Don Friesen
It may be that as you attend office parties and other festive functions at this time of year you will find yourself standing under the mistletoe, in which case you shouldn't be surprised if you receive a kiss. Though the mistletoe plant is considered a parasite, the lore around it invests it with great power. From earliest times mistletoe has been one of the most magical, mysterious and sacred plants of European folklore, associated with life and fertility. If a couple in love exchange a kiss under the mistletoe, it is interpreted as a promise to marry as well as a prediction of happiness and long life. In Scandinavia mistletoe was considered a plant of peace, under which enemies could declare a truce or warring spouses kiss and make up!
A kiss is usually considered a good thing, though you may have thought otherwise if you had lived in Boston in 1656. That year a certain Captain Kemble was put in public stocks for two hours, charged with "lewd and unseemly behaviour" because he had kissed someone in public! Mind you, it was the Sabbath, but the kiss took place on the doorstep of his own house, after his return from a three-year voyage, and it was his wife he was kissing! After several seasons of a certain television series (The Sopranos) we also know that if someone forcibly clutches your face between their hands and kisses you violently on alternating cheeks, this is not a good thing.
Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet and man of letters, wrote: "The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions--the little soon-forgotten charities, a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling." (The Improvisatore, 1827) Kisses are indeed pleasurable, though when I asked Dorothy if she would come up and help me with a demonstration, she declined.
It is customary at weddings to complete the ceremony of exchanging vows and rings with a kiss, signifying the intimate union of the married couple. The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, who had great difficulty with the English language, told a rather hesitant bridegroom at one wedding, "Son, it is now kisstomary to cuss the bride."
Kisses make for powerful moments. Two of the most famous photographs of the last century feature kissing. One is of two lovers kissing on the streets of Paris (Robert Doisneau, Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, 1950), and the other--certainly the most reproduced--is of a sailor giving a nurse a bend-at-the-knees kiss in the middle of Times Square. It was taken at the end of the Second World War by Alfred Eisenstaedt while on assignment for Life magazine. Capturing the euphoria of war's end, the photograph became the indelible image of "kissing the war goodbye".
A kiss is a powerful symbol. Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), the nineteenth-century French novelist, described one of his kisses as "one of those kisses into which one puts all one's soul". (Adrianne Blue, "A kiss is much more than just a kiss," The Guardian, reprinted in The Ottawa Citizen, June 15, 1996) In fact, it used to be thought that in a kiss two lovers were exchanging the breath of life, mingling their souls. "Soul meets soul on lover's lips," said Shelley. (Adonais)
The Kiss in Scripture
The Scriptures are not squeamish about kissing. For example, the Song of Solomon's earthy ode to love mentions kissing (1:2; 7:9; 8:1) several times, and the early families who populate the pages of the Bible are not shy about using the kiss as a sign of affection between all members of the family. (e.g., Genesis 27:26-27; 29:11, 13; 31:28, 55; 33:4; 45:15; 48:10; 50:1)
The New Testament contains some very moving kisses, such as the kiss the father gives his prodigal son upon his return (Luke 15:20), or the kisses Jesus received from the woman who anointed his feet. (Luke 7:38, 45) There is also repeated mention in the New Testament of the "holy kiss" (Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26) or the "kiss of love". (1 Peter 5:14) Of course, the most famous kiss in the New Testament is the kiss of Judas, a kiss of betrayal that reverberates through the Gospels (Matthew 26:48-49; Mark 14:44-45; Luke 22:47-48) as well as Western literary history and culture. Though negative, the Judas kiss serves to reinforce the power and meaning of a kiss. The kiss of betrayal shocks us because it betrays the idea of kissing; it betrays the trust implicit in a kiss. It would be difficult to find a metaphor that conveys so well the shock of betrayal; a handshake of betrayal, for example, just wouldn't have the same impact.
Righteousness and Peace Will Kiss!
One of the most powerful images of kissing used in the Scriptures is found in our reading from the Psalms, where we are told, "Surely (God's) salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other." (Psalm 85:9-10) It's a wonderful image, but its meaning may not be immediately apparent. The interesting thing is that the four characteristics mentioned--steadfast love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace--are natural pairs in Scripture. Rarely do you see one without the other.
If righteousness is a state of wholeness and holiness, and peace is a state of serenity and harmony and overall well-being, then how can one know peace without being whole? How can one be whole without knowing peace? How can one know peace and make peace and be whole without being holy? Righteousness and peace were meant to be together. The sense given in Psalm 85 is that the two have reunited, leading one to the conclusion that they were unnaturally separated! The kiss in Psalm 85 signifies the reconciliation of two things that belong together. It does not accept the separation of these two characteristics as a given.
The image of righteousness and peace reuniting in a kiss is a good reminder for those of us who live in a world where things that are meant to belong together have become estranged from one another. We have learned, for example, that justice and law are not the same; that university training and education are not necessarily the same; that leadership and integrity don't always go together. We have learned that marriage and fidelity are not always one and the same, and that image and substance are often miles apart. We have learned that business and ethics are often antonyms, that wealth and greed are often synonyms, and that making peace with the weapons of war, though straining credulity, is considered quite acceptable.
Consider that a nation willing to spend $100 billion on weapons of mass destruction to make the world safe from terrorism--a dubious enterprise, at best--is quite unwilling to spend 0.2% of that amount to make the world safe from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. In a recent issue of The Economist, Jeffrey Sachs, former head of the Harvard Centre for International Development and one of the world's foremost authorities on development, asks why, instead of investing these staggering sums in weapons of mass destruction, we don't invest such sums in weapons of mass salvation. How about building up a vast arsenal of life-saving vaccines, medicines and health interventions, emergency food aid and farming technologies that could avert literally millions of deaths each year. (Jeffrey Sachs, "Weapons of mass salvation," The Economist, October 26, 2002)
Waiting in Hope for Mass Salvation
Righteousness and peace will kiss each other," says the psalmist." (Psalm 85:9-10) This metaphoric kiss takes place in the context of a yearning for the salvation that is to come. It takes place in the context of a forecast of the glories of heaven. It's a poet's dream, uttered with a poet's passion. Says the psalmist, "Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land." (85:9)
The longing of this passionate poet is the same longing that permeates our reading from Isaiah. To those who have yearned for comfort, God says to Isaiah, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people...." (Isaiah 40:1, KJV) And then Isaiah offers real words of comfort to a distressed and suffering people, to those whose suffering is compounded by their feeling of guilt, so much so that they feel they are experiencing a double portion (40:2) of suffering! To them comes a wonderful word of comfort and tenderness.
The Old English meaning of comfort includes a wide range of things, including, "to strengthen," "to aid," "to console," "to encourage," "to refresh," "to relieve,""to soothe". It's a range of meaning quite evident in our two Old Testament readings, which speak of tenderness, forgiveness, pardon, salvation, love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace and restoration. It speaks of a God who withdraws His wrath and who gives what is good--a tender God who feeds his flock like a shepherd, gathers the lambs in his arms, carries them in his bosom, and gently leads them (Isaiah 40:11). It is a picture of a God who is faithful, a God who is trustworthy. They "that wait upon the Lord," says Isaiah in the same chapter, "shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; ...they shall walk, and not faint." (40:31)
Waiting for the Kiss
Here we are at the beginning of Advent, waiting for the kiss of Christmas, waiting for the fulfilment of all these messianic hopes, waiting for the kiss of righteousness and peace. Recall your first romantic kiss or, if you've never been kissed, consider your anticipation of it. Recall the delicate dance surrounding the kiss. Who will make the first move? If I do, will she respond? Does he feel the same way? It's a delicate and excruciatingly pleasurable moment, full of tension and expectation and emotion and love and affection and a million other things.
It's amazing, given the modern media's trivialization of romance and sex, to find that romantic comedies are still popular. When girl meets boy--or vice versa--it doesn't take too long to realize that something is cooking, but the best of these movies tantalize us by making us wait for that first kiss. Long before the two fated lovers engage in their first kiss or are even aware that they will fall in love and kiss, we are waiting for it. We know it will happen, and we can feel the tension of the yearning. In the movie, Jerry Maguire, for example, we long for Jerry and Dorothy to get together, and when they finally do, in spite of all the obstacles circumstances--and Dorothy's sister--throw in their way, we enjoy a feeling of great satisfaction.
A kiss is special because it signifies a love story. The story of the heavens kissing the earth through the incarnation of God in a child, is a love story--the most wonderful love story ever told. It began so long ago as to defy our human memory and it continues still, for this story is about a love relationship that will never end.
Leonard Sweet, in a book entitled Quantum Spirituality, says that the "Bible tells us that the human species has been twice kissed by the divine. If the first kiss brought us breath and birth, the second kiss brought us rebirth and a second breath." (Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic, page 298) "The first kiss of God quickened us to come alive. ... The second kiss of God quickens us to come alive in Christ and be ‘born of the Spirit'" (John 3:8, RSV; Quantum..., page 299). Jesus is God's second kiss, or, in the words of the twelfth-century saint, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), "Jesus is God's kiss". In that babe of Bethlehem, righteousness and peace kissed. Jesus was God's righteousness, righteousness that loved and spoke of forgiveness and ate with sinners and healed the most crooked lines of the human heart.
A kiss is powerful because of its implicit promise. It is a foretaste of more--a promise of love, of marriage, of tenderness, understanding, acceptance, affection, warmth, and intimacy. A kiss holds us in its magic, totally encompassing the mind and allowing the heart to explode with dreams of infinite possibility. Our wait for the kiss of righteousness and peace is full of similar yearning.
There are many reasons why we love Christmas, but the deepest reason is that Christmas is heaven's kiss. It fills us with joy and wonder and anticipation and it makes us long for more. Christmas is not an end in itself; it is the foretaste of so much more – an eternity of life together with our Creator.
John Wesley's mother equipped him with a number of puritanical aphorisms, such as, "Live each day as if it were your last." Sometimes evangelists communicate the same message: "You know, anything could happen to you on the way home from church today, so get right with God. Live each day as if it were your last." I'm not sure that our biblical hope shares that tone. Rather, I think it counsels us to live each day as if it were your first! It encourages us to live in anticipation, rather than dread. Live each day as if it salvation is very near. Live each day as if redemption is just around the corner. Live each day as if the kingdom of God is at hand. Live each day as if the Christian Gospel really is good news!
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.