Today’s Scripture Reading (September 17, 2016): Song of Songs 3
My granddaughter started school (Pre-Kindergarten) this week. Watching her come home from school reminded me of the first day of school twenty years earlier. I was just starting a new job on the staff of a smaller mid-size church. That morning, as my two kids went off to a new school, I went to attend a team meeting, anxious to get into my new role and to meet the other members of the team. It was a long staff meeting, which happened in those days, and before I knew it, we were approaching lunch time. Then the call came into the office. The secretary rushed into the meeting with a question – “Do you know where your kids are?” At the time it seemed like such a stupid question. Of course, I knew where my kids were – they were in school, or by this time they were headed home for lunch. Except they weren’t. My wife had shown up at the school to walk them back home for lunch (about a three block trek), but the kids were nowhere to be found.
As all of this started to sink in, I began to panic. I jumped up from the table at the meeting, not sure that I cared anymore about anything that was being said, and rushed out the door. It was at that moment that a car pulled into the parking lot with my two kids inside it. The new school was a round school, and they had walked out of the wrong door, and when they did that they started down the wrong street. My ten-year-old daughter realized that they had done something wrong and had begun to look for a Block Parent Sign. But there were none. So she just stopped at a door to ask for help. I have no idea who the people were that brought my kids back to the church, the one landmark that my kids knew. At the time everything seemed to be spinning too fast. All I knew was that my kids were lost, but now they were found.
There is an urgency in the words in this passage. The Bride wakes up and finds her lover missing. At that moment, nothing else matters except finding him – the one that was lost. She gets out of bed and rushes into the street. It doesn’t matter that it is night, or that there might be dangers lurking in the darkness outside of her door. Some scholars have speculated that she didn’t understand with whom she had fallen in love. He was just another laborer in the vineyard. At this moment, her lover disappears so that he can reappear later as King Solomon, but she doesn’t understand that. There is no wonder that she can’t find him. She has no idea that the place to look for her beloved is in the Palace of David. The more she searches without finding him, the higher the panic level.
This idea of searching is a common theme in the Bible. But in one story that Jesus told it is conspicuously missing. In the story of The Lost Son (or The Prodigal Son), the youngest son leaves home to go and find his way in the city. We are told that Dad waits daily for his son to come home. But what is missing is that it was the older son’s duty to go and search for his brother – to search with the same kind of intensity that the bride has as she searches for her groom just to make sure that his younger brother is okay. But the older son apparently refuses to go and look. And when his little brother walks back into the family life, the older son is disappointed.
Contrast this with Jesus, the older (and only) Son of God, who leaves the comforts of the palace and searches for us with the same intensity as the Shulamite bride has for the search of her lover. The dangers (and the cross) don’t matter. All that is important to him is you and me. So he looks for us. And he is still looking trying to make sure that we are all okay. And I think that we are also looking for him, but we share the same problem as the Shulamite bride – we sometimes forget that the one we are looking for is the King and that he is still searching for us.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Song of Songs 4
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