In yesterday’s reading  the Angel Gabriel invited Mary into the plans of God for redemption and salvation of the world in the reading known as the Annunciation. Today’s gospel is a familiar part of the Christmas story. It is the first part of the Visitation reading when Mary arrives at the house of her cousin Elizabeth and the child in Elizabeth’s womb leapt at the approach of the Messiah in the womb of Mary. It was a prenatal song of joy matched by Elizabeths’ outpouring of amazement and joy: “how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”  In tomorrow’s reading Mary will join this growing chorus of praise in her song of the Magnificat. These are the songs of the larger song of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Our first reading is from the Old Testament book: Song of Songs, an exquisite collection of love lyrics telling a dramatic tale of mutual desire and courtship. While the lovers in the Song are clearly human figures, they are also metaphors for the Lord speaking to Israel’s heart and wooing her into a new spiritual people betrothed anew to her divine Lover. It is the call to marriage covenant at all levels of the Song.

The reading begins with words that seem overly sentimental: “Hark! my lover–here he comes springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills. My lover is like a gazelle.” It is also one of the selections for a wedding ceremony ritual. During rehearsal it is often a bit challenging for the reader to keep a straight face, with words so foreign to our modern sensibility.  The reading continues with its language wooing the beloved to come to join the lover. The faithful being called to Divine Love.

The wedding version continues past our reading today and contains verses the speak to nature of that Divine Love to which we are called:

“My lover belongs to me and I to him. He says to me: ‘Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; For stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away.’”

Such is the Divine Love that called Mary to her destiny, that calls us all. May our voices join the symphony of responses to this Song of Songs.

Image credit: Pexels with historiated initial letter from the beginning of Song of Songs in a twelfth-century Latin Bible located in the library of the Winchester Cathedral | PD-US