Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 22], rcl yr b, 2021
Song Of Sol. 2:8-13; Ps. 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
It’s hard to imagine readings that are more different than the ones we have today. Two of them, one from the Song of Solomon, and the other from Psalm 45, are deeply sensual. They are about desire.
“The voice of my beloved!” begins the reading from the Song of Solomon. It’s the voice of a woman, watching the man she loves approach her. She watches him closely, and can’t seem to wait for him. “Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.” But her beloved, it turns out, leaves her wanting, keeping some distance, making for another moment of longing. “Look,” she says, “there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice.” And when her beloved speaks, he invites her to come away with him. “My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.’”
This is not about teaching the precepts of God, this is not a moral exhortation, this is an account of love and desire, where that desire is unfulfilled, only to open up to a deeper longing, and a deeper promise of greater things to come.
If we kept reading in the Song of Solomon things get even spicier. A youth pastor was once approached by the parents of church’s youth. “Tell our kids to read the Bible more” they said. So the pastor told the youth to read Song of Solomon. The parents came back to say “stop telling our kids to read the Bible so much.”
And the Psalm is similar, it’s kind of spicy, it’s partly about desire for another. It’s about Israelite foreign policy at its most intimate. It depicts a royal marriage, one between the king and a daughter of one of the king’s allies. Speaking to her King, her husband to be, she says to him “You are the fairest of men; grace flows from your lips.” And a bit later, she says to him, “All your garments are fragrant with myrrh, aloes, and cassia, and the music of strings from ivory palaces makes you glad.” We are most definitely in Song of Solomon territory: she is clearly drawn to this man, and desirous of her new husband.
It’s no wonder these sorts of passages are so often interpreted as though they were about our desire for God. This is certainly part of the Christian life. If Augustine is right (which he most certainly is), all our desires, even our desire for another, are ultimately desire for God.
But then we have our next readings, and there’s quite the change of gear. There’s a bit of a lurch. We go from the sensuality and desire of Song of Solomon and Psalm 45 to the moral reproach of James, and then of Jesus in Mark. James writes, not “come to me, my beloved, and let us go into that new and beautiful country;” but rather “You must understand this, my beloved.” Do these things, he says, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” Good advice! But this is quite the change of mood. It’s moral counsel, moral exhortation, meant to challenge us into behaviour oriented to the good, to transform us into virtuous people.
And Jesus, too, in Mark, is in a very different mood from the lovers of Song of Solomon and Psalm 45. Jesus is, as he often is, in an argumentative mood. Jesus wants to talk about evil, and our part in it. Evil comes not from the outside, but from the inside, from evil intentions, says Jesus, going on to list all those things we should avoid: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, [and] folly.”
So how do we reconcile these two different gods? On the one hand we have the Bible speaking about the God of love and desire; on the other hand we have the God of moral reproach, advice given forcefully about how one must change to live the good life. What would it take to see these two as one?
It takes a poet. It takes a poet well-versed in desire, and well-aware of his own shortcomings. It takes John Donne, lover of women, and lover of God; a man overcome by the beauty of grace and led into a new life of following Jesus.
“Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” writes Donne in Holy Sonnet XIV, and we can hear both divine moods if we listen. “Batter my heart” is to speak of a God that we are drawn to, that we desire, a God that makes our heart beat more quickly. But it’s also “batter my heart,” that is, batter this heart of mine into better shape. This heart of mine needs some painful and even forceful work if it is to grow in a Godly direction.
And that’s where Donne begins this poem:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God […]
[…] knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend;
[…] o’erthrow me and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.
This is James, this is Jesus, this is the response to moral exhortation, these are the words of a man who has heard the word of God and knows it to be (in part) authoritative counsel on the moral life, something that hurts as it fashions in him something new and as he hears those words he needs to hear.
But as Donne gets to the end of his sonnet he brings us back ‘round to the God that would make our heart beat a little bit faster, Donne returns to the desirous love of God we read about in the Song of Solomon and in Psalm 45. Donne invites the God who is the ultimate end of all our loves to set his heart to beating:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, […]
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Donne is obviously right. There aren’t two gods, there is but one; and this God is the one who batters our heart, the God who asks much of us, and asks of us sometimes difficult change:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
But this is one and the same God who batters our heart, the God of beauty, to whom we are drawn by desire:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, […]
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
The Revd Dr Preston DS Parsons