Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Brendan

8 Sunday Ordinary Time B
February 24, 2006

At the beginning of Lent each monk in the community is expected to give the Prior the name of the book he will read for Lent. This comes out of St. Benedict’s regulations for Lent in Chapter 48.

I’ve decided to read the Song of Songs. I chose it because of a discussion we had a month or so back in our Catholic Readers Society. Someone mentioned that this book would have been better left out of the bible because it is essentially a collection of poems, often frankly erotic, on the theme of human love: Hebrew opera from the 10th century b.c.

The criticism sounds a bit like my novice master of 30 years ago who gently suggested that novices might want to avoid reading the Song of Songs so as not to stir up youthful passions. Of course, as soon as we had a moment free we went right to our rooms and read it. It was everything he feared and all we hoped it would be.

As it happens, when the canon of the Hebrew bible was decided upon by the rabbi’s at Jamnia following the fall of Jerusalem, the opulent poetry of the Song of Songs caused much debate. Was it Sacred Scripture or not? It was Rabbi Akiva, a fierce conservative but for all of that no prude either, who argued forcefully for its inclusion. “God forbid,” he said, “that any Jew deny that the Song of Songs is a holy text; for all the ages are not worth a single day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. All scripture is holy but the Song of Songs is the holiest of all”.

He was not only defending the emotion of the Song of Songs, but also the extraordinary symbolic image of Israel as the bride of God. And his argument carried the day.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this and how long it’s going to take to get me there because obviously the Song of Songs does not figure anywhere in this Sunday’s readings. What does figure into the readings is the reality behind the Song of Songs i.e. the covenant relationship between Israel and God described as a marriage in which Israel demonstrates her faithfulness to her husband by forsaking idols and observing the torah.
I had an aunt who used to say that marriage was like a hot bath, once you got into it, it didn’t seem so hot any more. This may not be everyone’s experience of married life but it was hers. It also seems to have been the experience of the Prophet Hosea in the first reading. He is a husband who has been made a fool of time after time by an unfaithful wife, but who loves her so passionately that he works to win her back. He even plans a second honeymoon. The prophet’s unhappy experience in love and marriage is an image of Israel’s now hot, now cold relationship with her husband YHWH, but more importantly, it is the also the image of the passion with which God loves Israel.

“A bride”, as the saying goes, “is a woman with a fine prospect for happiness behind her”. Salvation history has a far more optimistic assessment for the bride Israel. The book of Hosea was written around the middle of the 8th century b.c. It would take another 750 years before the marriage relationship between God and Israel would take a dramatic and unexpected turn when God would renew the covenant in a way that no one could have guessed or imagined.
In the person of Christ God came to Israel in human flesh and renewed the covenant, no longer by the mark of circumcision in the flesh of each Jewish male: henceforth it is God Himself who bears the mark of the covenant cut into his flesh with nails and a lance. And out of his wounded side, as from the open side of Adam, is born the New Eve, the Church, the Bride of Christ.
It is out of this background that we should hear this Sunday’s passage from the Gospel of Mark. It is framed in the context of a theological dispute about the proper observance of the laws on fasting. But this story is not about the outward observance and legalism of the Pharisees verses the spiritual freedom of Jesus and his disciples. Fasting in Jesus’ day was not simply an act of piety or the mindless accommodation to someone else’s rules about food. Fasting had to do with Israel’s present situation over run and occupied as she was by pagans. More specifically it had to do with the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple. The prophets promised that one day God would come to restore the fortunes of Israel and fasts would be turned into feasts.
So Jesus raises the theological ante by asking “How can the guests at a wedding fast when the bridegroom is still with them”. In other words the bridegroom is at hand. Fasting is a sign of sorrow and repentance. Weddings are occasions of joy where the order of the day is feasting not fasting. Jesus’ presence means that the party is in full swing, and no one wants a glum face at a wedding.

But there are also darker things hinted at in this passage: there will come a time when the bridegroom will be taken away and put to a violent death. Mark, who also knows the outcome, immediately presents two images that hint at what that outcome will be: new cloth and new wine which tear and burst the old that went before them: images of the resurrection: the tearing away of the hold of death and the bursting forth of Christ from death and the tomb.

With Ash Wednesday just a few days away the liturgy is carefully preparing us for the coming of Lent. Obviously we cannot derive the whole theology of Lent from a few verses of Mark’s gospel. But using this Sunday’s texts we can begin to see what the goal of our Lenten fasts and observances are and what they are not. Certainly, Lent is not about eating carrot sticks and cottage cheese in order to win God’s favor and approval. We already have it. It is rather a time for God to
“ lead us into the desert and speak to our hearts
so that we may respond there as in the days of our youth.”
A time to put our own relationship with God aright by remembering the passion with which our God loves his bride, his Church and the length to which he has gone to prove it.