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!

 

Here the love song shifts from the third person to the first person, to God speaking directly and personally to us. “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, between me and my vineyard.” What follows is a powerful lament, a divine complaint, as it were, that highlights the problematic of our humanity in relation to creation. It echoes Genesis about Creation and the Fall, about our relation to God’s created order and our place and vocation within it. “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”, God is imagined as asking, emphasizing the essential goodness of the created order. “When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” 

 

It is a double-barrelled rhetorical question that contrasts the goodness of creation with our failures and sins in relation to it. Creation as paradise has been turned into a wilderness. This divine cry of the heart awakens us to our disorders, on the one hand, and to the love of God, on the other hand. How? Because Isaiah is singing a love song to God even in the face of human disorder and destruction. We are meant to feel our separation from God’s will and purpose for creation as his vineyard. It is not simply a matter of a failure in agriculture; it is failure of justice. Thus, now reverting to the third person, the prophet speaks on behalf of God as having “looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” The love song indicts and convicts us of our violence but only to awaken us to his love.

 

Our loves are incomplete and are nothing without the divine love which both creates, restores, and perfects. To be reminded of such ideas and concepts belongs to an ethical education that speaks to the dignity and truth of our lives as spiritual beings, not in a flight of fantasy from the problems and confusions of our world but precisely in the face of its disorders. It convicts our hearts by awakening our consciences to the transcendent love of God made known to be immanent and alive in us. God in Isaiah’s love song is ‘the Beloved’ yet we are meant to be his beloved vineyard, lovely in his sight in spite of all our unloveliness.

 

The love songs of the Scriptures reveal the higher justice of God’s grace that seeks the greater perfection and good of our humanity. The late 19th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captures the Christian understanding of this most poignantly in terms of our life with one another. By grace we are called to grace through justice informed by grace. “The just man justices,” he says, “keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;/ Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —/ Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Lovely indeed.