This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 25; Song of Songs 1:1-7; Revelation 7:1-8; Luke 9:51-62
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2-6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3-4, BCP, p. 94)
Song of Songs 1:2-4: Love & desire. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine — Song of Songs 1:2. These are not the sort of words with which one expects a book of the Bible to begin, are they? But they are a marvelous keynote for this “best of songs”: the main voice throughout this book will be that of a woman who yearns for the loving embrace of her beloved.
“There is something dreamy about these opening lines of the Song,” says Old Testament scholar Ilana Pardes (The Song of Songs: A Biography, p. 1). If you can read Hebrew, you will recognize the luscious “sh” sound predominating in the first two lines; in the opening paragraph, the voice vacillates between the woman’s speaking of her lover in the third person, and her addressing him in the second person; we are never quite sure exactly where we are, as the scene changes from intimate, private space to outdoor, festive space; we aren’t quite sure either whether her lover is an actual king, or whether her love makes him seem like one. As Pardes says, “It is a dream zone—nothing is completely discernable—everything is deeply felt.”
Going forward in our study, I’m OK with that. “Everything is deeply felt.” That is one of the primary take-aways from this book. Those of us who have been around church long enough have been taught that biblical love is agape-love, and that agape-love is primarily about “giving” and not “feeling” (or eros-love). According to Song of Songs, it’s not quite that simple. Biblical love—love between a woman and a man, and love between us and our Lord—feels deeply. To be sure, deep feeling gives deeply as well. But deep feeling feels deeply—and that is good. Because God made deep feelings good.
Song of Songs 1:4-8 —Love & eyes wide open. I am very dark but comely … my mother’s sons were angry with me … my own vineyard I have not kept — Song of Songs 1:5,6 (RSV). The woman who is the primary singer in our Song has been deeply wounded by her family, and she also acknowledges some sort of failing on her part. Her skin is deeply tanned, which in her world is not a sign of leisured beauty. In her case, it is a sign of being reduced to the degradation of laboring in the fields. Nor, for her part, is she free from fault: “my own vineyard I have not kept.”
A second take-away from this “best of songs” is that love loves with eyes wide open. There will be several phrases in this song that speak of love’s intoxicating power (2:5; 4:9; 5:1,8), but in this book, love is always cognizant of imperfections. At the human level, often the beloved’s imperfections become the things that the lover finds most attractive.
In his biography of Ulysses S. Grant, author Ron Chernow narrates a conversation between Grant and his wife Julia, who had grown up cross-eyed. As Grant began to become more and more a public figure, Julia, fearing that her “so very, very plain” appearance would hamper their public life, wanted to have surgery to straighten her eyes. Ulysses would have none of it: “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.” Chernow concludes, “The anecdote, as well as many others, attests to the depth of Grant’s unconditional love for his wife, and vice versa” (Grant, p. 332).
Love is a place of deep feeling and of deep giving because it is first of all a place of deep grace. For her part, Mrs. Grant—and Mr. Grant’s best friends—loved him through, and in spite of, his debilitating alcoholism. And it was their love that fortified him in his struggle.
Christ loves us not because we are without fault. In fact, it is to us in our tragic fallenness that he has drawn near. And we bless him for it. As the ancient church sang in the darkness of Holy Saturday’s Great Vigil:
O truly needful sin of Adam which was blotted out by the death of Christ!
O happy fault (“felix culpa”) which merited so great a Redeemer!
Our love for Christ is infinitely and forever sweeter by virtue of the fact that he comes not for the lovely but for the unlovely, not for the perfect but for the imperfect. He not only comes to forgive, he comes to unite himself to us, and in doing so to turn our tragedy to comedy, our ugliness to beauty, our humiliation to glory. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
Revelation 7: A perfected Israel. As providence would have it, our reading of Song of Songs will parallel the Book of Revelation’s account of the way God works to draw a people together from Israel and the nations, forms them as the Bride of Christ, protects them, and purifies them for the Marriage Feast of the Lamb (chapters 7 through 19).
In today’s reading, we see that God’s ultimate plan is to rescue 144,000 “of the people of Israel.” I submit to you that this is a figurative number—a number of love’s perfection, not of arbitrary exclusion. It is the square of 12 (12 being the number of Israel’s tribes) multiplied by 1,000 (1,000 being a number of magnitude), and is John’s way of referring to what Paul calls in his epistle to the Romans “the fullness of [the Jews]” (Romans 11:12). Paul balances out “the fullness of the Jews” with “the fullness of the Gentiles” in Romans 11:25. Just so, John’s 144,000 Jews receives its complement in the last half of Revelation 7 (tomorrow’s reading) with a countless throng from every nation and tribe and people and tongue “standing before the throne and the Lamb” (v. 9).
Between the first and second halves of Revelation 7, we get the dual mystery of God’s great plan: he elects perfectly, and does so with an expansive heart. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
Luke 9: Sublime resolution. When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem — Luke 9:51. Luke so finely balances a sense of God’s perfect timing (“when the days drew near”) with the resolution it took Jesus to carry out his mission (“he set his face”). And there’s also the fine balance between the horror we know the upcoming crucifixion to be and the way Luke refers to the end of the mission to be Christ’s being taken up into glory (“for him to be taken up”). Also finely balanced is the implicit message to the apostles to “let it be” when people reject them, and thus him (“But he turned and rebuked them”), and his “all or nothing” call to follow him (“No one who puts a hand to the plow…”). What a wonderful Redeemer, bringing a wonderful redemption. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+