So everyone is giving Justin Timberlake props for his performance during the Haiti thing. These are, I suppose, deserved. He did a pretty nice job with a pretty sparse song during a potentially pretty depressing telethon. He was no Madonna, for which I am sure we are all grateful. Haven’t the people of Haiti suffered enough?
The thing about the performance is that he left out a couple of verses in the song. It’s a long song, so there is an understandable urge to shorten it. There is only so much time any decent fundraiser is going to be able to wait before he throws another pitch in. Plus, the verses that got cut out are the ones most likely to get people riled up, what with their allegorical imagery that could be taken to be sexual. So, cut em on out, right?
Those verses, though, get right down to where the song touches our lives. Sure the biblical references are nicely turned out, but their all just leading up to something. Here are these heroic figures, isolated and alone in their grandeur. David, Sampson and so many other great men who might not have been good people. Not until they were stripped bare and cleaned out in the attempt to win love only to learn that, say Leonard says, “Love is not a victory march.”
It’s a broken Hallelujah. It can’t be justified by logic or strength. There is not a contract or a deal. What worked before isn’t guaranteed to work again. So the grace is that the Hallelujah still works. You can play it on the harp of a king dancing before the ark of the covenant, or it can play cold and broken, but it still plays. Hallelujah.