FROM HOLY KISS TO HANDSHAKE
Robert Meyers

I remember fondly from my late teens the stern face of Will M. Thompson, minister for the Church of Christ at 318 South Grand in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Rather grandiosely, we called our rectangular brick building the "Grand Avenue Church of Christ," and we were even more proud of Will M. Thompson, one of the last religious debaters who knew and used all the tricks of the trade.

Under Will M.'s tutelage I compiled several dozen debate notebooks which listed denominational arguments on all controversial religious topics and carefully answered each one. This training, and Will M.'s own personality, so influenced my adolescence that I have even yet not totally shaken off the instinct to go for the jugular vein when an argument gets hot.

More to the point, for purposes of this article, I recall the acid scorn with which he occasionally pilloried some real or imagined denominational preacher who had opined that a sweet roll and a glass of orange juice could serve as effectively for communion as Welch's grape juice and a Manischewitz cracker.

"This is exactly how men with no respect for the laws of God treat His sacred word!" he would thunder. "The elements have been prescribed. No man has a right to change them. When God invests a particular form with significance, it must not be altered — ever!"

Although the great man never explained to us where in the Bible the elements were described in such a way that they could be equated with our grape juice and baked crackers, I believed him to be infallible and in later years I ridiculed more than one unwary denominational preacher who tried to argue that it is the spirit and meaning of communion that matters eternally, not the precisely preserved form of it.

When Will M. stood at the door after one of these fierce anathemas and shook hands with all of us in the unvarying ritual which he would have been severely criticized for omitting, I never once realized how he was acting out a partial denial of his own logic. I will explain later, though you can begin to guess from my title.

His position, a standard Church of Christ position, was that both form and spirit were equally important in obedience to any commandment or participation in any ritual in the assembly of the church. They were indissolubly wedded in a tie no man could sever with impunity. Immersion, therefore, was not merely a religiously and culturally useful mode of initiation into the Christian family, derived from Jewish washings and perhaps influenced by Essene practices, with the vital element being the intent and the spirit of it. It was, rather, the permanent and only way to express one's faith and enter the community.

If the church later wondered how to baptize in the Sahara, and asked if pouring sand would satisfy the meaning of it, or if it seemed unnecessarily difficult to manage in the Arctic, no matter. Man not only had no right to change the spirit and intent of a ceremony; he had equally no right to alter its form to suit the circumstances of a different time and place.

This appeared divine logic to me and I bought it without question. Yet oddly, as I perceived years later, in many ways we were doing even then exactly what we condemned in others. We had quite disregarded Christ's assumption that we would fast, along with His and the church's approved examples of fasting, arguing that any similar form of discipline would fulfill the spirit and intent of that early Christian practice.

I can't remember any other disciplines we ever practiced which might have substituted for fasting, but I certainly know that we did not fast. On the contrary, we were great covered-dish dinner people. When I look back it seems we were eating constantly. The food was superb and abundant, much better than I usually got at home, and it was there that I learned to overeat. I used to try to get enough to last me for a week.

If someone asked us why we didn't fast, our lawyers would reply: "Oh, that was only a custom of those early times and it was not intended for us." I did not notice, as a child, that they never bothered to explain how we knew that some commandments were customs, and other commandments were commandments. Somehow we just knew.

If by some quirk of serious attention to plain orders in the New Testament our elders went to pray over a sick person (as opposed to the comfort and convenience of "remembering" him during a short prayer on Sunday morning in the meetinghouse), surely it was permissible to ignore James' clear injunction about using oil. Or, for that matter, the laying on of hands.

"After all," exploded one exasperated elder who was actually challenged on this point, "what kind of oil, for heaven's sake? And what a mess!" So, a judicious substitution of form was allowed in the belief that, after all, the spirit of the commandment had been fulfilled. No one was unkind enough to draw analogies between that ceremony and certain other ceremonies in which we refused absolutely to make such distinctions.

When it was noticed, as it rarely was, that John's gospel not only omits the story of the Lord's Supper but substitutes for it a story no one else tells — the washing by Jesus of the disciple's feet — we saw no indictment of our claims there, either.

True, Jesus commanded us there to wash one another's feet, and He nowhere repealed the orders. True, he used such strong language as he seldom used anywhere else about any ritual: "If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you ought also to wash one another's feet." But foot-washing was not in our tradition, so we ignored the passage.

If we were asked why we disregarded so plain an order, as I was asked once in LaGrange, Georgia by a dear old Baptist lady who was sure I would miss heaven unless she washed my feet, we replied loftily: "Oh, that was a custom of ancient times and not really meant to be binding on us today. We fulfill the spirit of it by offering each other a glass of water on a warm day, or just by being hospitable in our homes. Don't you see?"

And if one objected, as my dear old lady did: "But I thought you were the people who insisted on literalness in all the commandments," we smiled tolerantly and said: "Only on the essential things." That sweet vagueness did the trick for us, unless there happened to be a gadfly around to pursue such illogic. And if there was, we found ways to swat him until his infernal buzzing stopped.

I am ready now to return to dear old Will M. Thompson and his weekly demonstration of his own inconsistency. Five times in the New Testament we are directly commanded to greet each other with the holy kiss or the kiss of peace. No language in Scripture is clearer than the language in which these orders are given. Yet my boyhood mentor never passed that unequivocal commandment on to us. Quietly, he practiced a different form which he believed to be expressive of the same spirit that lay behind Peter and Paul's decree.

The substitution had been made long before, of course, as any student of church history knows. In the early centuries the church had faithfully practiced the holy kiss as enjoined by the apostles, although the Church Fathers differ as to just where it came in the meetings. Since an emancipated Roman slave was formally kissed when he entered the company of free people, Christians may have used their kiss at the time of baptism to symbolize entrance into the new life.

Most commentaries do not consider the perils of the practice, but I found a couple out of thirty that did. A French commentary on Romans (Godet) does a bit of prim guessing: "Probably the president of the assembly gave the kiss to the brother who sat next to him, and he to his neighbor, while the same thing took place on the part of the women." Ernest Best in the Harper's Commentary says: "We can assume that it was not on the lips because of the sexual association of such kisses."

These guesses do not seem to fit what happened in all the early churches, for in the Apostolic Institutions we discover that rules were laid down later to remove from the practice whatever might be offensive in it. "These things being done, let the men apart, and the women apart, salute one another with a kiss in the Lord." That sounds suspiciously like the kind of advice which comes after somebody has complained, not before!

And if Will Durant can be trusted in his magnificent Caesar and Christ, there had obviously been offenses and complaints. "The final ritual of the agape was the 'kiss of love.' In some congregations this was given only by men to men, and by women to women; in others this hard restriction was not enforced. Many participants discovered an untheological delight in the pleasant ceremony; and Tertullian and others denounced it as having led to sexual indulgences . . . and that the kiss should not be repeated if it gave pleasure. In the third century [it] gradually disappeared." Durant cites Turtullian and Clement, especially, although Origen, Justin Martyr and others all had ad-vice to give about the ritual.

It was resurrected in an altered form in the Middle Ages. In weddings, after the agnus Dei had been chanted, the groom went to the altar, got the kiss of peace from the priest, and returned to his wife to give her that kiss at the foot of the crucifix. In the mid-13th century a safe way of conveying the kiss was introduced into England: the osculatorium or tabella pacis, a metal disc with a holy picture, was passed around in the church to be kissed.

But this, too, caused some scandals because people quarreled over who would have the honor of kissing it first. And it had some uses not intended. When a young and beautiful girl kissed it, she often found beside her a hand-some young man who waited impatiently to take it directly from her hand and lips.

So much for human frailty! The kiss commanded by Peter and Paul fell by the wayside long ago and there is no serious movement to revive it in the church ritual. Even the most adamant literalist seems quite content to let this particular form be changed, so long as the spirit behind the commandment is somehow preserved. The substitute form is so widely accepted in fact that J. B. Phillips doesn't even bother to translate what Paul and Peter said. He simply paraphrases it in language every modern Christian will understand: "Give one another a hearty handshake all around!"

I heard the final irony in this connection just the other day. A friend of mine in the Church of Christ heard the Phillips version read in a study group and complained vigorously about the change. "You can't trust modern versions," he said. "Paul said holy kiss, not handshake." It did not occur to him that the new translation only sanctified an action which he had already taken.

No one who reads this journal will suppose that it is my hope to revive the holy kiss. The churches I know have troubles enough already, and I am more than happy to join them in expressing the spirit of that commandment through an altered form. I would only urge my brothers to extend to other people the same charity which they find for themselves.