what if you only had one kiss?

 

What if you only had one kiss?

Homily

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

15 April 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG 

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

How would you spend it?

I can tell you how I wouldn't spend mine!  On the kiss cam!  I hate the kiss cam.  I know I"m the only one, but I hate it.  Whoever invented it should be canceled.  I don't go to games to watch PDA.  I live in constant fear that some cameraman far far away will get a kick out of zooming in on a priest.  When I feel the kiss cam coming on, I make a beeline for the beer line.

So not there. That's a hard no for me.  Still, where?

What if you only had one kiss left?

Until now, the famous kiss of Christ's passion is a kiss of betrayal. Today we stare the result in the face.  God is dead, and I killed him.  A new nothing is the result of that infamous kiss.  The cross - it's so much darker than the darkness before the dawn of creation.  The cross - it's a new nothing so much more hopeless than the absence of that primal abyss.  Back then, evil just wasn't.  Right now, evil conquers all things, even the love of God!  What could possibly be darker than the death of God?  Wherever ground zero is, at Calvary we are way south of there.  God is dead, and I killed him with a kiss.

That's the end of God's love story, and of mine. We can all go home, unless there is another kiss that counts.  Good Friday is pure evil unless my kiss of betrayal gives way to a more passionate kiss.  That kiss can only be where God died, where He emptied Himself, where He became nothing.  This last kiss must mean nothing less than I want to die with Him.  This last kiss can only be  my embrace of the chance to suffer with, and for and in each other.  The kiss must mean that my mission is His, to to swallow up evil and transform it by kissing my cross, embracing what I least want, what I least understand, and what I cannot control or avoid.

Only a kiss like this could turn the tree of nothing into the axis for the recreation of everything.  Only a kiss like this can transform the tree of ultimate death into the tree of eternal life.

You're invited to kiss tonight only if the cross is never again how your story will end, but only and always and forever where you story truly begins.

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

Would you spend it here?

Would you spend it now?