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June 8, 2008
Fierce as the Grave: An Ode to Passion
a sermon on Song of Solomon 2:8-17; 8:6-7
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama
Is becoming a Christian more like buying a car or falling in love? Listening to
most of the sermons preached these days—even mine—you might think it is like
buying a car. The preacher is a salesperson. “Oh, you’re gonna love this … it’s
just what you need!” Then follows a description of the gospel: what it is, why
it is so good. The pitch aims to hit you both in the head and in the heart.
After all, you need a car. Everyone does. And you should feel good about your
car. You should be able to count on it working right and also feel good driving
it. So the preacher explains why Christianity is true and what kind of
difference it can make in your life. And, I would add in my own defense at
least, the pitch is sincere. I really believe in Jesus Christ. I am devoted to
him, and I have seen him do amazing things in people’s lives. I believe his
promises enough to stake my life on them. So the pitch is not a con job. It’s
honest. The preacher is convinced that Christian faith is right for you, and so
he or she tries to convince you as well. Accept Christ. Sign on the dotted line.
I do not want to criticize that approach, first because I do it all the time—and
as I say, I am very sincere. Second because the Bible does it too. Jesus did it.
He told people, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Follow me.” So there
must be a place for the “here’s what Jesus offers and here’s why you need it”
approach. Nevertheless, I do wonder whether becoming a Christian isn’t really
more like falling in love.
Donald Miller begins his book Blue Like Jazz by saying: “I never liked Jazz
music because Jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater
in Portland on night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for
fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked Jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it
yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.”
Maybe I would be a better pastor and preacher if instead of selling you on the
gospel I simply showed you how beautiful God is and how passionately I love him.
The issue here is not head versus heart. A good salesperson speaks to both. And
even falling in love is not done entirely independent of rational thought
processes. The issue is, the gospel is not a product. It is a love story. And
God is not a product. He is a person. Everyone who owns a car had to make a
decision, either to buy or accept it. But few people are truly passionate about
their car. People who fall in love have decisions to
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make, but love means so much more. Love is something that happens to you. You
can go looking for it, but you cannot create it. Nor can you make yourself love
another person romantically. You cannot choose passion. It just happens. And in
many ways our relationship with God is like that. Yes, at some point you make a
conscious decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ. But that’s like
marriage. First a couple falls in love, and that sort of just happens. Later
they decide to get married, and that is a decision they make. We all have to
make a decision for Christ, but first we have to know his love and experience
his grace. We have to believe and trust. Those are things God does in us.
Certainly a person without Christ can feel something wrong in his or her life
and go seeking God. Even this is a sign that God is already working. Somewhere
along the way, however, they fall into God like falling in love.
I want to ask you a question, but first I will give you the answer. The answer
is: the inscrutable providence of God. The question is: What is erotic love
poetry doing in the Bible?
The book of the Bible from which our scripture reading comes is the Song of
Solomon, also known as the Song of Songs. It is unlike anything else in the
Bible. It is a series of love poems, some of them quite suggestive. Other books
in the Old Testament give us history; they tell us about the temple and religion
and kings and laws. The Song of Solomon presents an intimate portrait of
romantic love.
God is hardly mentioned in the Song of Solomon. It is not about doctrine or
faith. Really it is not very religious, which is one reason I wonder how it got
into the Bible. It is also the only book of the Bible in which a woman’s voice
dominates. Much of the book is a series of lines sung back and forth between a
woman and her man. She speaks for 56 verses; he for only 36. The book is built
around her. Her longing, her dreams. The way he feels about her.
From our perspective the imagery of Song of Solomon seems obscure and a bit
corny. I have no idea, for example, what is meant by the little foxes in verse
15 of our reading. When the man confesses to his beloved in a later poem, “Your
hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Mount Gilead,” a modern
reader is more apt to be amused than awed. It is also very subtle by our
culture’s standards. There is nothing trashy here. The beauty of pleasure is
veiled behind carefully chosen euphemisms. Despite the chasm separating the poet
who composed the Song and us, however, the enchantment of the lovers’ passion
comes through. We would describe the feelings with different words, but we know
the feelings. Love is strong as death. Passion is fierce as the grave. If you
have tasted it or simply hungered for it, you know.
There are hints here and there in the book that the love between the man and
woman in the poems is improper. We are never told directly why, but clues point
to class differences. Some scholars think the problem may not be so much
economic as racial
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and ethnic. For some reason society frowns on their love; but like all true
lovers, they cannot help themselves. They didn’t choose love. Love chose them.
Their passion burns.
I return to my question: How did this get into the Bible? At one level we have
an answer.
After the disastrous rebellion against Rome that led to the destruction of the
temple in Jerusalem, only one kind of Judaism remained. In Jesus’ day there were
Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees. Maybe others. Some Pharisees were militant
while others were passive. The militant ones led the rebellion. The passive ones
were content to wait for God to rescue Israel. After the war, only the
non-violent Pharisaic type of Judaism remained. Instead of the Temple, the
scriptures became the focus of their religious experience. Where do you go to
meet God? In the scriptures, they would say. It wasn’t long before they decided
an official list was needed. Which writings were holy scripture—the Word of
God—and which were not? When they drew up their list, the Song of Solomon was
hotly debated. I would love to know how it got on the table for discussion in
the first place. I have no idea. Obviously it was being read as scripture. It
was included in the Greek translation of the Old Testament which was made 200
years before Christ. We really do not know who wrote it or when. Tradition
associates it with Solomon, but that’s rather doubtful. Anyway, its place in the
Bible was finally settled when some of the rabbis argued it is a beautiful
allegory of God’s love for Israel.
That way of interpreting it has stuck. Jews read the Song of Solomon as a
picture of God’s passionate love for Israel. Roman Catholics read it as a
picture of Christ’s love for the church. Protestants tend to read it as a
picture of Christ’s love for the individual’s soul. Personally, I think it works
all of these ways plus as a reminder that romantic love and passion are gifts
from our heavenly Father that will point us to him, if we do not turn romantic
love into an idol and worship it.
Other than the inscrutable providence of God, I am not sure why this love poetry
is in the Bible. But when I read it as scripture, I realize how romantic love
can be a clue pointing us to God—a signpost, if we are able to read it.
The passionate love of a woman and a man is a constant theme in stories, from
ancient Greek plays to modern movies. It has that kind of power, so much power
that we enjoy feeling it vicariously. It feels good to watch two people fall in
love and overcome obstacles to finally end up together. Of course, these stories
don’t always have a happy ending, but they are always powerful. Why? Because
passionate love is one of the most overwhelming emotions humans can have. You
meet someone. You fall in love. And that’s how we talk about it. It is something
that just happens to you, like falling in a hole you didn’t see. You are
consumed with love, desire, passion, possessiveness, and
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all the rest. Everything in your life gets fuzzy, swirls around, and comes into
a new focus.
When two people are passionately in love, they come as close as fallen humanity
can come to escaping our selfishness. Suddenly this other person means more to
me than I do. They take pleasure in making each other happy. That’s the truth
behind the play Gift of the Magi, in which the husband sells his watch to buy
his wife combs for her hair, and she cuts off her hair and sells it to buy him a
chain for his watch. Each gives up the most precious possession they have to
give a meaningful gift to the other. That’s love. Passionate love takes us out
of ourselves and joins us to another. It is powerful and beautiful and
potentially dangerous.
You can never find your ultimate fulfillment in another person, no matter who
they are or how good your relationship is. You always need others, a community.
And you always need God. But for a while, it feels as if this one person is your
entire universe. Young love. Fresh romance. It does not last. Hopefully in
marriage it grows and matures into something even more beautiful and redeeming.
If passion is about losing yourself in another person, marriage is about being
loved and accepted for who you really are.
Why can’t the passion of new love go on forever? I believe it is meant to, but
the problem is our sinful hearts. True love takes us outside of ourselves, but
we are too selfish to live there for long. Sooner or later that other person for
whom you would give the whole world is going to get on your nerves. Such is the
plight of fallen humanity. But I believe God intended the thrill, the joy, the
excitement, the lose-yourself-in-another-person experience of romantic love to
be permanent. And—and this is where I get really radical—I believe God meant for
all love to be so fulfilling. Not just romantic love, but the love you have for
family, friends, even strangers. I believe love in its purest form is like that.
To love purely means to take great delight in the joy of another. It means to
find yourself fulfilled by blessing another. Can you imagine if feeding a
stranger who is hungry felt as good as your first kiss? Maybe it is supposed to.
That sounds crazy, I know. But what if pure love is just that thrilling?
God created us to love and be loved with pure love. The problem is, because our
hearts are turned away from God, we don’t love purely. Our love is always
tainted by sin. It is never 100% pure. We come close sometimes. I think the
times we come closest are the love of a parent for a child and passionate
romantic love. Is it any wonder then that the Bible describes God’s love for us
as a husband’s love for his wife and a father’s love for his children?
Passionate romance is not perfect, and it doesn’t last forever the way we want
it to. But it is enough to give us a glimpse of what all real love is supposed
to be. In our fallen state, God has given us clues, signs, reminders of who we
really are and what we were
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made for. Our experience of romantic love and our desire for it to last forever
are such a sign, pointing us to pure love. And God is the source of all pure
love for God is love.
That’s the main thing I wanted to tell you today, and it is the main thing I get
from the Song of Solomon. Passionate, romantic love is less than God’s love, but
it approximates it enough to point us toward the greater reality. Unfortunately,
many people do not look beyond passion, and they make it an idol. This should
not surprise us. After all, God created us with a need for love. So we need
love. People will desperately try to fill that need any way they can. It is
meant to be filled by God, by family, by friends and community. But since
passionate romance is about as close as we come to pure love that lifts us
outside our selves, some people try to find ultimate fulfillment in it—and they
try over and over no matter how many times they fail.
Still, romance is wonderful. It is a gift God gives us because he loves us, and
this is the other thing I wanted to say. Think about this: You know how strong
passionate love is. You may know how stubborn and irrational teenagers can be
when they are in love. You know the sacrifices people make for love. The stupid
things they do because of love. The poet got it right: Love is strong as death
and passion fierce as the grave. You know all that. Now consider this: God’s
love for you is even stronger.
The gospel is a love story. The Old Testament compares God to a loving husband
and Israel to an unfaithful wife. Israel’s wandering in the wilderness was a
honeymoon with God. Her idolatry was her unfaithfulness. The prophet Hosea
dramatically acted this out, marrying a prostitute and then buying her back from
the slave market. That’s the kind of fierce, passionate love God has for his
people. It began with creation, when God made us and took joy in us. Even after
we fell into sin, and turned our backs on God, he did not turn his back on us.
Eventually he sent his Son, Jesus, to die for us, so that everyone who has faith
can be reconciled with him. That’s the measure of God’s love: his death on the
cross. Do you know what it feels like to be loved that much? You should. God
loves you more fiercely and passionately than you realize.
His fierce love for you is one side. Your passionate love for him is the other.
I am not going to tell you that you ought to love God passionately. That’s like
telling someone to fall in love. What use is it? You do, or you don’t. Since you
can’t control it, it doesn’t do any good for me to try to talk you into it. All
I can do is point out how much God loves you. Look at the cross. Experience his
grace. Once you know his love, you either love him or you don’t. I do. And let
me tell you, it is wonderful. Sometimes when I am faced with overwhelming
temptation, I am held back because I love Jesus Christ, and I know he would not
understand. I love Christ more, and that makes the difference. Sometimes when I
get discouraged and want to give up, I keep going because I love God, and if
this is what he wants me to do and where I can serve him best, then I will.
There is a peace, a contentment that comes from knowing you are loved and
returning that love. There is also a thrill born of loving God. No matter how
long you are
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married to a person, he or she can always surprise you. And that’s a human
being. God is capable of even greater surprises.
God loves me—and he loves you—with a pure and burning love that exceeds romantic
passion. And his love is eternal. We are not capable of loving like that—yet.
God made us for that kind of love. He designed us to both receive and give it.
Part of what Christ does for us—part of what we mean by the word salvation—is he
restores our ability to love purely. I am looking forward to that. It doesn’t
happen in this life, obviously. But when God raises his children from the dead
and makes all things new, we will be able to love as he does. That’s exciting.
Imagine a love more compelling than the strongest passion—a love that makes
Romeo and Juliet’s passion look like puppy love—a love that dwarfs what
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy share in Pride and Prejudice—pick your epic love
story, this love is greater. Imagine this love, and you are the lover, and it
does last forever. “My beloved is mine and I am his.” That’s what we have to
look forward to if we belong to Jesus Christ. The greatest love story ever turns
out to be about you—and all God’s people. We will love with a purity and
brilliance that the world has only seen once, in Jesus. We will love and be
loved with the pure love of God.
Yes, I am looking forward to that. I can’t wait for it. Why should I? I will
love God as best I can right now, humble though my love might be. I will give
him my heart and my soul. I will live for him. I can’t help myself. That’s just
how love is. I hope you know what I’m talking about. Amen.
rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
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