Monday 10/24/2022 • Proper 25

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 41; Psalm 52; Song of Songs 3:6-11; Revelation 11:1-14; Luke 11:14-26

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)

An audio or video version of this devotional can be found here: Apple Podcast, Spotify Podcast, YouTube

For our Old Testament reading last week, this week, and the next, I am treating the Song of Songs instead of the lectionary’s choice, Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Ben Sirach). Together, I hope we are discovering or rediscovering the wonder of this “Best of Songs.” Today’s portion is Song of Songs 3:6–11. 

Song of Songs: a wedding day. The scene in today’s verses from Song of Songs evokes the liturgical spectacle of one of Solomon’s seven hundred wedding ceremonies (see 1 Kings 11:3). The opening question is wrongly translated by the NRSV. The Hebrew is “Who is she coming from the wilderness, like a column of smoke?” (Song of Songs 3:6). The bride approaches just as Israel had emerged from the wilderness, accompanied by incense that recalls God’s presence in a cloud of smoke (Exodus 14:19-20; 40:36-38). The groom, with a wedding crown atop his head, receives her in his palanquin constructed of materials that recall the Temple in Jerusalem, and “inlaid with love.” With its inclusion in Scripture, the Song of Songs lays down a pattern whereby every wedding ceremony becomes a reenactment of God and his people entering into covenant. 

Whether in a cathedral or in a city hall, every bride is a queen, every groom is a king. We all sense this truth, whatever cultural forces resist it, because God made us this way. 

Congruently, to belong to Christ is to be betrothed to him, and therefore to be in the process of becoming beautiful, toward the day in which we emerge from our own wilderness and are received into the chariot of love of our greater Solomon, the King of Peace. O happy day!

Luke: a consequential presence. In the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus had announced his Messianic mission to set captives free (Luke 4:16-22). In today’s passage, he does just that. He releases a person from a demonic oppression that had left that person without a voice. Crowds are amazed when the formerly mute person speaks—something so fundamental to human flourishing has been restored! 

Jesus has indisputable powers. The question is: where do those powers come from? … from below? … or from above? Jesus warns that it is a fatal mistake to get this question wrong. His miracles are evidence of the reestablishing of God’s benevolent rule. To miss their meaning is to put oneself on the side of malevolence: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23). To fail to see Jesus’s life-giving miracles as coming from “the finger of God” is to commit a kind of spiritual suicide. In verses 24-26, Christ portrays his purging a person of evil as creating a kind of spiritual vacuum. That vacuum will be filled again, either by the Holy Spirit, or by spirits worse than what had been driven out in the first place. Lord, have mercy!

Revelation: a season of witness. It’s impossible to tease out the richness of the symbolism of Revelation 11 in just a few words. John is told to measure the temple, because it will be protected, while the outer courts will be trampled by the nations. It’s not the physical temple in Jerusalem that John measures, for that temple was destroyed in the Jewish War. Jesus’s coming as the true temple had made of the earthly Jerusalem’s temple an anachronism. Now his own body has become the source for the building of a Final Temple (John 1:21), made up of his people, whom Peter likens to “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5). 

This is the temple John measures. This temple, so John is being instructed, will be protected, while that which lies outside it will be destroyed during a limited, but intense, period of persecution. This season of persecution will be characterized by two things: witness and martyrdom. God will raise up witnesses whom he will empower with the same Spirit, who, under Moses, had turned water into blood and had struck the earth with plagues, and under Elijah  had “shut the sky” so that no rain would fall (Revelation 11:6). At the same time, there will be martyrdoms that have every appearance of being utter failures—but which will result in resurrection (Revelation 11:7-11). 

It’s important to keep in mind that Revelation’s story line is leading up to a wedding day—a wedding day not dissimilar to the one the Song of Songs describes in today’s reading. In the next chapter of Revelation, John will shift his image of the church from “temple” to “woman.” In the same way that the “temple” experiences protection while the “outer courts” are trampled, just so, the “woman” will be carried into the wilderness where the “dragon” will pursue her, while nature itself preserves her—for her wedding day. Stay tuned!

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

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