Readings: 1 Samuel 16.15-23; Psalm 50; Mark 2:18-22
One of the shortest books of the Bible is the Song of Songs, a collection of love poetry that celebrates the love of a bride and a groom of ancient Israel. For example, the bride: ‘my beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies. Until the day breathes, and the shadows flee, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on the cleft mountains’ (2:16-17). And the groom; ‘how beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful. Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats moving down the slopes of Gilead’ (4:1).
The Rabbis were somewhat taken aback by the explicit imagery to be found in these poems and decided that it should be understood as an ‘allegory’. In other words, it was not really about what it seemed to be about. It was actually concerned with the love affair that the Lord, the God of Israel, had been carrying on with His people for many centuries. The groom is God and the bride is Israel.
There are lots of other texts in the Jewish scriptures that helped to support this interpretation, many places where this is exactly how the relationship between God and Israel is described. God is besotted with this people and is totally taken by them. He is madly jealous when they go after other gods and does not hold back from expressing his anger at their infidelity (chapter 16 of Ezekiel is the most startling of these passages). The prophet Hosea speaks of God luring Israel to a deserted place where He can ‘speak to her heart’. There she will respond to Him as she did when she was young. There He will betroth her to himself forever in integrity, justice, tenderness, and love (Hosea 2).
It is all very beautiful and is taken up by Christians later on. There are many occasions on which Jesus refers to himself as ‘the bridegroom’. An example is today’s gospel reading. The Messiah was the bridegroom of Israel, the one sent by God to betroth the people to Him once again. His coming would be a nuptial event, a time of celebration and joy, the prelude to the great marriage-feast of the Lamb. All would be fresh and new: new clothes for the party, new wineskins for the bubbly and effervescent new wine, all things made new in this union of earth and heaven (Revelation 21-22).
Marriage remains ‘a great mystery’ for the early Christians, not in the sense in which we might be sometimes tempted to say that, but in the sense that the committed fidelity of bride and groom symbolises the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5). Marriage is a symbol of God’s love for human beings and this is understood, in the Catholic Church, in the strongest possible sense. Marriage is one of those central symbolic actions we call ‘sacraments’. A sacrament does not merely point to some deeper reality beyond itself. In God’s design a sacrament makes that deeper reality actually present in and through the human words and actions involved. In other words the love between husband and wife does not merely point to some deeper and higher meaning. Their love becomes that deeper and higher reality while remaining as fully human as we know it to be. When a married man loves his wife, Christ loves the church. When a married woman loves her husband, the church loves Christ.
Christian monks and others were just as shocked as the Rabbis had been at the explicit imagery of the Song of Songs. They followed the Rabbis and decided the work was an allegory, this time for the relationship between the Christian soul (the bride) and Christ (the groom) as they are united in the higher reaches of mystical prayer. The most famous example is the Spiritual Canticle of Saint John of the Cross. It is based on the Song of Songs and celebrates – in what I believe is some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in Spanish – the desires, disappointments, anxieties and joys of love.
It seems as if there are four weddings then: the man and the woman, God and Israel, Christ and the Church, Christ and the Christian soul. But in reality they are all one. For every Christian is a member of the body of Christ which is the Church. The Church is the new Israel, the people of God in this time and place. And the man and woman whose relationship is sacramental are Christ and the Church, for this is what a sacrament means.
This is why marriage is such an important vocation within the Christian community. And because these four weddings are one, we can return to the Song of Songs and appreciate it not only for its allegorical meaning but for its literal meaning, as a poem that celebrates sexual love. Someone gave G.K.Chesterton a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover thinking that the great Catholic apologist would be scandalised. On reading it, Chesterton is reported to have commented that ‘all it lacks is the sacrament of marriage’.
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