuries, in homage to Him who inspired Handel to such greatness and who now reigns as Lord of glory. All stood except one, that is. There was one gentleman at Bethany who never stood, though he was always there. He sat quietly and with simple dignity throughout the chorus while all others stood. This was the consistent thing for him to do, for he was himself the Messiah, he was convinced, and no one stands in his own honor.

Julian Barkley was a huge man, at least 6-5 and weighing way beyond 200. He had a substantial beard and his hair reached the shoulders, not unlike the paintings we see of Jesus. A bachelor, he lived alone on a small farm across from the old Alexander Campbell farm, property bequeathed to him by the Campbell family, being himself one of the heirs, a great grandson of Alexander Campbell. It was Julian’s parents who were our first missionaries to Jerusalem. His presence around Bethany lent support to the claim that there was insanity in the Campbell family, a viewpoint strengthened by the fact that there is sometime but a thin line between genius and insanity.

Ouida and I had Julian as a guest for dinner one evening. He had a voracious appetite without being gluttonous, and Ouida soon realized that she should have prepared for several guests instead of one. But he was a big man, strong and impressively handsome. Yet he was humble and gentle. One year some of the college boys wrestled Julian to the ground and relieved him of his beard, gleefully bearing their spoils back to the dorm as young braves would their first scalp. But old Julian did not resist their evil deed, allowing them to have their way. It is a good thing, for had he resisted the students would surely have had to pay a bloody nose or a broken bone for every strand of beard.

He impressed Ouida and me as a real gentleman, polite and refined. And he was most interesting and knowledgeable, with almost encyclopedic resources. He must have remembered everything he ever read, and he read widely and deeply. He would discuss history, linguistics, economics, and religion as if he were a professor in these areas. And one would not have supposed him to be mentally ill, except in certain areas of his conversation. He always spoke of Jesus as if he were referring to himself, giving rather logical reasons as to why people did not accept him as the Christ. “After all, I was rejected before.” He once extended his open hands to me, most humbly, explaining that the marks of crucifixion are sometimes visible.

Bless his heart, I never tried to contradict him, except that I once asked him what he thought of the other people who claimed to be Jesus. About that time I had read The Christs of Ypsilanti, a psychology study of three inmates at a mental hospital, all of whom claimed to be Jesus. The psychologists brought these men together to see how they would respond, the result being that each was greatly challenged to prove the others as fakes. Julian was well informed even in this regard, telling me of any number of deluded souls who had the audacity to identify themselves as the Christ!

He was of course schizophrenic, but a delightful and harmless man nonetheless. But the women in the community were all scared of him, and the new students at church were curious about the Elijah figure that would sit in the balcony off to himself, little realizing that the man sat there receiving all the worship that the congregation was willing to extend to him. At Christmas Julian would send us all greeting cards signed Jerusalem or Jesus. No one hardly ever made fun of him, but Perry Gresham, president of the college, could not resist the temptation, in recounting the advantage of being at Bethany, of observing, “And where else but at Bethany can one receive a Christmas card from the Lord himself!”

I had mixed feelings about poor old Julian. He was the only descendant of Alexander Campbell around, his own great grandson. His magnificent body and mind gave credit to his great progenitor. So did his gentility, for he was kind, gracious, and loving. And yet he was a terribly sick man. Like Bethany is sick, despite its great heritage. Like the church is sick, despite its great potential. Like the world is sick, despite all its goodness. One can weep for Julian just as he can weep for himself. Sin and sickness have a heavy hand upon us all.

And yet Julian’s fantasy may not have been so fantastic after all, for he may well have been more like Jesus than anybody else around Bethany. The sane ones around town were too self-sufficient, too intellectual, and too moral to be much like Jesus. After all, Jesus could be heard talking to trees and to devils and he associated with all sorts of strange people. Besides, he did not concern himself with the things that really matter, like money and fame. One wonders how sane Jesus would have appeared in the village of Bethany, West Virginia. Perhaps no more so than in ancient Bethany. The people then cried, “He has a demon!”

It is significant that Dostoevsky, impressed with the goodness of Jesus probably more than any other modem writer, depicted his character who was most like Jesus as an idiot, or at least considered so by his associates.

Julian overdid it of course, due to his illness, but how wonderful it would be if professed Christians enjoyed such union with Jesus that they would experience an identity with him that would effect all that they did. Paul, who may have been more like Jesus than any mortal man, could say, “It is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me” and “For me to live is Christ.” This is more than professing the Christian religion. It is such an identification with Christ that one forgets self. It may well be that in our kind of society, as in Dostoevsky’s, one so resolved may well appear to be an idiot, however fine and noble he may be.

This is the hallelujah chorus of our lives, that Jesus is real and that he is in our hearts. It is those who are willing to be fools of God, like Paul, who will ignore the applause of this world in order to become like Jesus. To be like Jesus! Do we even begin to realize the profundity of such a profession. It reaches the very heart of what we love and believe in and would die for. If it really is holiness that we seek, if ours is a hunger and thirst after righteousness, then the treasures of this world will be trivial to us. And we will be as fools to a secular world.

This is part of what it means to praise God, which is the meaning of hallelujah, to honor him as the Lord of our lives even when it brings the frowns of a proud world down upon us. The working girl is praising God when she preserves her virtue for Jesus sake. The clerk is praising God in remaining honest, even when it is easy not to be, because he sees this as the will of God. The youth is praising God when he draws upon spiritual resources to kick the dope habit. One is praising God in fighting poverty, disease and ignorance in that he sees these things as debilitating to that likeness of God that is in man. One praises God in coping with his own pride, realizing that pride denies his heart of a simple, trusting faith.

Proud men do not praise God. Thankless men do not praise God. Nor do the self-sufficient.

As elegant as the expression is, hallelujah is rarely found in scripture, as if it were reserved for those special instances when men let loose all that is within them in praising God.

The psalmist is the only Old Testament writer to use the term, and he only a dozen times or so. Scholars believe that the term served as a special invitation for those around to join in praise to God. In Psa. 116 the writer cries Hallelujah because “The Lord listens to my entreaty; he bends down to listen to me.” Could there be a tenderer description of God as loving Father, bending down to hear what we are saying to him. No wonder we should praise him!

In Psa. 113 there is the cry of Hallelujah because God “raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the dunghill, and in Psa. 107 he is praised for showing the way to those who are lost and bringing light to those in darkness and gloom.

It is only in Revelation that hallelujah appears in the New Testament, and here it is used in praising God for the final victory of goodness over evil, of Christ over Satan, of the church over the world. It is indeed a song of victory for the saints: “Hallelujah! The reign of the Lord our God Almighty has begun. Let us be glad and joyful and give praise to God, because this is the time of the marriage of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:7).

We do not know just how this term inspired the gifted mind of Handel, thus giving us the great hallelujah chorus, but it must have been comforting to him, once he had grown old and blind to listen to that music of his youth that so beautifully honors God. It was surely a quiet joy that filled his heart, a joy that cannot really be blind even if one can no longer see. And this is the hallelujah of our lives, that joy that sees ultimate victory for all that God is doing in our lives. To praise God is to enjoy him and to rejoice in his purposes for us. “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice,” said the great apostle even from a Roman prison.

A few years after leaving Bethany we heard of Julian Barkley’s death. Following farm labor as was his custom through the years, he passed on quietly while a passenger on a bus. Tragedy may have marked his life, but there was something tender about his obsession for Christlikeness. If God must make us fools to make us more like himself, then fools let us become. And then that joy that inspired St. John the Divine to sing of victory will be ours. Hallelujah! — the Editor