How will you use your last kiss?

Homily

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

2 April 2021

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +mj

What if you only had one kiss left for the rest of your life?

Would you use it tonight?  

How would you use it?

The celebration of Good Friday is marked with a liturgical kiss.  Why would I waste it?  How can it be anything less than the most passionate kiss of my life.

Just last night I betrayed Jesus with a kiss on his lips.  Tonight the consequences are splayed out before me.  Evil triumphs.   A new nothing results.  It's a nothing so much darker than before the creation of the world.  It's a new nothing so much more hopeless than the absence of that first abyss.  Back, then evil was just absent.  In this new nothing, evil reigns.  For what could be a deeper darkness than the death of God?  Wherever ground zero is, we are way south of there at Calvary.  God is dead, and I killed Him.

That's the end of God's love story, and of mine, unless there is another kiss that counts.  Good Friday is pure evil unless my kiss of betrayal gives way to a more passionate kiss.  This kiss must be precisely where God emptied all of Himself.  It must mean nothing less than my deepest embrace for that cross of mine that I least want, least understand, and that draws out a love that empties all of myself.

Only this kiss could turn the tree of death into the axis for the recreation of the world.  Anything less, and death wins forever.  Only a kiss that holds back nothing, can reverse the new nothing of the cross.

You're invited to kiss tonight only if that cross is never again the place where your story might end, and only and always and forever where you story begins.

What if you had one kiss for the rest of your life?

Would you use it tonight?

If so, how would you use it?