Song 1:2-7

In these studies on the Song, greatly helped by Robert Jenson, I’ll follow his presentation of the material. How the poem progresses, what it tells us about our relationship with God, and what it tells us about human love. Basically: Poem and man, God and man, man and woman.

Poem and Man

The opening verses of chapter 2 are an exchange of compliments. We have to assume that the ESV has the speaking parts right and say that the man compares himself to a rose in verse 1. He then looks at his bride and sees her as the only thing of beauty in his eyes, the only lily in the brambles.

She returns these compliments in verse 3. To her, the whole world is made up of barren trees, he is the only fruitful one. He is the only one who provides what she needs. The second half of verse 3 and verse 4 have to be read as talking about physical desire and fulfillment. Without ascribing meaning to every jot and tittle we see desire and fulfillment plainly spoken of. The man takes her to some sort of banqueting hall, somewhere designed for a party, and with his banners, lets everyone know how he loves her. She is so overwhelmed by this love that she needs sustenance. A happy, fulfilled scene greets us in chapter 2.

I don’t think the poet meant this intimate scene to be viewed publically, so we have to read verses 6 and 7 as happening later on, as a memory being told in the present tense. What the bride says to her ladies in waiting is another question. Either don’t wake up my husband until he’s ready, or don’t wake me up and ruin this physical bliss, or don’t fall in love too soon. And how is this vow made by gazelles and does of the field? Jenson suggests that this is perhaps one further step of analogy removed from the later Jewish practice of swearing by the temple, or the gold or the Torah. Again, as we are reading a poem, we can simply enjoy the beautiful imagery if we want to.

God and Man

Bernard of Clairvaux says ‘uniquely among the trees of the forest, the Lord Jesus is a tree who bares fruit, and that according to His humanity.’ Amen. Jesus came, with a body, to serve. We worship and physical God, Jesus had hands and a nose and a mouth. He came to serve us and to save us, he fruit is borne to us according to His humanity. But was Israel ever lovesick for her Lord? We have to remember that the prophets spoke ‘not only for the Lord to His people, but for the people to the Lord.’ (Jenson) The first returned Jews were lovesick for a Temple, the Jews in the diaspora were sick for any sort of Temple.

Origen, living after the incarnation of Christ, brings us even closer. He says ‘when (the church) has been pierced through and through by the loveable javelin of knowing Him, she can only long for Him day and night…and have no inclination or desire…for anything except Him.’ This is a wonderful picture of what our love for Jesus should be like. One day in His house is better than a thousand elsewhere, He alone is the eternal thirstquencher. Once we’ve been pierced by His gentle darts, nothing else seems as good, as sweet, as satisfying.

When we are close to Him, in the banqueting hall, intimate with Him, nothing else will ever be the same again. And our hearts long for that closeness again, as a bride for her husband.

Which bring us to the embrace, and makes us ask ourselves ‘could faithful Old Testament believers be happy with the idea that then Lord had a body?’ Well, if we throw out all the physical metaphors and similies of God in the Old Testament, we really throw out most of what the Old Testament says about God. Even at the start God walked in the cool of the day. For Christians the incarnation settles the matter. The New Testament teaches that we are the body of Christ, and that He lives in us. I think all of us have a suspicion that matter is bad and spirit is good. Something that we’ve picked up from living in the 21^st century. The Song, with it’s visual and vibrant depictions of our bridegroom, dismisses such notions, however. God embraces His Church, depicting this embrace with the metaphor of physical love. And it is good.

Let us long to be sick with the love of our Saviour, let us place ourselves where we can pierced with those lovely darts, let us pray for a heart that sees nothing lovely anywhere else.

Woman and Man.

Jenson follows on from the last point: it’s hard for the reader to escape ‘how very bodily that love is which the Song proposes as an analogy for the love between God and His people.  We might have the idea that our love would be better if it was not bodily, but the Song does not agree. The heart may be where human love flows from, but the heart issues through the actions of the lips and hands. The lovers in the Song are ‘incurable romantics’ who have escaped the modern notion that any unconditional declarations of love and foolish, and that any romantic notions must be hidden in layers of irony and pastiche. And good for them, we have to say. Easy for us to observe then, not only how scripture addresses the whole of life, but how scripture speaks to what most people would regard as something deeply private. And just how far we’ve fallen from the ideals of the Bible. We must, it seems, maintain the value of impractical and historically contingent love. Just the sort of love that God has for His people. A love that gets in the way, a love that often makes no sense, but a love that is true and real and deep. Our eyes of faith should see through the atheistic attempts to be ‘cool,’ and to trust our romantic impulses.

Simply, we learn here, to love well, because God loves well, not to fear or look down on the physical, because it was that which God came to save.