Music courtesy of The Falls Church Anglican Choir, Falls Church, Virginia, under the musical direction of Simon Dixon. Audio mastering by Andrew Schooley. From Messiah by George Frideric Handel (1742)

Listen to the full playlist for Handel’s Messiah.

We associate Handel’s Messiah with Christmas and the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Yet Handel produced Messiah for Easter, following Lent, and reserved his forty-eight hallelujahs for praising our death-defeating Savior. In Handel’s day (and for some Christians still today) the word hallelujah was considered too celebratory for the forty days of Lent. There are stories of choir boys making a coffin and putting the word hallelujah in it, only allowing themselves to resurrect it on Easter Sunday.

Some assume Handel’s Messiah ends with the “Hallelujah Chorus,” but there are nine more movements. One of the most striking is “Death where is thy sting?” from 1 Corinthians 15:55–57. A hundred years earlier, John Donne, the pastor poet of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, captured the same idea when he taunted death in his famous sonnet, “Death, Be Not Proud.”

After a near-death experience, he commissioned his own monument not in the clerical robes of a priest but in a humble shroud. Since death had lost its sting, he didn’t fear the shroud because he would exchange it for the white robes of righteousness as he met his Savior.

Years ago, our family visited Saint Paul’s and stood before the stone figure of the emaciated and shrouded Donne. It was one of the few to survive intact in the 1666 blaze that collapsed the Cathedral. It was another taunt at death and emblematic of Donne’s confidence that through faith in the risen Christ he would escape the fires of judgment.

This Christmas listen to Messiah and sing hallelujah. But also open and keep a Christmas package of evidence from Scripture that the babe born in the manger conquered death. Our package has four numbers worthy of memorizing – 40, 12, 8, 516. Scripture records that after His death, Jesus appeared over 40 days, 12 separate times, in 8 geographical locations to more than 516 eyewitnesses.

Hallelujah! No Sting!