The Divine Kiss:

A Case For Intimacy in Worship

By Robert Webber

I have been greatly challenged by many of my readers who have taken me to task for my statement that “a romantic relationship with Jesus is a lie.” 

The most common concern articulated by these writers has to do with the Song of Solomon and the image of the bride and bridegroom.  Surely, it is argued, these images of human love are analogous to the divine and heavenly love we experience with God.

True.  The Song of Solomon is rich with love images as is the relationship of the bride and bridegroom.  So how are we to interpret these images?  How do they relate to intimacy in worship?  These are important questions that deal with our relationship to God so they must not be left unanswered.

Since this column is entitled Ancient-Future Worship, I decided to see how the Fathers of the ancient church interpreted these love images and how they applied them to our experience in worship.

Typological Interpretation

We must begin our investigation by recognizing that the Early Church Fathers interpret the scripture using the method of typology.  This form of interpretation sees Old Testament events, offices and images as types of future events, offices and images finding their fulfillment in Christ, in the church and in its worship.  For example, the most prominent type in the Old Testament is the Exodus event.  The deliverance of Israel from their bondage to Pharaoh point to and find fulfillment in Jesus Christ who by his death and resurrection delivers us from the power of sin and death.  Around this Exodus-event/Christ-event comparison, many other typologies exist.  For example, arising from the Exodus event and throughout the history of Israel we meet prophets, priests and kings.  These offices are also types that are fulfilled in Jesus who is the eternal Prophet, Priest, and King.  Then too, Israel is a type of the church.  And, of course the Fathers argue, there are many Old Testament types that are fulfilled in the worship of the church and in the spiritual journey of God’s people.  The intimate images of Song of Solomon and of the bride and bridegroom are types that are fulfilled in the worship of the church. 

One more matter about the typological interpretation that will help us understand how the early Father’s approached the Song of Solomon is this: typological interpretation is historical.  It always sees the type fulfilled in a future historical person, event or symbol.  This differs from the current romantic interpretation of the Song of Solomon by those people who are reading it as an expression of an immediate personal description of their relationship to God.  Historic typological exegesis of the Song reads the Song sacramentally (to be explained below). Current writers who propose a romantic spirituality exegete the song as an immediate existential encounter.

Baptism and Marriage

The church Fathers saw the marriage images of the Song of Solomon as a typology of the sacrament of baptism.

Using allusions from the Song of Solomon, St. Cyril of Alexandria (early 4^th Century) says to those who are about to be baptized, “already the perfume of blessedness is wafted to you, O Catechumens. Already you gather spiritual flowers to weave heavenly crowns.  Already the sweet perfume of the Holy Spirit is poured out.  You are in the vestibule of the royal dwelling.  May you be led into it by the king.  From hence forth, indeed the flowers have appeared on the trees.  Now the fruit must ripen.”  Following these words the candidates for baptism go through a number of rituals, all of which imply the forming of a new relationship - a turning away from Satan and the powers of evil to enter a new relationship, a marriage and life-long commitment to Jesus Christ.  The new Christian is now devoted to Jesus as a wife is devoted to her husband.  Baptism is the sign of that devotion.  It is the mark of the Christian, the ring that signifies a new state of being. 

In the Early Church period there were a group of heretics known as the Gnostics who rejected the notion that God communicated through visible sign.  In keeping with their rejection of all material as evil (i.e. water or bread and wine), they also rejected the Incarnation.  Because they saw God as a spirit and evil as matter, they could not affirm that “the word became flesh.”  Instead they claimed Jesus was a spirit phantom who did not become real flesh.  Their spirituality was an ethereal spirituality that repudiated all material signs in favor of an immediate spiritual experience with a phantom Christ who was spiritualized in romantic terms.  It makes me wonder of the current romanticized and overly sentimentalized musical expressions of our time are a new incarnation of the Gnostic heresy.

Eucharist and Relational Consummation

The Early Church Fathers interpreted the consummation of the relationship between the bride and the bridegroom to be a type of the Eucharist. 

St. Ambrose (4^th Century) wrote, “you have come to the altar (meaning the communion table).  The Lord Jesus calls you, for the text speaks of you or of the church, and he says to you:  ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth’ . . . what is the altar, indeed but the figure of the body of Christ - you see the wonderful sacrament (meaning the bread and wine), and you may say: may He kiss me with the kiss of His mouth, that is, may Christ give me a kiss.”

Communion, the receiving of bread and wine, is the kiss given by Christ to the soul - an expression of the love between God and the individual believer, an expression of love between Christ and His church, the bride.  In the Early Church the use of the word “kiss” meant something very different than Faith Hill’s song “Kiss”.  Paul refers to it as the “kiss of peace”.  Paul’s words are connected to the first words of Jesus to his disciples after the resurrection.  He said to them in the upper room “Peace be with you.”  The kiss of peace, which is the sign of Christ, is a momentary experience of the eschatalogical Kingdom to come.  When the bread is eaten and the wine touches our lips it is God’s kiss assuring us that the battle with evil has been won on the tree and at the empty tomb. We are assured that God’s peace (shalom) will rest over the entire created order and that we have a peace in his eternal Kingdom.  Like the kiss of peace, the Eucharist is the seal of God’s promise, the assurance of eternal life.

In conclusion we must ask ourselves how this ancient and biblical interpretation applies to us in our worship today.

My contention has been against sexual innuendo in worship.  Let me try to explain this in light of what I have written above.  In today’s worship we are generally expressing our love songs to God without any biblical or sacramental imagery.  Consequently, having no tangible form through which God’s love is communicated to us and our love to him, we draw on the images of romantic and even sexual love dominant in our culture.

This can change.  By returning to the ancient typology that sees the Song of Solomon and its marriage images fulfilled in baptism and Eucharist, we gain physical and tangible images of divine love and relationship that avoid the current culturally laden images of inappropriate sex.

Baptism is our marriage to Christ.  The implications of this image are enormous.  Eucharist is God’s kiss, ever sealing the commitment made between Christ and us personally and the church collectively.  Affirming that God has rescued us to be his special eternal people, his bride.