In the Lord’s Passion, we can recall how Christ was handed over to the crowd, the scribes, and Pharisees who wanted Him dead. It was made through a signal coming from Judas Iscariot, and the sign was a blistering kiss! Indeed, a kiss that transformed the Christian world. It paved the way for the death of the Christ but, on a brighter side, it was destined also to be a sign that the Church of Christ is due to be born. After the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the early Church headed by the apostles led by Peter, was born.
A kiss is a symbol of affectionate love. In some parts of the world, it is used to greet someone with affection. In general, it is usually an expression of goodwill. Our present understanding of a kiss is that we love or we favor the one to whom we give the kiss. We see the kiss from a newly-wed couple, filled with so much love and affection. There is also the kiss of the parents and children, and just the same, filled with so much care and protection. Almost every kind of kiss can be presumed to include love and affection.
But, of course, Judas introduced to the whole world a different kind of a kiss. The kiss of Judas is the kiss of death for Jesus. It is a kiss of a traitor! When Judas gave that kiss to the Lord, it also gave a very negative blister to the supposedly positive notion of what a kiss is all about. Now, we have to be wary about those who will kiss us because they can be our friends and maybe our enemies, too! People with opposing intentions can now make use of just a single expression, the kiss!
The kiss of Judas had been done and Jesus died, but rose from dead on the first Holy Week. Our faith as Catholics had been proven to be genuine and with a Divine origin because of the triumphal rising of Jesus from the dead. The kiss of Judas did not leave a blistering mark on our faith but it helped our faith to become mature and a lot stronger.
The blister of that kiss of Judas is left not on our faith and relationship with Christ, our Savior, but on the relationships that we have among each one of us in this world. We kiss each other a lot and sometimes we even kiss with no reason at all! We kiss our pet dogs, we kiss our pictures, and we kiss even those who are not and those who are no longer kissable. Crazy kiss, I think, is the best term to define the kind of kiss we have in our present age.
If the aim is to fulfill the Scriptures, then, Judas contributed in this liberating story by virtue of a kiss. And so did Peter, the first among equals, in his denials. All the other disciples who ran away when Christ was arrested also did what they were destined to do during that fateful night in the garden of Gethsemane. All their reactions showed their human side and Christ understood all that because they were destined to happen.
The Passion narrative is a tragic story. We do not like to watch movies which end in the death of the main character. We do not like to hear and read love stories with a tragic ending. But digging deeper, we can consider this Passion of Christ to be a love story beyond all our human experience because this is a Divine Lover’s story, who chose to give up his life for the life of the beloved. Love, in almost every aspect, must be a mutual sharing of life and love. It must not be a one-way traffic in which only one is the giver and the other is only the receiver. Even in our relationship with God, God must not be the only one giving us our needs through all eternity for we must also give Him what we are supposed to give Him back. However, up until now we are still at a loss of what to give Him in return.
It has been said that a single drop of the blood of Christ is more than enough to expiate for our sins. But He did more than that just to set an example for us to follow. He showed us the kind of love that He is expecting us to learn as we love our fellow human beings. How I wish that we won’t lack the time to learn this kind of love because I guess even our own lifetime is not enough for us to learn. After so many years from the death of Christ on the cross, we are still acting like cats and dogs ready to devour anyone who comes along our way. We are still like the pagans who are out to kill for their self-protection. We are still self-centered like Adam in the Garden of Eden.
Let us therefore pray and reflect on the sufferings of Christ. He suffered and died for you and me and for all of us. Now it is our turn to offer our very life to Him in obedience to His will so that not a single drop of His sacred blood will be wasted by our non-compliance. Let us learn to love our Savior by loving our brothers and sisters in return. This is the only way left for us to do so that the kiss of Judas will not have a blister in our lives.