Tag Archives: Song of Songs

“Kiss Me With the Kisses of Your Mouth”

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An illumination of Christ kissing the bride in the Song of Songs.

In the Song of Songs, the bride begs the groom, “Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth.” (Song of Songs 1:3) In the plain text of the Old Testament, this is the beginning of an erotic love song; I remember as an undergraduate, a roommate was writing a paper about the “four loves” as they appear in the Bible and was frustrated that there seemed to be no text that illustrated Eros. He was shocked and delighted that he could finish his paper once I introduced him to the Song.

But the Song is so much more than simply an erotic encounter between a bride and groom. It has been read as an encounter between God and the Church as well as a personal encounter between Christ and the believer. (In theology, an “individual” is always cut off from others, grasping and striving only for himself, isolated and alone. Lost. Damned by their own choice. But a “person” and everything about them that is “personal” is in communion with others, is reaching out to encounter the Other. A person is growing and is in the process of being saved; an individual is frozen, static, dead.)

Many have preached on how this “kiss” might be understood in the context of an encounter between Christ and the believer. Bernard of Clairvaux says that God’s “living, active word (Hebrews 4:12) is to me a kiss… an unreserved infusion of joys, a revealing of mysteries, a marvelous and indistinguishable mingling of the divine light with the enlightened mind, which, truly joined to God, is one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:17). He goes on to say that “the mouth that kisses signifies the Word who assumes human nature; the nature assumed received the kiss; the kiss however, that takes its being from both the giver and receiver, is a person that is formed by both…. A fertile kiss is not a mere pressing of mouth upon mouth; it is the uniting of God with man.”

This communion of divine and human is the goal of theosis, salvation understood as deification, coming to be by grace everything is Christ is naturally (2 Peter 1). The kiss is the beginning and the goal of this uniting of God and human, the Uncreated and the creature. In the kiss we move from being a collection of individuals, each in their own isolated desert, and become persons who are united with the divine Lover and each other, becoming what we were created to be: a communion of persons who find salvation in our experience of the Other.

“My Beloved is a sachet of Myrrh”

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Medieval illumination of the royal couple in the Old Testament Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon

“My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.” (Song of Solomon 1:13 ) St. Gregory of Nyssa comments on this, saying: “The Lord Himself, having become a balsam of myrrh (in His death) and taken residence in my heart itself, occupies the center of my awareness.” St. Bernard of Clairvaux also understands the bitter myrrh as an emblem not only of Christ in the Passion but as the personal repentance of each believer. “This perfume of repentance,” he preaches, “reaches to the very abodes of the blessed in heaven…. God will not scorn this crushed and broken spirit. This [myrrh] not only inspires us to amend our lives but even makes the angels dance for joy,” because the angels greatly rejoice over one sinner who repents. “Those who have renounced sinful ways are inevitably gripped by bitterness and confusion… like fresh wounds” but the bitterness of the myrrh gives way to the sweet scent of the oil of gladness described in Psalm 45:8 (which also describes the royal bride preparing to wed her groom).

In modern Judaism the Song is read on the Sabbath during the Passover, which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel, while Christian tradition reads it as an allegory of Christ and his “bride”, the Church.

The Church’s interpretation of the Song as evidence of God’s love for his people, both collectively and individually, began with Origen. Over the centuries the emphases of interpretation shifted: first, reading the Song as a depiction of the love between Christ and Church; in the 11th century, it was read as describing the relationship between Christ and each Christian; in the 12th century the Bride was seen as the Virgin Mary, Each of these new readings absorbed rather than simply replaced earlier interpretations, so that the commentary became ever more complex. Reading the Song of Songs as a theological metaphor reveals the two partners–whether understood as Christ and the Church, Christ and each believer, or God and the Blessed Virgin–are eternally bound in a relationship that the idea of “marriage” can only approximate.