Kiss of death. What does this mean? The “kiss” is supposed to be an image of life. A world is formed between the meeting of the lips. Breath is given in the meeting of the lips. Praise and fealty are enacted in the laying of the lips. How can a thing that gives life, the kiss, become an instrument of death?
When I say “kiss of death” the first popular image that comes to mind is the scene from The Godfather Part II when mob-boss Michael Corleone kisses his traitorous brother Fredo, marking him-out for slaughter. “I know it was you Fredo! You broke my heart!” Michael’s kiss brings death.
And this isn’t only a modern phenomenon. Kisses sometimes bring death in the Bible too. Judas’ kiss is ultimate (Mark 14:44): he kisses Life Himself and marks Him as the One to be arrested and crucified. The One who breathed into the dust of the world and formed our race, creating with the kiss of life, is betrayed with a kiss and sent into the heart of the world (Matt. 12:40).
Before Judas, Joab killed Amasa with a kiss. Pretending at fraternal peace, he laid hold of Amasa’s beard and kissed him even as he drove a blade into his body (2 Sam. 20:9-10). The kiss which should have marked loyalty and faithfulness, instead becomes the mechanism for subterfuge and assassination.
Now, these all fit a kind of neat category. The kiss is weaponized by violent folk and twisted into an instrument of death. Joab, Judas, Michael Corleone, they follow a kind of pattern.
But there is another kind of “kiss of death.” And it doesn’t follow this pattern. It is not deceit, it is revolt. It is the kiss of tragic and dis-ordered love. When Romeo finds Juliet in the crypt and assumes her dead, he kisses her lips one last time:
“… And, lips, O, you /
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss /
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.”
(v.iii, 113-115)
The same kiss, which earlier had been the fist up-raised against the community which forbade his emotions follow their intended course, now blossoms in sorrow and fruits in despair. The kiss becomes his signature on the invoice of the grave. “Thus with a kiss I die.”
So also, before she stabs herself, Juliet kisses the dead-but-till-warm lips of Romeo, hoping for some last drop of poison (v.iii, 169-172). The very act that had been at one point revolutionary and amorously defiant, now dooms instead of liberates.
It is this kiss of revolt, the kiss of Tristan and Iseult, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Paolo and Francessca, and others, which despairs of God’s order and thus also becomes a Kiss of Death. It is, sadly, the form of the kiss that we moderns tend to praise. But, like the other kisses of death, the kiss of the affair fruits in destruction. Mighty it remains when its breaks from the Law, but that might only furnishes a greater heat with which to go down in blazes.
May all our kisses be kisses of life.