The
Song of Solomon
Song
of Solomon 7:6-9
1st Timothy 4:1-5
Matthew 19:10-12
I: -- The book of Proverbs tells us there
are four things too wonderful, too mysterious, for the human mind to
comprehend: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a
rock, the way of a ship on the seas, and the way of a man with a maid. (Prov.
30:19) The Song of Solomon
is a collection of love-poems celebrating the way of a man with a maid,
celebrating romantic love. Some
of these love-poems were recited regularly at Hebrew weddings.
While the poems might be the occasion of embarrassment today,
they were clearly no embarrassment to the people who wrote them and no
embarrassment to the wedding-guests who heard them, and no embarrassment
to God who gave them.
They might be the occasion of embarrassment
at a church wedding today in that we tend to confuse eroticism with
pornography and find ourselves rightly upset at pornography.
We ought to distinguish clearly between eroticism and
pornography. Pornography is
the exploitation of the erotic. Pornography
is the vulgarisation, the debasement, of the erotic.
Pornography has become a huge industry
today. How huge?
Pornography is the single largest use to which the internet is
put. Despite the billions of
dollars gambled through slot machines and casinos, the “porn”
industry generates a cash flow ten times greater.
Psychologists have long recognized that pornography is more
addictive than heroin. Pornography
therefore should be abhorred.
At the same time, the erotic is a gift of
God. “The way of a man
with a maid” is something for which our Israelite foreparents praised
God when they worshipped. Because
Israel knew the erotic to be God’s gift, therefore good in itself,
Israel wasn’t embarrassed around the erotic even
as Israel recognized and repudiated the dehumanisation that arises
whenever something as deep in us as the erotic is divorced from human
intimacy, divorced from the profoundest encounter of two persons in a
union whose mystery is so deep that it can never be adequately
described.
While Israel rightly abhorred reducing the
profoundest encounter of man and women to animal instinct-gratification
(we should never forget that David’s earthly life kept going downhill
after his affair with Bathsheba, even as we should remember that last
year in Canada 100,000 people were diagnosed with sexually transmitted
diseases), Israel nonetheless remained as unashamed at the beauty of the
way of a man with a maid as it was unashamed at the beauty of mountains
and stars. To this day
Orthodox Jewish couples have intercourse on Sabbath Eve, and refer to it
circumlocutiously as “Sabbath blessings”.
Reflecting the Jewish conviction of the sanctity of marriage,
Rabbi Akiba said, “The whole world isn’t as worthy as the day on
which the Song of Solomon was given to
Israel
”. Another rabbi insisted
that anyone who looked upon these love-poems as disgusting – such a
person had no share in the world to come.
“Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved”, says the man in the
poems. Longing for him the
woman says, “O that his left hand were under my head, and his right
hand embraced me.”
Because the church has always had
difficulty owning its Hebrew root, the church has traditionally not
known what to do with the Song of Solomon.
For this reason the church has traditionally tried to turn the
Song of Solomon into an allegory. An
allegory is a story in which every item in the story represents
something else.
For instance, some people maintained that the love-poems are an
allegory of God’s love for his people
Israel
.
Another allegory was (is) that the lover in the poems is God,
while the beloved is the individual Christian.
(Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote fine hymns such as “Jesus,
Thou Joy of Loving Hearts”; he thought this.)
Still another allegory: the lover is God, the beloved is the
Virgin Mary.
Martin Luther was the earthiest of the earthy, yet somehow his
earthiness deserted him here, leaving him saying that the love-poems
celebrate the loyalty that King Solomon’s subjects have for Solomon
himself.
When Bernard of Clairvaux read verse
thirteen of chapter one – “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that
lies between my breasts” – Bernard couldn’t stand the thought that
the verse might mean exactly what it says, and so he allegorised it this
way: the bag of myrrh (costly spices) is Jesus Christ crucified, and the
two breasts mentioned in the text represent the two terrorists crucified
on either side of Jesus.
All such allegories, of course, aim at
denying what the love-poems want us to know; namely, that the mystery
and wonder of the deepest encounter of man and woman is good because
it’s God’s gift.
It’s plain that asceticism in principle
is foreign to the Hebrew mind. Paul,
a Hebrew thinker himself, writes to Timothy, “Everything created by
God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with
thanksgiving.” Asceticism
in principle is simply sub-Christian.
Paul tells the Christians in Colosse that they mustn’t heed
ascetic teachers who wag their finger and say, “Don’t handle;
don’t taste; don’t touch”. “Disregard
them”, the apostle urges; “their teaching is sub-Christian”.
A woman from a distant city visiting one of my previous
congregations spoke to me about her situation as a single person (it’s
never easy to be single) and indicated she would very much like to be
married (this is understandable) – to a clergyman, no less.
“A clergyman?” I remarked; “Why do you specify a
clergyman?” “Because
clergymen are so sexless”, she intoned.
Buried in her mind, obviously, was this: sexlessness is a
Christian ideal. Truly
spiritual people, godly people, holy people, are sexless.
Such a notion any Israelite would find incomprehensible.
Because the Israelite mind is always
earthy, the bible is always earthy.
At the same time, the bible is always modest.
Modesty and earthiness together fend off two sub-Christian
distortions. Modesty fends
off vulgarity; earthiness fends off asceticism.
“Abraham knew Sarah, and Sarah conceived.”
Everyone knows what’s meant.
The reality of love-making is acknowledged and its delight
upheld; at the same time, it isn’t described in minute detail in order
to entertain the prurient. Everywhere
in scripture realistic earthiness is joined to fitting modesty.
We must never think that the bible’s
frankness encourages an “anything goes” attitude.
Quite the contrary. Hebrew
conviction never condones wantonness; never approves illicit sexual
behaviour; never winks at violations of God’s command.
Hebrew conviction forthrightly declares that God will not fail to
punish any and all violations of his command, which command is given for
our blessing. When
Israel
was surrounded first by the Canaanite nations and then by the
Babylonians,
Israel
was always pressured and therefore always tempted to set aside the
command of God and abandon itself to whatever its neighbours were doing.
The Hebrew prophets were unrelenting in their insistence that
pagan sexual practices were degrading because dehumanising, and
dehumanising because violations of the command of God, and violations of
the command of God just because God’s command is God himself in person protecting his people.
The Hebrew mind, Hebrew heart, knows that
erotic intimacy is to be reserved for human intimacy, and the expression
of human intimacy, according to God’s command and counsel, is a union
between a man and a woman that admits no rivals, aims at lifelong
faithfulness, and is therefore to be terminated only by death.
II:
-- Plainly, then,
for the Hebrew mind marriage is good.
But it isn’t the good. The
kingdom
of
God
is the gift. Scripture
speaks of marriage as gift. But
it isn’t the gift.
When Paul exults, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible
gift” (2nd Cor.
9:16
) he means Jesus Christ and him only.
Everyone – without distinction or
qualification – is invited to flee the world of defiant disobedience
and joyfully enter the
kingdom
of
God
. Everyone is summoned to
embrace – without hesitation or reservation – the only Saviour we
can ever have. The
kingdom
of
God
is now and ever will be the good.
Jesus Christ is now and ever will be the
gift.
Marriage is a
good; marriage is a gift. And this good,
this gift, we might as well admit right now, is not for everyone.
We should say at the same time that marriage isn’t essential to
our humanness. To be
unmarried isn’t to be humanly deficient or humanly defective.
In a sermon several years ago in Schomberg I said that all humans
are gender-specific: to be human is to be either male or female.
I said too that gender-specificity is related to gender-complementarity.
Not only am I male (only), I’m male only in the context of
female. Females are female
only in the context of males. Since
I can’t be human without being male, and since I can’t be male
except in the context of females, therefore my gender opposite is
essential to my humanness. True.
At the same time I relate to any number of women, and must relate
to any number of women, in many different ways without being married to
them. Gender-complementarity
is essential to our humanness;
marriage is not essential.
Jesus wasn’t married.
Yet the gospels tell us that Jesus never fled women.
On the contrary he was always found with women, both
single and married (we do well to note); he related warmly to them,
and related to them in ways that defied long-standing social custom,
even as he never transgressed the command of his Father with respect to
the women to whom he wasn’t married.
No one, I trust, wants to suggest that our Lord’s humanness was
deficient or defective in any respect.
Moses was married; Elijah was not.
Hosea was married; Jeremiah was not.
Peter was certainly married; Paul appears not to have been or
else he was a widower and therefore wasn’t married during the time of
his apostolate. In no case
do we say that those who married were superior to those who didn’t
marry or were no longer married.
Overlooked too often is the simple fact
that Genesis 2 leads on to Genesis 3.
Genesis 2: “It is not good for man to be a lone….I will make
him a helpmate.” Genesis
3, however, discusses the fall of humankind.
Genesis 2 speaks of the goodness of the creation, a goodness that
never disappears entirely. Genesis
3, however, speaks of the distortion of the creation, of the disorder
throughout the cosmos. In
the wake of the fall, with its distortion and disorder and distress, we
must admit that marriage won’t be for everyone, and this for several
reasons.
In the first place, many people who want
with all their heart to marry and should marry are deprived of the
opportunity to marry. They
are victims of sheer misfortune. Think
of the European nations at the end of the Great War, and then at the end
of World War II. Since
twenty or thirty million young men had perished, there were now twenty
or thirty million young women who would never have the chance to marry.
Canada
, a country with a small population, lost 70,000 men in the Great War
alone. Those 70,000 were all
of marriageable age. The
women their age who remained in
Canada
; whom were they supposed to marry when the war was over?
Many people are deprived of the opportunity to marry through
sheer, simple bad luck. For
this reason “old maid” is a dreadful expression and should never be
uttered. “Old maid”
jokes aren’t jokes; they aren’t funny at all.
I despise them as much as I despise the racist “joke” or the
anti-Semitic “joke”.
There’s another reason some people
don’t marry. They are
psychologically unable to sustain a marriage.
When discussing the matter of eunuchs – men who aren’t going
to marry – Jesus says some men were born congenitally damaged and
therefore won’t marry. He
also says that some men were made eunuchs by others; that is, they
suffered irreparable physical injury and therefore aren’t suited for
marriage.
We should admit right now that in a fallen
world some people are going to be born with defects of body and
mind that render them unsuited for marriage.
And in a fallen world some people, in the course of moving from
infancy to adulthood, are going to sustain psychological damage of such
a sort, and to such an extent, that they ought not to marry.
To be sure, all of us have some psychological quirks and
personality peculiarities. Still,
there are psychological quirks and personality peculiarities that render
some people unsuited for marriage. This
is not to say that such people are greater sinners.
It’s merely to recognize that marriage requires certain
personality traits which, when absent, make it wiser not to marry.
Among other things, marriage requires enormous accommodation and
adaptability. Marriage
requires two people to flex themselves around each other.
Marriage requires a huge elasticity that allows us to be closer
to one person than we are to anyone else, and distant enough from the
same person as to allow him or her to thrive without being smothered.
Rudeness, slight, insult; when it comes from someone we don’t
know we’re scarcely aware of it. The
same rudeness or slight or insult; when it comes from a friend it
wounds. When it comes from
our spouse it’s lethal – unless in the next instant we have
sufficient resilience and elasticity and flexibility to get the marriage
past a jolt that will prove fatal in a brittle person or brittle
relationship.
Recently a young woman approached me who is
manic-depressive, with episodes of out-and-out psychosis.
(That is, episodically she’s deranged.)
She has married a fellow who is schizophrenic, and he too has
psychotic episodes. She
suffers from a major affective disorder; he from a major cognitive
disorder. She told me she
didn’t think her marriage would survive.
Does anyone doubt her?
When people volunteer for the submarine
service the navy doesn’t jump and down for joy, “Are we ever glad to
see you: there are never enough volunteers for the submarine service.
Step this way immediately.”
Instead the navy first assesses the volunteers to see whether
they have the psychological configuration required in those who have to
live in cramped quarters under immense pressure for long periods of
time. There’s no disgrace
in learning that you don’t have the psychological configuration
essential to living in a submarine.
Jesus says that in a fallen world some men are eunuchs either on
account of congenital malformation or on account of brutalisation.
Such men don’t marry. As
much can be said about psychological damage.
Such people shouldn’t marry.
And then Jesus gives a third reason as to why some men are
“eunuchs”. “These
men”, says our Lord, “have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of
the kingdom of heaven”. Plainly
he’s speaking metaphorically here.
He means that there are men who forego marriage inasmuch as they
have a vocation from God that entails their not marrying.
In the church catholic we call this “vocational celibacy”.
Scripture upholds marriage as a good, a great good.
At the same time, scripture declares that when the
kingdom
of
God
collides with a disordered world, some of the kingdom’s servants are
asked to forego marriage because of a special task to which God assigns
them in the midst of the world’s disorder.
In other words, just as marriage is gift and calling, celibacy is
gift and calling.
Protestants usually flounder here.
Roman Catholics, on the other hand, have less difficulty
understanding this point, since Roman Catholic clergy have remained
unmarried for centuries. My
problem with the Roman Catholic understanding is that it relates
vocational celibacy too one-sidedly to priests and nuns.
In truth there are lay Christians who are never going to be
priests or nuns who are nonetheless called to an expression of Christian
service that renders marriage inappropriate.
Think of people whom God has summoned to a work that is
extraordinarily dangerous or difficult, extraordinarily disruptive of
all that marriage requires.
We must understand too that celibacy is
significant even for us who do marry.
Celibacy is a sign, not just a sign for unmarried people
themselves but a sign for all Christians, whether married or unmarried;
it’s a witness, a reminder to all Christians that obedience to God
requires self-renunciation. The
same self-renunciation isn’t
required of all Christians, but self-renunciation of some
sort is required of all Christians.
After all, our Lord insists that all
his disciples, all his
followers without exception, have been appointed to cross-bearing of
some kind.
Celibacy is a reminder that specific kinds
of service in God’s kingdom require specific expressions of obedience.
Think of the Sisters of Charity, the order established by the
late Mother Teresa. These
sisters assist dying destitutes in
India
. There’s also a chapter
of the Sisters of Charity in
Toronto
. What do they do in
Toronto
? They assist terribly
deranged women in downtown
Toronto
who are otherwise friendless. These
sisters render a kingdom service on behalf of the world that married
people simply cannot render.
This isn’t to say that celibacy is a
higher calling than marriage. There
is no hierarchy of callings in God’s kingdom.
There are only diverse callings.
Married people are called to serve God in such a way that their
marriage is characterised by a faithfulness and caring and self-giving
that are signs of God’s faithfulness and caring and self-giving.
Unmarried people are called to serve God in such a way that their
vocational celibacy reminds the world that the world is vastly sicker
than the world thinks itself to be, and extraordinary service must be
rendered if the world is to be healed.
Present-day
Christians have difficulty understanding what the apostolic church knew
well; namely, the self-renunciation to which God summons us varies from
Christian to Christian. The
kingdom-service to which God calls us requires greater financial
renunciation for some, less for others.
It will require geographical dislocation for some but not for
others. It will mean special
education or training for some, but not for all.
In other words, there are only two issues that any Christian has
to settle. One is
discernment; specifically, discernment of God’s will for
me. The other is
obedience. Discernment plus
obedience equals discipleship.
In
the first part of the sermon I indicated that people such as Bernard of
Clairvaux missed the point when they allegorised the Song of Solomon and
turned it into a secret story about Christ’s love for his beloved
people. Allegorisers like
Bernard, I said, were wrong, since the Song of Solomon is really about
God’s gift of romantic love.
At the same time, since marriage is the
commonest metaphor in scripture for faith; since scripture speaks of
Christ as groom and his beloved people as bride; since scripture uses
the metaphor of adultery to speak of the unfaithfulness of God’s
people, allegorisers like Bernard of Clairvaux weren’t entirely wrong.
The
last word today belongs to Christ Jesus our Lord: “Let anyone accept
this who can.”
Victor
Shepherd
January 2006
