Wednesday • 10/30/2024 •

Proper 25

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:49-72; Song of Songs 4:9–5:1; Revelation 12:1-6; Luke 11:37-52

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)

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 4:9–5:1. 

Sacramental love. There is a spiritual habit of soul—a capacity for “seeing through” to “the other side”—that is difficult for secularized Westerners to comprehend, much less experience. That’s why so many modern commentators flatten the physical similes and metaphors of love in the Song of Song. Late modern people have become tone deaf to supernal overtones—what sociologist Peter Berger calls “rumors of angels.” 

You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride…” — Song of Songs 4:9. Our male singer and lover finds in his “sister” and “bride” a rediscovered Eden. His garden imagery is not just exotic but fantastic—fruits and flowers that would grow together in no garden in this world: “…with all choicest fruits, henna and nard,… and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh, and aloes, with all chief spices—a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon.” It is Paradise that he is imagining, for streams did not flow from Lebanon to Israel. In a Palestine that is perpetually threatened with drought, he has found, in her, his own secret garden with its ever-flowing supply of water. For him, she has become the place where he returns to Eden— where everything is possible and where life is always new.

Moreover, she takes him back to Israel’s entry into the Promised Land. Communion with her is the partaking of milk and honey: “I eat my honeycomb with my honey, I drink my wine with my milk” — Song of Songs 5:1. Milk and honey, of course, were crowning symbols of the richness of the Promised Land (Exodus 3:8). Noting, by the way, the convergence of wine and milk and honey in the Song of Songs, the Apostolic Tradition, often attributed to Hippolytus (of the church of Rome, early 3rd  century AD), supplemented the Eucharistic wine with milk and honey, symbolizing thereby the notion that communion with Christ is its own way of enjoying the bounty of the Promised Land: “…and milk and honey mingled together in fulfillment of the promise which was made to the Fathers, wherein he said ‘I will give you a land flowing with milk and honey’; which Christ indeed gave, even his flesh, whereby they who believe are nourished like little children, making the bitterness of the heart sweet by the sweetness of his word.” 

What’s more, she who is herself “an orchard of pomegranates” embodies for her lover communion with God in the temple. Pomegranates adorned the High Priest’s robe (Exodus 28:31-36; 39:22-26). Solomon set two-hundred bronze pomegranates atop the two pillars of bronze in the temple (1 Kings 7:13-22). And the very smell of her (“with all trees of frankincense, myrrh…”) puts our singer in mind of the altar from which rises the fragrance of spiced incense. There is an enchanting beauty to God’s holiness (Psalm 98:6) that the sights and smells of the temple excite in him—a beauty to which the sight and smell of her sacramentally attune him. 

The biblical world is first and foremost a challenge to a redeemed imagination, and to a restored sacramental sensibility. One of the great gifts of the Song of Songs is to contribute to the reclamation of spiritual sight and taste and smell and touch. 

The same is true for today’s passage in Revelation. Here Christ’s entire earthly career is mind-blowingly summarized, as it careens from birth to ascension against the backdrop of murderous malevolent intent. But the focus is on the pregnant heavenly royal woman who, under attack by a great red dragon, gives birth to her royal son. The son is taken to heaven, while she escapes to the wilderness, “where she has a place prepared by God.” Who is the woman? Mary? a new Israel? the Church? all of the above? In the rest of Revelation, the mother who has become the woman-of-the-wilderness becomes the Bride of Christ. Meanwhile, we will discover that her eventual elevation comes at the expense of her evil counterpart, the Whore of Babylon. The biblical world invites—no, demands—a looking beyond immediate headlines and pressing duties to a larger cosmic drama. 

Luke & Jesus’s “woes” against faux faith. With so much at stake in the grand biblical drama, it is small wonder that Jesus speaks piteous woes against those who are supposed to be guardians and promoters of the faith in his day. Those who are tasked with enlarging and building up people’s faith have been diminishing it and undermining it. And so Jesus denounces: 

• their externalism (“Did not he who made the outside make the inside also?”), 

• their elevating things less important above the more important (“you tithe mint and rue and herbs…, and neglect justice and the love of God”), 

• their pride (“…you love to have the seat of honor”), 

• the very vacuousness of their being (“…you are like unmarked graves”), 

• their lying piety (“…you approve the [murderous] deeds of your ancestors and build … tombs [to those they murdered]”) 

• their hypocritical cruelty (“…you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering”). 

May your time in God’s Word open up to you the vast horizons of his abiding trustworthiness, the grand hope of glory that is yours, and his overwhelmingly persistent love for you. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+