“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st...”

That's Shakespeare. Have you ever written anything like that? All the love letters and the poems that you compose when you’re falling in love? You remember that! There may be some here in the throes of first love. And whatever age you get to, you never forget that; their names or how they looked. Your first love! (And since Christine isn’t here today, I can tell you it was Gillian Williams in Primary School, and she sat opposite me!)

A number of years ago, when we used to do summer sermons from the church aisle (without going into the pulpit),s ermon chats as I called them, I remember making a commitment that I would only preach on the Old Testament lesson of the day. It was a good discipline and made me realise just how much we have in the Hebrew Scriptures.

In fact, since Jesus himself only had the Hebrew Scriptures to use in preaching his message of love and salvation, I believe we have already in the Hebrew Scriptures everything we already need to know. The New Testament, in that sense, simply ratifies what is already written and taught in the Old Testament.

Back to that summer of preaching on the Old Testament! Once there came up a reading from the ‘Song of Songs’. Since I had made the commitment, I had no choice, and you got a bit of a sermon on the Song of Songs. How many sermons have you heard on the Song of Songs? It makes a bit of a change from John, chapter 6 that we’ve been looking at over the last number of Sundays ... or does it? Let’s see!

The Song of Songs gets its title from the very first line of the book, “Solomon’s Song of Songs”. Many traditions interpret the book as an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel, as husband and wife; thus justifying its inclusion in the Biblical Canon of Scripture. Jewish tradition sees it as an allegory of God’s love for the Children of Israel. But if you read it carefully, that’s not the kind of love that is being described; in fact, if you think it is, then it makes the relationship, of father to child, quite perverse.

If you want to take the safe traditional line, that’s fine, but it is so intimate and sexual, that I see it simply as erotic poetry, and because the great King Solomon put his name to it all, it has made it part of Hebrew Scripture. To see it in any other way, I believe, makes it all seriously strange and unhealthy.

Solomon would have needed to know something about sexual prowess, since, according to 1 Kings 11, verse 3 he had 700 wives and 300 concubines! I’m sure many a Biblical scholar would take exception to this perhaps rather over simplification of mine, but that’s my basic take on it, and I don’t think I’m ‘off the wall’! The Song of Songs is a collection of erotic poetry that has Solomon’s name on it and it has no real allegorical merit at all! In reality, there is no real scholarly consensus on the Song of Songs and it leaves all sorts of possibilities wide open!

In most translations the main characters of the Song are simply a woman and a man (with some verses acting as a narrator) and the poem suggests movement from courtship to consummation. Even in the more secular world, it is used by songwriters, poets and writers from Kate Bush to Robert Burns to John Steinbeck, and even in Holywood films such as the 2005 film, “Keeping Mum”, or the 1984 film “Once Upon a Time in America”.

The celebration for us is that it’s there! In Holy Writ, we have the most gorgeous language of people in love! That’s the wonder of it! It is a celebration of sexual love. But we’re terrified of it! And I find that extraordinary given the church’s preoccupation with sex! And I’m not trying to be flippant or facetious here; I’m trying to be realistic, but I’m not going to go into all of that now; it’s for another day!

But in trying to truly ascertain what the Song of Songs is really about, there are a couple of very interesting viewpoints.

Jewish tradition has it that Solomon wrote the Song in his youth, that he wrote the Book of Proverbs in his prime and he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes after he had grown weary of this world. This view has much to commend it. Since the author praises marital fidelity, it has been suggested that Solomon dedicated the book to the first of his many wives before he got embroiled in all his other exploits. In fact some read the book as contrasting the nobility of monogamous love with the debased nature of promiscuous love, even suggesting that the book is a veiled criticism of Solomon’s consequent behaviour.

Pope Benedict’s encyclical ‘God is love’ of 2006 refers to the Song of Songs in both its literal and allegorical meaning, stating that erotic love (eros) and self-donating love (agape) is shown there as the two halves of true love, which is both giving and receiving. Isn’t that something John, chapter 6 all over again? We’ve certainly had sermons before on eros and agape, and we should know the difference by now!

But if we’re beginning to narrow it down, there’s no doubt that the Song is erotic poetry. Given its story, the book is to be seen, I believe, as an encouragement to true love and purity and joy within the faithfulness of the kind of marriage vows and promises that three couples have taken here in this Church within the last three weeks. If anything, it is a glorification of young faithful marriage. And, again, that’s the celebration! Isn’t it great that it’s in our Bible?