When Joy Changed Its Name

On Christmas Day, 1989, less than seven weeks after the Berlin Wall crumbled, Leonard Bernstein stood before an orchestra unlike any the world had seen. Musicians from East Germany, West Germany, New York, London, Paris, and Leningrad sat side by side in the Schauspielhaus near the Brandenburg Gate. They had come to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — but Bernstein made one audacious change. Everywhere Schiller's poem read Freude — "Joy" — the chorus would sing Freiheit — "Freedom."

The effect was electric. Voices that had been divided by concrete and barbed wire for twenty-eight years now rose together in a single, thundering declaration. Millions watched the broadcast across six continents. Some wept. Many could not believe what they were seeing.

Psalm 98 calls for exactly this kind of moment — a new song, born from marvelous things the Lord has done. The psalmist says all the ends of the earth have seen God's salvation, and the response is not polite applause but rivers clapping, mountains singing, the whole creation joining a chorus of joy. Bernstein understood instinctively what the psalmist knew by revelation: when God does something marvelous, the old words are not enough. You need a new song. And when that song rises, it gathers everyone — east and west, near and far — into one voice of praise before the Almighty who comes to set things right.