God’s kissAs the Easter Triduum, in other words, the three holy days in which the Church commemorates the mystery of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, is practically on our doorstep, it would be appropriate to appreciate it by revisiting the opening verse of the Song of Solomon: “O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!”
(Cant 1, 2). The mystery of Easter is an optimal time to treasure God’s kiss.
According to Origen, the bride of the Song is the Church and the bridegroom is Christ. He writes: “Let it be the Church that desires to be joined with Christ.” At another moment, Origen likens the soul with the bride who is eager for intimacy with her bridegroom. He comments: “As the third point of our exposition, let us introduce the soul. All her zeal is aimed at union and fellowship with the Word of God and entering upon the mysteries of his wisdom and knowledge – entering, as it were, upon the private chambers of the heavenly Bridegroom.” The bride (both the Church and the individual soul) is visited and kissed by the Word of God when the latter reveals himself to her. “For when, apart from any human or angelic ministry, her mind is filled with divine understanding and thoughts, she has the right to believe that she has received the kisses of the Word of God.”
For one of the Cappadocian Fathers, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, in befriending God, as happened in the case of Moses, one becomes the object of God’s kisses. Moreover, when the soul approaches Christ she inevitably receives his eternal kisses, his very life! Saint Gregory explains: “The virgin soul longs to approach the fount of the spiritual life. That fount, however, is the mouth of the Bridegroom, whence ‘the words of eternal life’ (John 6:68) as they gush forth fill the mouth that is drawn to it… Since then it is necessary for the one who draws drink from the fount to fix mouth to mouth, and the fount is the Lord who says, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink’ (John 7, 37). It follows that the soul, thirsty as she is, wills to bring her own mouth to the mouth that pours out life, saying, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.’
In Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s view, God’s kiss occured when the Son of God became man in the person of Jesus Christ. He explains: “A fruitful kiss, this, and wonderful for its astounding kindness, which does not press mouth to mouth but unites God to humanity… In (the latter) case a joining of natures in one fits the human together with the divine and brings peace to things on earth and things in heaven”.
The same thought features in the writings of the 12th century Christian theologian and prolific writer, Honorius Augustodunensis, better known as Honorius of Autun. Jesus is God the Father’s kiss. “By kiss, then, we understand peace, and by mouth, the Word of the Father, that is, the Son. He (God) kissed her (Bride), so to speak, by his own mouth when ‘in the last days he spoke to them in the Son’ (Heb 1, 2), saying ‘Peace be with you’ (John 20,19). For this means: ‘You will know the peace and the grace, which you lost in Paradise by the agency of the Devil, now restored to you by the agency of my Son’”.
Easter proclaims that God the Father kissed us by giving his Son Jesus for our salvation. Each time we savour his Saving Kiss we experience its ongoing saving effects!
■ Fr Mario Attard
OFM Cap