BOUND BY LOVE

Song of Solomon 3:4 “Scarcely had I passed them when I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go.”

"A Raisin in the Sun" is a play about a family on Chicago’s south side. The father dies and leaves a small legacy in the form of an insurance policy - several thousand dollars. The mother was going to use the money to fulfill a longtime dream of buying a small bungalow for the family to live in. It would not be the Taj Mahal, but they would be able to move out of the tenements, and call it their own. The son also had a dream. He’d never had a decent job, so he convinces the mother to give him the money as an investment in a business deal (a deal that couldn’t miss). The mother wanted happiness for her children more than anything. And so she gives him the money, and the so-called "friend" of the son promptly skips town with the money. The young man is left alone to face his mother and sister. His shoulders are slumped in defeat. His head bows low as he tells them the money is gone. The sister rips into him. She screams at him. She calls him names. In every way possible she lets loose on him with contempt and scorn. When she finishes her tirade the mother speaks, "I thought I taught you to love him." The sister shouts back, "Love him? There is nothing left to love." The mother says, "There is always something left to love. And if you haven’t learned that, you haven’t learned anything. Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and the family ’cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he been through and what it has done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they’ve done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you aren’t learning - because that isn’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in himself because he has failed.

Do you recall what it is like to fall in love? Do you know of the first dizzying wave of colliding senses; when your heart leaps, and everything is intensified in a rush of exploding wonder. Life seems to surround like a sea of sweet and gentle breezes. Suddenly there is the existential knowledge that life was made for love. When you’re apart from your love, you’re busy savoring the thought of their image and essence.

Solomon’s imagery is the remembering of "dove eyes" of his well beloved, the rose of Sharon. When together new lovers are overpowered with each other’s presence (like a "bundle of myrrh"). There is the sense of being lost in abandonment, totally absorbed. The female voice in the Song felt the "banner over me was love" and it "ravished my heart."

To fall in love is to be irresistibly drawn, inexorably to the source of that love. Jesus came to be in love with his own. Standing on a hill outside of Jerusalem Jesus cried, "O Jerusalem,...how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings,.."

Jesus brought this love with him from heaven. He came to earth, to us to fall in love. And his beloved hung him on a cross. For you and I that might have ended a love affair. Divorce would have been the first words on my lips. But the first words on the mouth of Jesus were, "Father, forgive them."

God entered time and space in a manger in Bethlehem, grew up and died as a voluntary sacrifice in our place. He did that because we are his beloved, and he wished to reveal himself to us and fall in love with us. What do you say to such love? All he really wants to hear from you is, "Yes, I love you, Lord. I will give myself to you."