Thursday 10/27/2022 • Proper 25

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 50; Song of Songs 5:2-8; Revelation 12:7-17; Luke 11:53–12:12

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); 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 some of the wonder of this “Best of Songs.” Today’s portion is Song of Songs 5:2–8.

Looking for love in all the wrong places. Today’s verses from the first half of Song of Songs chapter five form a matched set with those from the first half of chapter three. Both sets of verses have a dreamlike aura about them. In both sets, our female singer wanders nighttime streets seeking her lost lover. This time, his absence is due to her slow response to his overtures. Regretting her reticence at intimacy, she rashly rushes out into city streets in the middle of the night. As before, she is met by the city’s “sentinels” or “watchmen” or “guardians” (Hebrew shomerim). Unlike last time when the “guardians” left her in peace, this time, they rough her up. As though she were a compromised woman, they strip her of her mantle, and beat her. The vignette ends with her appealing to the “daughters of Jerusalem” to find her beloved and tell him: “I am faint with love.”

As with the previous reverie about a nighttime search for love, the story itself reads more like a dream—in this case, a bad dream—than a recollection. And its deeper meaning for the recorder of the song and for those who deemed it worthy of inclusion in the canon is probably to be found in its theological symbolism. As commentator Robert W. Jenson crisply puts it: “Israel is asleep, and the Lord is absent.” When God’s people are slow to respond to the Lord and he departs, “her lovesickness overwhelms her prudence.” She mounts a wild and unconsidered quest to satisfy the longing that he has awakened. This time the keepers of the faith—Moses and the Levites, and their prophetic heirs—“offer no comfort but only judgment.”

The singer’s song in today’s verses tells a cautionary tale. In Israel’s history, one thinks of the Golden Calf, a wrong-headed attempt to make up for Moses’ absence during his forty days on Mt. Sinai—to which Moses responds harshly. Or Israel’s tendency to turn to Canaanite deities of fertility in the face of drought—prompting the prophets’ persistent reproofs. One may even fast forward to the Bride of Christ’s flirting with, even taking to her bed, alien lovers of secularism, nationalism, racism, materialism, spiritualism, occultism—countered by faithful preachers’ steady urging to return to “your first love” (Revelation 2:4). In such periods, the “guardians” do their guarding by rebuking. As well they should.

And looking for love in the right place. Oddly complementary to today’s reading in Song of Songs is the vision in Revelation 12. Here, Michael the archangel fights the dragon who has been threatening the queen of heaven and her royal son. The queen of heaven sojourns on earth where the dragon, that is “the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world,” has been cast down from heaven. Ousted from the heavenly court, the Dragon-Devil carries out his campaign against her down here below. With this captivating cluster of images, John symbolically portrays the church’s career: transformed from queen of heaven to Bride-in-waiting during her period of persecution on the earth.

With the devil’s forced change of venue, worship breaks out in heaven. The devil’s being thrown down signals his end, and, simultaneously, the inauguration of the Kingdom of God: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of the Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down….” (Revelation 12:10).

I think that as John writes these words he expects us to recall what he had recorded Jesus saying about his upcoming death: “’Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die” (John 12:31-33). The cross of Christ becomes the place where the devil is deposed, disarmed, and defeated (Colossians 2:15), and where his grip on the sinful nations is broken (John 12:32, with Revelation 20:2-3).

Happily, the grand arc of the biblical narrative does not culminate in the nightmare of our missing out on God’s loving advances, experiencing shame and pain like the lost lover at the hands of the “guardians.” Her Groom will not leave his Bride abandoned and shamed in the dangerous nighttime streets. The crux of the Bible’s story line is a Cross where our Heavenly Lover captures our hearts for all time, where all our resistance and all our reluctance fade away, and where the voices of our accusers — whether “guardians” or enemies — get drowned out by shouts of “Now have come the salvation and the power….”

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Nikolay Bogatov , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons