Song of Solomon 7:10

Three times in the Song the lovers reach for the same sentence, and it will not sit still. Early on it is My beloved is mine, and I am his (2:16) — she says it with her hand already closed around him, the way we say mine of a thing we are afraid of losing. Later the order quietly turns: I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine (6:3) — belonging now comes first, and possession follows it. And then, near the end, the sentence breaks its own symmetry altogether. She does not say and he is mine. She says his desire is for me.

That is a stranger and a better thing to be sure of. It is one matter to know we have hold of someone; it is another to know we are wanted. A grip can be kept up by effort — ours usually is. Desire cannot. It either turns toward us or it does not, and nothing we do manufactures it. What the Song hands its singer at the last is not a tighter grasp but a rest: she has stopped counting what is hers and started simply knowing herself desired. The love that began as something she held has become something that holds her, and the proof is that the wanting now runs the other way. She is not clutching. She is cherished. The whole book has been quietly carrying her from the first to the second, which may be the only direction love ever really travels.

The Heidelberg Catechism opens by asking what our only comfort is, and answers in the Song's own grammar: that I… am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. Not I have taken hold of him — I belong to him, because his desire reached us first. And that desire is no figure of speech. On the last night, with the cross already in view, he told his friends, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer (Luke 22:15). The wanting ran toward us all the way to the table, and past it to the wood.