Scripture Daily

Context No. 1691 of 4322 · Song of Solomon

Context · Reflection

Song of Solomon 1:8-17: in context

8If you don’t know, most beautiful among women, follow the tracks of the sheep. Graze your young goats beside the shepherds’ tents. 9I have compared you, my love, to a steed in Pharaoh’s chariots. 10Your cheeks are beautiful with earrings, your neck with strings of jewels. 11We will make you earrings of gold, with studs of silver. 12While the king sat at his table, my perfume spread its fragrance. 13My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh, that lies between my breasts. 14My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms from the vineyards of En Gedi. 15Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves. 16Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, yes, pleasant; and our couch is verdant. 17The beams of our house are cedars. Our rafters are firs.

The Song of Songs gives voice to two lovers delighting in each other. The man praises his beloved, comparing her beauty to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots, adorning her with jewels; the woman treasures her beloved like a sachet of myrrh, a cluster of henna blossoms. Behold, you are beautiful, my love, he says; and she answers, behold, you are beautiful, my beloved. Back and forth runs their mutual delight, tender, glad, unguarded, a celebration of love given and received.

On its face, the Song is a celebration of the love between a man and a woman, and it honors that love as good, a gift woven into creation. But the Christian tradition, following the Jewish reading before it, has long heard in the Song something more: an image of the love between God and his people, between Christ and the soul. And read that way, the tenderness of these verses opens onto a truth we can find hard to believe: that God's love for his people is not merely dutiful but delighting. We can imagine God tolerating us, putting up with us, loving us out of obligation or principle. It is harder to imagine him delighting in us, taking pleasure in us, saying over us, as the lover says, behold, you are beautiful, my love. Yet this is how the tradition has heard the Song: as the voice of a God who does not merely endure his people but delights in them, who looks on them with the glad, unguarded love these verses breathe. There is something we need in this. Many of us relate to God as to a stern examiner, hoping to pass, braced for disappointment; the Song invites us to hear instead the voice of a lover who delights. This does not cancel God's holiness or his call to obedience; it sets them within a love that is glad, not grudging. To be loved by God is not to be barely tolerated but to be delighted in, as a lover delights in the beloved. The Song, in all its tenderness, is a window onto that delight, and an invitation to believe that the God who made us looks on his own not with reluctance but with joy.

Do I imagine God merely tolerating me, loving me out of obligation, or can I receive what the Song has long been heard to say, that God delights in his people, looking on them with glad and tender love, and does that change how I come to the God who does not barely endure me but delights in me?

Sources