Friday 10/28/2022 • Proper 25
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 40; Psalm 54; Song of Songs 5:9-16; Revelation 13:1-10 (and Saturday’s Revelation 13:11-18); Luke 12:13-31
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6-11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13, BCP, p. 93)
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.
Song of Songs. Challenged with the question, “What makes your Beloved so special?”, the Bride declares that her Beloved is “the chiefest among ten thousand” (Song of Songs 5:10b KJV). Just as the Bridegroom earlier had described the Bride’s features from her face down to her neck and then to her breasts, so the Bride describes her Bridegroom in similar sequence: “his head...his eyes...his cheeks...his lips….” She continues to describe “his arms...his body...his legs….” Once again, it is worth taking time to read this slowly and appreciate the lovely lyrical quality of the Bride’s delight in, and love for, her Bridegroom. (For a possible real-world, but lesser analogy, one might imagine a bride in a later century trying to describe her lover in terms of the physical perfection of Michelangelo’s David. With thanks to commentator Robert Jenson for this suggestion.)
The Bride and the Bridegroom exult in the loveliness each sees in the other. There is an innocence in the joy with which they celebrate their love and their delight in one another’s physicality. Eden exists! To each other, they are perfect. He to her: “There is no flaw in you” (4:7). She of him: “All of him is delightful” (5:16b).
On the human plane, one thing to notice is that husband and wife meet at the level of mutuality—they experience each other as “sister” and “brother,” and she calls him “friend” (4:9,10,12; 5:1,2,16; later, 8:1).
On the divine-human plane, the thing to notice is that for Christians, God’s incarnation in his Son brings an elevation that is perhaps more accessible to hymnody than to formal theology:
What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear…
Jesus, what a friend for sinners, Jesus lover of my soul…
Less well-known, perhaps, are the lyrics of poet Fanny Crosby, whose physical blindness sometimes seems to make her view of spiritual truths all the more accurate. “Seeing” her Savior and Lord Jesus in today’s verses, she writes:
He’s the Chief among ten thousand, And the fairest of the fair;
I shall see Him in His beauty, And His image I shall bear.
Revelation. By contrast, what vile ugliness confronts us in Revelation 13! The dragon (Satan) produces a first beast (dubbed in John’s epistles “antichrist”—1 John 2:18,22; 2 John 7) whose career is a mocking inversion of Christ’s (Revelation 13:12,14), and a second beast (dubbed in 1 John “the spirit of antichrist”—1 John 4:3) whose career is a mocking inversion of the life-giving Spirit (Revelation 13:12-15). Together the dragon and the two beasts form a kind of counter trinity, set against the true Three-in-One.
Two points I wish to make:
First, while both Revelation and John’s epistles do seem to point to a future day in which there will be an explosion of evil against “the Lamb and his people,” John also indicates that the entire era of the church’s existence is characterized as “the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance” (Revelation 1:9). Already in John’s day, he could point to many “antichrists” (1 John 2:18), that is, to many figures who stand against Christ, even offering themselves as substitute-Christs (for “substitute” is one of the meanings for the “anti-” in “antichrist”). And already in John’s day, he detects the working of the “spirit of antichrist,” animating false teaching within the church and persecution from without. We should not be shocked or discouraged if we sense “antichrist” and “the spirit of antichrist” around us in our own day as well.
That said, we should not miss the fact that the power of these evil beings is limited (note the repeated refrain, “it was allowed” and “it was given authority”—e.g., 13:5,7,15). We know the end of the story. We know that this pathetic, if powerfully destructive, rebellion is doomed. We win.
Luke. In the face of all that is still evil in the world, God is preparing his Church for her wedding day. That fact makes it all the more imperative that we heed Jesus’s teaching from today’s gospel reading that we not allow ourselves a short-sighted, “your-best-life-now” preoccupation with money and bigger things and better stuff (larger and larger barns). And further, that we learn the peace and confidence that come from “considering the lilies” and trusting both ourselves, and our destinies, to the Lord’s tender, beautifying care.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+