The Bride's Longing and the Church's Come, Lord Jesus
Old Testament: Canticle of Canticles 2:16-17
My beloved to me, and I to him who feedeth among the lilies, Till the day break, and the shadows retire. Return: be like, my beloved, to a roe, or to a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
New Testament: Apocalypse 22:17, 20
And the spirit and the bride say: Come. And he that heareth, let him say: Come. And he that thirsteth, let him come: and he that will, let him take the water of life, freely. ... He that giveth testimony of these things, saith, Surely I come quickly: Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
The connection
The Song of Canticles gives voice to the bride crying out through the night for her beloved's swift return, longing for the daybreak that will end the waiting and the shadows. The Apocalypse closes with the same cry raised to its full pitch: the Spirit and the Bride, the Church herself, calling "Come" to the Bridegroom she has not yet seen face to face, and Christ answering with His own promise, "Surely I come quickly." What the Canticle sings as a private love between two, John reveals as the marriage toward which the whole of history has been moving. The Bridegroom's "quickly" is not a claim about elapsed time but about the kind of time He inhabits. Scripture itself warns against measuring it by ordinary duration: "one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Peter 3:8). Augustine works through this at length in the Confessions, arguing that time itself is a creature, made along with the world rather than something God acts within; eternity, as Boethius defined it and Aquinas affirmed, is not endless duration but "the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of boundless life" (Consolation of Philosophy V, in the Loeb translation), a now without succession. Christ's coming presses on every generation with equal nearness because, though it will come on the last day, it could be accomplished at any moment (CCC 673); it is always as close as eternity is to any single moment of time.
Moral sense
Let the ache for God shape daily life, not only its ending; pray "Come" as real desire.
Anagogical sense
Longing answered: the wedding feast realised, no longer awaited but present.
The Fathers
St Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles 74, on this verse, in Eales's translation: the soul's "one and continual demand, is as it were a constantly repeated Return, until He come", and "though He come with sufficient quickness, if our deservings be considered, He does not come quickly enough for our desires."
Warrant
Traditional: neither text cites the other, but the Church's later tradition hears the Bride's cry as this one. St Bernard, preaching on this very verse, makes it the soul's "constantly repeated Return, until He come", and finds that He "does not come quickly enough for our desires" (Sermons on the Canticle 74). The explanation of "quickly" as eternity rather than duration rests on firmer ground: Augustine's Confessions XI, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy V, and Aquinas's Summa I, q.10, all address time and eternity in terms that support this reading more directly than the core pairing itself does.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2817.
The verses
Canticles 2:16 · Canticles 2:17 · Apocalypse 22:17 · Apocalypse 22:20
