Song of Songs 1:1-4
July 5 MMXX
I.
I confess I did not pay much attention to the recent General Assembly, which was conducted on Zoom. But I did notice the fallout on social media. Apparently, the Assembly had opportunities to make a strong statement affirming and supporting black women and girls… and declined to do so.
I have no idea what they were thinking. However, I suggest that this attitude was less about the actual circumstances of black women and girls, which are in dire need of improvement, and more about the abysmal theological and ecclesiastical habits we have inherited, in which categories of people have been chronically ignored, rejected, devalued, and assaulted, including: women, young people, and non-Europeans, especially Africans.
In considering what the Bible might have to say about this, the Song of Songs comes to my attention. I mean, the whole book is a dialogue between two ecstatic lovers: someone called “the King” and… a black woman.
The Song of Songs, taken literally, is an erotic love poem. It is even fairly explicit sexually. It does not take much imagination to get what a lot of the imagery is referring to. If you just go to the most overtly sexual interpretation you can think of, you’re probably on the right track.
Some might wonder what this R-rated book is even doing in the middle of the Bible anyway. Song of Songs is like a minority report, a subtle, understated, humble composition that seems to differ with a lot of the mainstream of the Biblical message.
But in reality Song of Songs can be read to provide the very basis and matrix that holds the Biblical message together and gives it its true direction and meaning. It is called Song of Songs as a way of saying that it is the greatest of all songs; it is the song that undergirds and informs every other song. It’s relationship to the rest of the Bible is like the key-signature at the beginning of a piece of music. It provides the tonality, flavor, and organization of all the subsequent notes.
Because Song of Songs is about love. It offers human love, not just as an analogy, but an expression, reflection, and manifestation of God’s love. It says that the love experienced by two human beings is nothing less than a participation in the love of God that permeates the whole creation, and which is the very energy generated by and holding together even the Holy Trinity, which is God in essence. To know this love is basically to share in the fundamental organizing principle of the universe.
Song of Songs, like the whole Bible, reveals and points to the Word of God become flesh, Jesus Christ. And it offers a subtle filter by which God’s love is brought into focus. For with this Song in our hearts it is impossible for us to interpret the gospel of Christ in violent, exploitative, domineering, controlling, legalistic, retributive, exclusionary, selfish ways. Through the Song we know that God is madly, crazily, wildly, irrationally in love with the world and each one of us, and our only coherent, authentic response is to desire and pursue nothing but a total, ego-annihilating union with and in God through creation. And that is what Jesus Christ embodies. That is what trusting in him gives us: the freedom to lose ourselves in love for the world, each other, and God.
II.
The Song starts with an attribution to King Solomon, a biblical figure who is loved by the writers in the Wisdom tradition of the Bible, in books like Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Proverbs, Job, and this one. (We Presbyterians don’t even have some of these books in our Bibles, which is a problem to begin with.)
Solomon is also disliked by a group of biblical writers, who choose to blame him for all kinds of bad things. I suspect they were most disturbed by the kind of wildness and sensuality we see in Song of Songs.
One thing that disoriented nervous establishment types is the fluidity we see in this passage concerning pronouns. It goes from third person to second person, the speaker shifts from singular to plural, all without skipping a beat, just in the first 4 verses. It reminds me at least a little bit of the trend in some circles today to choose your own pronouns for yourself. Some find this affirming and others disturbing, which may be part of the point.
It is also important to note that we don’t even know the gender of the first speaker. What we do know is that those reading and hearing this passage identify primarily with the one expressing love for the King, which makes for an intentional possible awkwardness for male readers (and readers in synagogues would have been male). They have to start by standing up on the bema or in the pulpit and opening with the words, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” It is almost comical!
In Genesis we read that God created human beings in the divine Image, male and female. The Hebrew could be taken to mean that every human being is both male and female, that each of us is somewhere on a spectrum, a continuum, between the two. If that is so, the Song of Songs begins by asking us to identify with our female aspect. That is, we see ourselves primarily with those who are reflexively marginalized and devalued in human culture. That’s whose voice gets priority; that’s whose perspective we need first to adopt.
And when the apostle Paul, in Galatians, proclaims there to no longer be in Christ “male and female,” he is deeply influenced by the theology of Song of Songs. He means that Christ reveals our participation in an inclusive Image of God in which one aspect is no longer superior and the other subordinate, but in which the devalued element is lifted up, and the overvalued element is deflated, so that both are able to function as equals in attraction and affection. In Ephesians 5, Christ breaks down the oppressive pecking order, the imbalance of privilege, the unequal power, in which one is always subject to the other; now male and female are subject to each other.
III.
In the Song of Songs, the initial speaker is the King’s lover. And, once we dig deeper than the literal meaning, we see that the speaker may represent the individual disciple, or more likely the community of disciples, that is, those who love “the King,” who represents God. The whole book is thus taken by mystics and theologians as an allegory for the love between God and humans.
Some insist that this is just a way to neutralize and domesticate the eroticism of the text. And certainly it was often used that way.
But this cuts both ways. Because the point of the Song may be to affirm that our relationship with God, and also with God’s creation and each other, needs to express qualities of desire, wildness, sensation, and delight.
This has been sorely and tragically lacking in our Presbyterian tradition, which often has the whole thing locked down in iconoclasm, systematic theologies, confessional subscriptionism, the Book of Order, and Robert’s Rules. All of these tend to privilege the rational, controlling, goal-oriented, adversarial, and objectifying side of our nature, and subordinate the untamed feelings of the heart. Which is how we still have oppressive things happening at GA; our structures and procedures spawn our decisions.
Song of Songs insists that we approach things differently. It invites us into a sensuality that displaces our dominant rationalism. Listen to the attention here to wine, to anointing oil, to perfume, and even to kissing. Listen to the way it is these things — not written moral laws or theological precepts — that are identified with the King’s “name.”
Indeed, here the very name of the King is love and attraction! It aromatically permeates the atmosphere, and even gets into the bloodstream like alcohol, shifting our perceptions. The name of the King is pervasive and intimate; it is like the way the name of a lover comes to magically infect every part of you.
The King, of course, is Jesus Christ, who instructs us to follow him and love him as he loves us. Discipleship is not a duty so much as a passionate surrender like that expressed here with the plea for him to draw us into his chamber. It is a giving ourselves over to him in delight and ecstasy. It is receiving his life. It is represented in the Sacrament where we eat his body and drink his blood so that his life swims and flows in us. It is where we become “one flesh” with our God, empowered to do his work of justice and love in his name.
With this Spirit blowing through us, how could we ever turn anything God made into an object to be used and used up? In the glory of this Wisdom, how could we ever reduce anyone or any group of people to an enemy or an underclass to be exploited? Filled with this overflowing love, how do we not collapse in sorrow and shame at the abuses suffered by our fellow creatures, from the tropical rain forests to, for instance, black women and girls?
IV.
I do not know how we even imagine pouring this kind of potent new wine into the dried out, brittle wineskin of Presbyterianism; I really don’t. If we tried, I wonder if it wouldn’t just explode, as Jesus says.
But my sense is that this has to start somewhere. And maybe that somewhere is the injection of a more sensory, tactile, intimate, undefined, altered, wild, and present practice of our faith. I mean, Jesus was called “a glutton and a drunkard” who associated with “tax collectors and prostitutes.” He was famous as a healer and exorcist who broke social boundaries. In our gospel reading he has a scandalous encounter with a woman and some scented oil, and he uses this to talk about forgiveness.
None of which sounds very Presbyterian.
What if we moved more? What if we started using all our senses in worship? What if we paid attention to beauty? What if Jesus really became, as J.S. Bach offered, “the joy of our desiring”?
Maybe there is more to Jesus’ central commandment to “love one another as I have loved you,” than we have allowed ourselves to imagine. Maybe Jesus calls us not just to love the world and each other, and God, but to be crazy in love with them. Maybe Jesus is enticing us to lose all sense of proportion and what passes for “decency,” and to surrender, giving up ourselves, in ecstasy and joy, to the love that pulses at the heart of all things.
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