Song of Solomon 4:7

The line is spoken by a lover gazing at his beloved, and it says something almost reckless: <em>You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.</em> Not beautiful despite your flaws, not beautiful to me even with your faults — no flaw at all. Anyone who has been truly known flinches a little here, because we each carry a private catalog of our own defects, and we assume that being seen closely means being seen accurately, which means being seen as flawed. Love that looks long enough, we suspect, will eventually find the blemish and cool.

The Song insists on the opposite. This is not the blindness of infatuation, which has simply not looked yet. It is a love that looks fully and pronounces the beloved whole. And read as more than a wedding poem — read the way the church has always read it — the voice belongs to Christ, and the astonishment deepens past bearing. He, of all lovers, sees the actual catalog. He is not mistaken about us. And still the verdict is <em>no flaw in you</em> — not because the flaws were overlooked but because they were covered, borne, washed out at a cost we did not pay.

Wisdom's hardest lesson may be simply letting this be said over us: that the One who sees us most clearly is the One who calls us most beautiful, and means it.

The hymn tells us how the verdict can be true. On our own there is always a flaw to find; the beloved is called altogether beautiful only because she is clothed in something not her own. <em>My beauty are, my glorious dress</em> — the beauty Christ sees when he looks at us is his own righteousness laid over us like a wedding garment. So the Song's astonishing line is neither flattery nor denial. It is the gospel: no flaw in you, because every flaw was taken up by him.