“Like a lily among the thorns,
so is my love among the maidens…
My beloved is mine and I am his;
he pastures among the lilies.”
Song 2:2, 16
In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of the Vulgate, owing a bit to the idioms of Latin, is a bit stronger: lilium inter spinas. She is a lily set in a nest of spines. One cannot get at her without getting into the spines. Toward the end of the chapter the Lover says of her Beloved that they belong each to the other and that he willingly pastures, or “browses,” among the lilies which means also among the thorns.
What’s going on? Why make this comparison? What’s more—what do the lovers of the Song mean by this? Here I offer a brief quadriga-informed reading.1
I. On what is called “the literal level” we can understand these as clearly intertextual scriptural allusions: She is like the flowering capitals which crown the pillars of the Temple (1 Ki 7:15–22). She is like the rim of the great bronze basin in the court (7:23–26). She is the crowning glory, the blossom at the zenith of who he is, the flowering well of his life. She is a sanctuary-ified Eden. She is also like Eve whom Adam names a second time after the Fall upon hearing the Lord’s promise to her: that the Seed of the Woman would crush the serpent (Gen 3:15). Eve means “Mother of the Living” (3:20).
And yet for all this their romance still wears signs of the Fall: thorns stand round about her. We are right to think of the thorns of Adam’s curse (Gen 3:18). To dive into the brambles to savor the Lily is to touch the thorns. It is in fact to become crowned by them like the ram who took the place of Isaac (22:13).
The picture is a meaningful one: each suffers the wounds of love. She suffers the thorns which pierce her as she extends in love for the Beloved. And he suffers the spines’ lacerations as he presses in to delight in her.
In The Art of Courtly Love, Andreas Capellanus describes the way in which love can be understood as an inborn willingness to suffer for the sake of the beloved one. Those who have loved know this to be true.2
II.
We can move easily into what is called “the typological level” from here. Christ is the Beloved who reaches for the Lily among the thorns and in so doing crowns himself with them (Matt 27:29; Jn 19:2). It is not out of some impersonal sense of Kantian obligation he lays down his life for the world; it is rather “for the joy that was set before him” (Heb 12:2).
The Bride, the Church, also endures the pain of the thorns. Jean-Baptiste-Elie Avrillon offers this gloss: The celestial spouse “must therefore love and suffer at one and the same time…when the wind sways the thorns, they pierce the lily on every side, but how does this flower revenge herself for so many wrongs? It is by turning her wounds into so many mouths, from which she breathes forth a sweet perfume.”3 Divine Love calls us to bear the wounds of the thorns in which we are set; each place in which we are pierced creates a new set of lips which sing the praises of the Beloved who gave his Life for us. Thus can Paul say, for one example among many, “rejoice in my sufferings” (Rom 5:3).
Paul is uninterested in merely white-knuckling through the sorrows of the Gospel in order to enjoy the benefits of salvation. No, the thorns are among the things in which Paul finds sweet communion with Jesus: “I want to know Him, and the power of his Resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being confirmed in his death” (Phil 3:10).
III.
“Tropology” means how the typology applies to the life of the church. Here’s one application (I’m sure there are others): You, beloved, are a lily among thorns. You have hardships and sorrows and tears and difficulties. You have been pierced. Comparing your wounds with the wounds of others is not the point. It is enough that you have sorrow. The Living God browses among the thorns and lilies of your life. The things that pierce you pierce him too. Sing those sorrows. Find in each wound a new set of lips with which to sing the Redeemer’s praise. Tune your wounds to the music of the Gospel of the Beloved.
When David says that tears have been his bread (Ps 42), he is making more than a poetic gloss on his painful moments. He is alluding to the show-bread, the communion bread of the tabernacle which the priests gave him to eat in times of trial in communion with the living God (1 Sam 21:3–6). His sad moments, his sorrows have become like that: communion meals with the God of Jacob, moments of intimacy and comfort.
So also our wounds, in the Body of Jesus, become productive of praise. They become a part of the sweet aroma that the Lover will, in the end of the Song, pour out on his Beloved (Song 7:13).
It is not just that Jesus has sorrows like me, though that is true too. It is, more deeply, that my sorrows, like His, are not “unto death” but are “unto the glory of God” (Jn 11:4).
Sing your sorrows.
IV.
This may seem like a Good Friday reflection, but it isn’t.4 For something terribly beautiful about wounds encounters us in Easter: the Risen Christ still bears the wounds he received in his Passion (Jn 20). They become glorious marks of his victory (Rev 5:6). The saints too, in classical hagiography, bear in heaven the marks of their suffering—the badges of their “fellowship with Christ,” as Saint Paul regards it (Phil 3:10).
Here we move into what is called the “anagogical” level of interpretation in which we uncover the way the Scriptures speak to our hopes and longings. The exegetical question asked on this level is “how does this shape what I am supposed to hope for?” The thorn-crowned Jesus, who calls us to also be crowned with the thorned diadem as we love others, also makes promises for us about the scars those thorns leave on us: they too become marks of the glory we share with Christ.
Of course, the Lord is not a sadist. Christianity must never be allowed to be construed into a hollow darkness where pain is the only currency. At the same time, however, it is precisely in the erasure of pain from the lexicon of redemption that allows pain to become meaningless. Ours is a society consumed with and by what Byung-Chul Han identifies as an unbearable “positivity” in which everything painful needs be avoided and all memories of it erased.5 Wounds, we seem to believe, only heal when they are forgotten and removed.
The Church, however, has long seen that the greatest (if also paradoxical) response to pain is to gather it into the work of redemption. The negative wounds of Christ (his Side) become a font of faith for Thomas (Jn 20), and the scars on his back, bent out of shape by the Passion, become the shape of promise. This scarred back is forever inscribed with the truth that he who lays down his life shall not lose it but gain it (Jn 10:18; cf. Matt 16:25).
The Moravians are famous for their rich devotional life orchestrated around the image of the wounds of Christ. This was not pain for pain’s sake, but rather the belief that pain could be made sense of in the light of the Gloria Pleurae, the “glorious wounds” of Jesus.6 The phenomenal missionary power released from that devotion found its strength in the claim made by those wounds that that which we suffer for the sake of the Kingdom isn’t meaningless but participates in the glory of God. We who have wounded him, we who have made the scars in his body, become one body with the Wounded Body and bear marks also.
There is therefore a hopeful mutuality in the wounds of the Body of Christ. Just as the Lord declares that the name of his people is graven into his hands (Is 49:16) so also the Lord’s people bear in their bodies the marks of their Lord (Gal 6:17). We too become bodies inscribed by hope and victory. We are marked, like Jesus, as people who have come out of the old world’s week. We have passed through the last of the dead Saturdays outside of Paradise. We follow Jesus beyond the curtain, beyond the shut gate and fiery saber, marked with bruises left by the teeth of trampled serpents, into the Rest prepared for the people. But (and here’s the important thing) the eternal rest of the Kingdom lies not in the erasure of all that we have suffered but the hallowing of our wounds: O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata!
Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu.
NOTES
- An earlier version of the first three exegetical movements appeared at the All Saints Honolulu Blog, “A Lily among Thorns,” (July 28, 2025), https://allsaintshonolulu.com/blog/2025/7/28/a-lily-among-thorns. ↩︎
- Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love I.1, trans. John Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 28. ↩︎
- Jean-Baptiste Elie Avrillon, The Year of Affections: Or, Affections on the Love of God Drawn from the Canticles for Every Day in the Year, trans. E. B. Pusey (Nashotah, WI: Nashotah House Press, 2022), 25. ↩︎
- What follows in this anagogical section comes from a post on my substack, “Glorious Scars, Happy Sabbaths,” (April 4, 2024), https://stannes.substack.com/p/glorious-scars-happy-sabbaths. ↩︎
- Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). ↩︎
- Peter Vogt, “‘Honor to the Side’: The Adoration of the Side Wound of Jesus in Eighteenth-Century Moravian Piety,” Journal of Moravian History 7 (Fall 2009): 83–106. ↩︎