Imagine taking the The Messiah to Macy’s. Well part of it did go there. Two Saturday’s ago 650 singers “spontaneously” sang the “Hallelujah Chorus” to the shoppers in the Philadelphia Macy’s, and it was pretty spectacular.
The camera work is annoying, but the sound is good. It’s also disturbing when dirty vessels carry clean water.
Sadly, many of the shoppers took the music as a restful delight, instead of disturbing truth intended to make them repent.
Hallelujah in context, of course, refers to the Resurrection. Now if the company had also sung the movement preceding this one… we might imagine a different shade of meaning attached to the paschal Hallelujah. Illiteracy, it must be granted, also has made the word hallelujah an expression of subjective elation rather than of a call to worship YHWH.