Truth In Advertising

A friend’s son gave his senior recital yesterday.  One of the selections on offer was an aria from Handel’s opera “Semele.”  I’d heard the binge before. - my wife is a vocal performance student, meaning that I’m getting educated way beyond my appreciation - but I never knew the song’s context until I read it in the program notes.

Seems that Jupiter, as that randy Roman deity was prone to do, had fallen in love with a mortal.  (Note: the mediterranean gods were a seriously hormonal bunch, which is why any comparison between the pagan demigods and the incarnate Christ is like comparing Hugh Hefner to Billy Graham.)  He plights his troth in the poetic way that gobsmacked gods are prone to do when punctured by Cupid’s hypodermic.  In this particular setup the god warbles to his intended about all the fringe benefits that come from being the flavor-of-the-week arm candy for the Boss Hog of Mount Olympus.  And I have to admit he offers her a pretty sweet deal!

Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade:
Where’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise;
and all things flourish where’er you turn your eyes.

Now that’s the kind of sound, sensible, marketable promise that any seeker-sensitive supreme being would make to a potential bride:  a climate-controlled ecosystem with portable shade and hot and cold running floral arrangements laid on regardless.  In fact, I must admit that this Jupiter bears a remarkable resemblance to the Jehovah preached from too many ostensibly Christian pulpits.  We hear much these days of a God of guarantees, an extended warranty sort of Lord who plies the potentially pious with prosperity and success beyond the dreams of avarice.

The real Christian poets, however, paint a different picture.  They speak of long treks through death valleys, of thorns corkscrewing into tender flesh, of Sloughs of Despond and Valleys of Humiliation and hard time in the dungeon of the Giant Despair and the vile world that is a friend to grace to help us on to God.  They tell us about armor worn, not on parade, but in the deadly earnest of daily combat, of notched swordblades dulled by close-order contact with the enemy’s habergeon.  Three trees do indeed crowd the crown of Golgotha, but they provide little in the way of shade; what comes instead is the deep shadow of darkness at noonday when God’s righteousness withdraws into eclipse before the price of obedient love.  They give us gardens, but these are Gardens of Gethsemane; not the blush of blossoms but the flush of blood-streaked sweat blooms in the grove of sacrifice.  What rises where we tread are not blushing flowers but brutal crosses.

Handel didn’t write his own lyrics; he swiped ‘em off the poet Alexander Pope.  Air-brushed love poems of idealistic forevers were all the rage in Merry Old England.  A century and a half earlier Christopher Marlowe gushed out an amorous prospectus which begins,

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields
Woods or steepy mountain yields

Again, a good deal, but hardly credible.  Sir Walter Raleigh called Marlowe’s bluff, countering with a sonnet of his own which leads off,

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

 Or, stripped of the Elizabethan gingerbread, “Pull the other one; it’s got bells on it.” 

Christ calls his bride from the cross, and he calls her to the cross.  He reads the fine print of the prenup in letters as large as the five wounds that puncture his flesh.  His is not the hormone-addled lovesong of a paramour who will say anything to enjoy one whom he wishes to use.  It is the battle hymn of a viking to a valkyrie.  Feel free to serve the crooning god of the world’s top forty, just don’t confuse him with Christ.  But if you wish to be the bride of the one who tells the truth about the sorrows that ennoble and the suffering that deepens, then take up your cross and walk the aisle.

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