This week while my friend Amy and I were recording the new episode of the BibleWorm podcast, she said something that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. It has challenged not only the way I think about human empowerment, but also how I think about our relationship to God.

Mutual Affection

The passage we were reading is Song of Songs 1:12-2:6. It depicts the dialogue of two young lovers as they begin to explore the wonders of human sexuality. In the first part of the passage, they exchange compliments. In 1:15, he says “Ah, you are beautiful, my love; ah, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves.” In 1:16, she replies “Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly lovely.” (While it’s hard to tell in English, the speaker change is clear in Hebrew, which marks the gender of both “you” and “beautiful.” The first line is hinnach yafah [“you (f) are beautiful (f)”] while the second is hinnechah yafeh [“you” (m) are beautiful (m)”].

I noted this as a nice example of affirmation in a relationship, where each partner acknowledges the beauty of the other. It demonstrates mutuality and reciprocity, in which each person uplifts the other.

Empowerment and Confirmation

But Amy pointed out a shift in the pattern in the second half of the passage. There, the female lover begins by saying “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys,” to which the male lover responds, “As a lily among brambles, so is my love among the maidens.”

At first I had read this, too, as simply another exchange of compliments. But, as Amy pointed out, it isn’t. Instead, the female character speaks about herself, declaring her own beauty as a rose of Sharon. The male character then affirms her assessment of her beauty, in essence saying “Oh yes you are.”

As Amy pointed out, this is a rather remarkable interaction. Instead of waiting to receive external validation from her male companion, the young woman confidently declares her own beauty. She demonstrates a strong sense of self and feels empowered to be loud and proud about her own value. The male’s role is but to encourage her and confirm her own sense of her inherent worth.

Loving Each Other in Community

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this interaction means for our own relationships, both romantic and otherwise. It suggests that the best relationships may be the ones in which our confidence in each other leads to increased confidence in ourselves. That affirming the value of another person can call forth their confidence to recognize and declare their own inherent worth. And that we, too, should feel empowered to declare our own value without worrying about being seen as arrogant or self-important.

The best partnerships call forth and affirm the beauty of the other, creating safe spaces for naming and acknowledging our own inherent worth.

We are Beautiful to God

But this passage takes on an even more profound meaning when we shift the Song of Songs into the allegorical register. As you may know, the Song has traditionally been understood as describing the relationship between God (the male character) and humankind (the female character)—whether Israel, the Church, or the individual person.

When we read 2:1-6 through that lens, we find ourselves as the female character declaring our own inherent worth and God echoing and affirming that worth. “I am beautiful,” we say. “Oh yes you are,” God replies, “You are like a lily among the brambles, and I love you.”

This image of approaching God confident in our own worth runs contrary to the way the Christian tradition most often views our relationship with God. In that more common model, we say in confession, “I am a terrible sinner,” to which God replies, “Yes you are, but I love you anyway.” There is value in that way of conceiving of our relationship with God, and oftentimes we do need to acknowledge our sinfulness and realize that we could be better people.

But here we find another way of approaching God, with confidence in our own inherent worth. “I am a child of God,” we might say, “and I am beautiful.” And God looks at us the way a parent looks at a child, or the way a lover looks at their beloved, and simply says, “Yes, you are beautiful, and I love you.”

What a tender and empowering image of the divine-human relationship. We are beautiful, you and I. We are valued by the creator of the universe. We don’t have to prove anything to God or to anybody.

So we are free to go and love the world.

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