Holy Kissing
A Reflection on Embodied Faith
Modern assumptions about personhood often allow for, or even promote, unwarranted distinctions between theory and practice, being and doing, believing and behaving, faith and faithfulness. Any number of practices mentioned in the New Testament reveal that assumption and those distinctions as deeply problematic.
One example: Holy Kissing.
I have written and sent these few lines to you by Silvanus. I consider him to be a faithful brother. In these lines I have urged and affirmed that this is the genuine grace of God. Stand firm in it. … Greet each other with the kiss of love. Peace to you all who are in Christ. (1 Pet 5:12, 14 Common English Bible)
Drawing his letter to a close, the author summarizes its entirety. Thinking of those outside the church, the ones responsible for ostracizing Christ-followers in their own communities, Peter urges his audience to stand firm in God’s true grace. Concerning people within the household of faith, Peter writes, “Greet each other with the kiss of love.”
Paul similarly closes four of his letters, though in his case referring to a “holy kiss”: Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26.
Many reasons might be given for a kiss of greeting in the Roman world. However, a public kiss on the cheek or forehead, or even on the hand, would typically have served as a kind of barometer—a visible, physical, down-to-earth measure—of socio-religious inclusion, honor, and kinship (cf., e.g., Luke 7:45; 15:20; Acts 20:37). Like a brush in the hand of an ancient artist, so the bodily act of public kissing functioned like an instrument for drawing lines of social interaction.1
The kissing Peter mentions was mutual (“greet each other”), allowing for no markers of elevated status or heightened honor. It was inclusive of all within the household of believers. Peter qualifies this greeting as a “kiss of love,” underscoring his understanding of this simple practice as an apt summary of the whole of his teaching concerning relations within the family of Christ-followers. From his first chapter to the last, he has promoted love as a defining characteristic of the life within the community of believers—signifying a group ethos of solidarity and loyalty, an essential pattern of life favoring others in the community, and a commitment to oneness within the group: “Love each other deeply and earnestly” (1 Pet 1:22); “Love the family of believers” (2:17); “Be of one mind, sympathetic, lovers of your fellow believers, compassionate” (3:8); “Show sincere love to each other” (4:8); and now, “Greet each other with the kiss of love” (5:14).2
This emphasis on the nature of household patterns of life among believers is furthered by the familial terms that surface throughout Peter’s letter. Note, too, the metaphorical references to new birth, newborn babies, and the converted as children comprising a family for whom God is Father. Familial love denotes a strong sense of identity as a kin group (see 1:22; 2:17; 3:8; 5:9) that would stand in sharp contrast to cancerous experiences of marginalization, scoffing, and other forms of distress arising from the status of Peter’s readers and hearers as strangers within their communities (1:1, 17; 2:11).3 Those sentiments come into sharp focus here in the final appeal of the letter: “Greet each other with the kiss of love.”
The “kiss of love” has a ritual quality about it. Rituals are socializing structures, the performance of which generates identity and relationships. Here, two basic features of ritual have particular relevance:
The power of ritual to focus people’s attention on specific relations or networks of relations sharing a common center in the life of God, and
The physicality of ritual (tactile, observable, bodily), locating a community’s essential commitments within physical demonstrations.
As a greeting, the “kiss of love” is like a threshold, a doorstep, into a time and space determined by familial relations made possible through new birth, a time and space where the damages of life in a world hostile to the faith are relegated to memory’s margins. As a ritual, the “kiss of love” renews, strengthens, and recreates those patterns of believing, thinking, and feeling determined by the merciful initiative of the God who brings liberation in Christ and creates a household structured around his grace. Practices like the “kiss of love” thus enact the defining values of this community.
The “kiss of love” concentrates Peter’s theology of love and redemptive images of household life. The “kiss of love” does not simply display but actually constructs the very reality it intends to represent. It enacts in bodily form Peter’s understandings of the Spirit’s sanctifying work within the community and the character of the believing community. Put sharply, the “kiss of love” is embodied theology.4
Cf. William Klassen, “The Sacred Kiss in the New Testament: An Example of Social Boundary Lines,” New Testament Studies 39 (1993): 122–35.
All translations follow the Common English Bible. φιλάδελφος is used in 3:8; φιλαδελφία in 1:22; φιλόξενος in 4:9; and φίλημα in 5:14.
I have discussed the social situation of Peter’s audience in Joel B. Green, 1 Peter, Two Horizons New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).
Adapted from Joel B. Green, “Embodying the Gospel: Two Exemplary Practices,” Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 7, no. 1 (2014): 11–21 (19–21).