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Fifteenth Sunday of Pentecost

Song of Solomon 2
8 Listen! My beloved!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
10 My beloved spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”


If you’ve ever seen an old painting, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a religious painting.

For you see, there was a time (before the Renaissance of the fourteenth century) that almost everything painted had a religious theme. It helped that the church was the primary patron of the arts, but in general terms, religious themes were considered to be the only themes suitable for representation in art.

And even after this assumption changed, and people started painting the human figure for the sake of beauty alone, or some Roman ruin in nature, or some classical story or character—even after such a profound shift in subject—religious art was still being created. The Last Supper is a Renaissance painting, an obviously religious theme by a painter who was equally interested in showing his use of perspective and the brilliant way he could paint human figures.

According to the National Gallery in London, fully a third of their collection of Western art is religious in nature. And the topics are easy to predict: the crucifixion, the (aforementioned) Last Supper, and any story that involves a beautiful woman: David and Bathsheba, Susanna and the elders, Samson and Delilah. Perhaps the most popular (unsurprisingly) is the Madonna and Child, to the extent that I’m sure a third of the third of the religious paintings at the National Gallery depict Mary holding the baby Jesus.

(Incredibly, I’ve only ever seen two paintings of Joseph with the baby Jesus, and they’re both at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Seems it’s a theme that occurs in Latin American art, and a pleasing one to this dad.)

So I’ve taken you on this brief tour of religious art to highlight a bit of an anomaly that relates to our reading this morning: there are very few paintings based in the Song of Solomon. Yes, by the nineteenth century painters like Dante Rossetti would try, and Marc Chagall some decades later, but by-in-large the Song of Solomon was ignored over the span of Western art.

Why would this be? The primary reason, it would seem, is the way the book as been viewed through the ages. From the time it was included in the Jewish Bible down to the modern era of biblical interpretation, is has been viewed as allegory. Not a story of desire between two lovers, not a story about Solomon and one of his many wives, not even a guidebook on how to woo your lover (though it does a great job at that)—but a story that points to something else altogether—in other words—an allegory.

And it would have to. This book of the Bible that doesn’t mention God, or the law, or the covenant, must have some larger, symbolic meaning—so the earliest thinkers settled on the relationship between God and humanity. Later, Christian theologians would clarify this belief and say it’s an allegory of the relationship between Christ and his church, but the view is the same: this is about the passion God has for us and the passion we are urged to return.

I think you can see the issue for the visual artist. You could paint lovers or various creatures described in the book, but it’s not really about that. If it’s an allegory of mutual love between Creator and creature, that’s something that is hard to represent in oil or watercolour. I think there may be a way—or at least I may have uncovered one way—but before we look at that, we should spend a bit more time on the Song of Solomon.

I keep using the word “story,” but even that is a little misleading. It’s not a story in the sense that it has a plot or a series of events. It’s more of a dialogue between lovers, a “celebration of love,” and a loose collection of moments of “passion, descriptions of physical beauty, memories of past encounters, and longing for the lover's presence.”*

It’s more like a collection of scenes, meant to evoke a sense of the passion and mutuality that exists between these lovers. Let’s listen in again:

8 Listen! My beloved!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
10 My beloved spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”

We can hear the passion and the mutuality, but there is something else. A few verses later she says “My beloved is mine and I am his,” (2.16) which adds the virtue of fidelity, the abiding sense that these lovers will remain faithful within the sensuousness of the place they find themselves. Suddenly, this is starting to sound like a wedding homily, but there is more.

Just a few chapters later, she picks up this theme again, but restates it to say “I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me.” (7.10) According to Dr. Ellen Davis, this is a critical moment in scripture, a moment when this confident woman has reversed the curse found in the Book of Genesis. She explains it this way: After the fall, Eve is punished for her disobedience and God says "your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” And human history would seem to bear this out. But within the Song of Solomon, comes the reversal: “I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me.”

In other words, there is something in these words that returns these lovers to the Garden of Eden, repairing the rift that begins with the apple and restores them to equality and mutuality once more. Add to that the abundance of nature in our passage—flowers, cooing doves, the early fruit of the fig tree and the fragrance of the vine—and we are transported to another theme in art that seems to locate our lovers once more: the peaceable kingdom.

The Peaceable Kingdom (which you have in your hands) is a common theme in art (Edward Hicks painted this painting 62 times!) and it is most often associated with Isaiah 11 (“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”) Hicks’ paintings often include settlers and their First Nations neighbours, or groups of Quakers (from his tradition) or simply the abundance of the natural world. In some ways it’s about a return to Eden, like the Song of Solomon, but it’s also about the age to come. It’s a glimpse of what God intents for us, what God will provide in the fulfilment of time.

And in this sense, we’re back to allegory. If the Song of Songs is about God and humanity, or Christ and his church, then what we’re introduced to is the way things ought to be. Or the way things will be in the age to come. There is living with passion, there is mutuality and the respect we extend to the people around us, there is fidelity to the relationship and the future we share, and there is the abiding sense that we are not only loved but sought after.

And it’s this passion that holds the key. Imagine each day God says to us “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me.” See the world as I wish it to be. See the others among my beloved who are doing my work, remaking the world as we speak, bringing together heaven and earth. “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me,” and see the peaceable kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Amen.

*Kathryn M. Schifferdecker (workingpreacher.org)

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 4:39 AM