Love and Death

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

As a seal upon your arm;

For love is strong as death, 

Passion fierce as the grave,

Its flashes of fire a raging flame.

-Song of Solomon 8:6

The Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs is one of those wee little books tucked away between more "important" things.  It is one of the more R-rated pieces of literature in the Bible, hiding all sorts of lusty language about breasts and loins in between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah.  It's sort of like discovering D.H. Lawrence between Nietzche and Goethe.  Yes, it's a love poem.  Yes, it is full of metaphors and pretty much impossible to read literally, and yet here is a truth that is absolutely true, so true in fact that it defies the very nature of literal readings and fundamentalism in general: "love is strong as death."

If I had to pick one phrase that summed up the narrative contained in canonical Scripture as succinctly as possible, it would be that: "Love is strong as death."  It is what is proven by God's involvement with the children of Abraham, despite all the ways they go wrong. It is what is proven by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, it is what (I believe) will be proven about all of Creation when everything is said and done.

See also 1 Corinthians 13: "and now these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love."  Sometimes it's hard to hold on to that truth, I mean when things go sour.  When it looks for a moment like death is going to win, when the cry that is on our hearts is "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I think it's a mistake to brush that moment off, I think love and death are connected in a very yin-yang sort of relationship.  After all, the reason why we love on a biological level is so that we can procreate, and the reason why we procreate is because we are not immortal, and so there is a need created by death to which love is the answer.  The mystery at the core of this is stated in 1 John: God is love.  The Creator has made everything that is because the essence of being is love.

The majority of English translations keep the equation in balance: "Love is strong as death" or "as strong as death" though a few do actually tip the balance in favor of love (CEV) for instance, but I think that's a mistake, reading a bit too much triumphalism into the text.  Which we tend to do... I tend to do... because I want it to be true.  I like love, I'm not a big fan of death, but I do recognize the part it has to play.  As I mentioned yesterday, it would seem there are times where love does not win the battle.  There are times when hatred, fear and anger get the best of us.  

The King James Version, which I will go to sometimes for translations of poetry in Scripture (but not much else) says: "Love is strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave."  Now, as a whole, I prefer the "passion/ fierce" reading, but I can see the balance coming out, and the relationship that gets easily twisted when we love the wrong things or love in the wrong way.

Yes, you can love wrong.  You can love selfishly, you can love in a way that is controlling and bitter.  You can love in ways that honestly have no business calling themselves love.  Love can have a bit of an identity crisis, in that it is sometimes hard to define, and it does not always stand up and shout about itself.  That job is left to poets and musicians.  That is one way you can tell that death is love's equal, it is powerful enough to walk unabashedly into the room and proclaim it's nature with no hiding or obfuscation.  Death is unapologetic and undeniable.

As Paul describes love in 1 Corinthians 13, "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth."

If you follow with that definition, and Jesus' call to love your neighbors and your enemies you will find that there is an awful lot of very bad behavior going on in the world today, much of it being perpetrated by people who are supposed to believe that "love is strong as death."

We get this so very wrong, especially in those moments when it's most crucial to get it right. As I look around I see people who are self-identified Christians totally failing the love test.  They are acting with hatred and fear in their hearts, they are raging against death while trying to use the vocabulary of violence and power, but those words belong to death, death defines them and gives them their true weight.

Love is strong as death, but it doesn't get to use the same weapons.  When love wins it sometimes looks like a cross.  When love wins it doesn't mean there is no tomb.  Love wins when it can take all the darkness and violence death has to deal out and still say, "I forgive, I love, I am love."