KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 February
A Love Song for all times
“Let me sing for my beloved a love song.” St. Augustine long ago spoke about the Scriptures as “letters from home,” a lovely image. They are ‘love letters,’ we might say, writings that speak to us about the love of God who seeks the perfection of our broken and disordered loves. That is signaled in the Scriptures as a whole and rather pointedly in a number of texts that are explicit about the underlying theological idea of God’s love for our humanity in the face of the disorders and disarray of our world and our hearts. In that sense, the love letters of Scripture encourage a spirit of inquiry and self-criticism that act as a check upon our self-righteousness or pride and our self-obsessions and the divisions and animosities which they so often occasion.
In Chapel, the readings and reflections have often revolved around the love of God and the love of neighbour, what is known as “the Summary of the Law,” to illustrate the way in which the divine love shapes, orders, and re-orders our human loves. That theme is clearly present in Paul’s great ‘Hymn of Love’ in 1st Corinthians but in many other texts as well. Isaiah 5, verses 1 to 7, is a beautiful love song which convicts our consciences in order to awaken us to the divine love which Paul celebrates in his paean of praise to charity, the love that binds our humanity together as a body, a community of love. As John says in a passage frequently heard in Chapel, “God is love and he that abideth in love abides in God and God in him.” This consolidates and concentrates the overarching theme of the Scriptures overall.
Speaking in the first person, Isaiah says, “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard.” God here is ‘the Beloved’. What or who is “his vineyard”? It is us as God’s creation. “My beloved,” he says, “had a vineyard.” He goes on, speaking now in the third person, to describe God in relation to his vineyard. “He [God] digged and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he [God] built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” It is a lovely image of God as the gardener or vinedresser of creation. “He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” Ah! Trouble in paradise, in the vineyard, it seems!