It was during the season of Advent that St. Bernard of Clairvaux placed his sermon on a line from Songs 1:1, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth…”
For Bernard the longing of the Christian year at Advent was best expressed in this cry of lovesickness. As we wait for his return, the song of the Bride becomes the song of the church in waiting. “Maranatha, come Lord Jesus!” (1 Cor. 16:22; Rev. 22:20).
But Bernard also sees in these words the confected desire of all of those holy folk before the first coming of Jesus: “Many an upright man in those far-off times sensed within himself how profuse the graciousness that would be poured upon those lips” (60).
To modern readers Bernard’s interpretation of the Song (along with all the long tradition of Rabbis, church fathers, and medieval theologians) seems strange. Surely he’s making an exegetical mistake, we think. This is a book about nuptial love, not about Jesus. But we are wrong. Christ is the Bridegroom (Jn. 3:29). He is the new Adam (! Cor. 15:45-49), and the Church is the new Eve.
While such an analogy is drawn by the prophets (e.g. Hos. 2; Is. 5:1-7), and while Christ draws on these themes throughout the Gospels, perhaps the most explicit and simple proof is St. Paul’s teaching that when he speaks of husbands and wives he is also speaking of the mystery of Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:32). The Church, after all, finds herself at the end of God’s story “as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2).
But this doesn’t answer our discomfort with the image of the kiss. It feels weird to us to pray, in both our private and corporate prayers, something like “Father, give us the kisses of your son.”
But perhaps the problem is not with the language of the Bible, but with the poor state we’ve allowed the kiss to occupy in our popular imagination. Perhaps we need to revivify our understanding of “the kisses of the mouth” with a biblical analeptic.
Kisses in the Bible begin with the creation of Adam. God breathes life into Adam, a kind of kiss (Gen. 2:7). Kissing is the gift of life.
Kisses are the sign of peace (Gen. 27.26-27), a greeting passed between brothers who are at peace (e.g. Gen. 33:4; Ex. 4:27), a symbol of mutual benefaction.
Kisses pour forth from lips, just like words, prayers, and songs (Ps. 119:171-172). Kisses are visible words laid upon the body of another person.
Kisses denote an intimate space, closing the distance between the sharers of the kiss. Intimate spaces are dangerous spaces. Union happens in the kiss, as does the deepest of betrayals, like Amnon and Judas (2 Sam. 13:1-14; Lk. 22:48). This is why the men called by God into the service of speaking his words, are concerned with the status of their lips: Moses has faltering lips, Isaiah has unclean lips, and Jeremiah cannot speak for he is a youth (Ex. 6;30; Is. 6:5; Jer. 1:6). The answer of Yahweh is to pour upon them the gift of his words, to kiss them with the kisses of his mouth, and take away their sin and frailty.
Kisses mark a special precinct around the body of the kissed, “this is my beloved” is what the kiss proclaims (Songs 5:16). By the words of Yahweh are his people “kissed” with his name (Num. 6:27).
Kisses denote the joy of receiving what we never thought of having (Lk. 15:20). Kisses are things we shower upon gifts given or returned to us.
And this is only cursory stuff. But it can be enlightening. Bernard summarizes, “[t]he mouth that kisses signifies the Word who assumes human nature; the nature assumed receives the kiss; the kiss however, that takes its being both from the giver and the receiver, is a person formed by both, none other than […] Jesus Christ” (61-62).
We live in an age when kissing has been relegated almost entirely to the realm of the romantic. And yet precisely in this relegation has it lost much of its power. Let us work to redeem the image of The Kiss so that we do not balk at the prayers of the beloved in the Song nor the instructions of the Apostle to “greet one another with a holy kiss” (Rom. 16:16).