The Kiss of Peace

Today’s Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul is a decided oddity in our Church calendar. Saints normally get their own feast day, but this weekend we have a double remembrance: Peter and Paul are celebrated not individually, but together. And this celebration is of such importance that it supersedes even our regular Sunday observance in ordinary time.

Equally curious is the iconography of this feast. When pictured individually, Peter is usually represented as a burly old man with a curly gray beard, carrying in his hands the emblematic keys to the kingdom that Jesus consigned to him as the first leader of the Christian community. Paul is usually rendered as a balding, thinner chap, often carrying a book, or scrolls, or the sword with which he was beheaded in Rome around 64 a.d.. He died during the persecution of Nero, the same persecution that saw, as legend tells us, Peter’s upside-down crucifixion. Yet when shown together, especially in the icons of the Eastern traditions, the attributes of keys and book are often dispensed with, and what we see is jarring to some modern eyes. The two old men are shown embracing, cheek to cheek. They are exchanging the “holy kiss,” the kiss of peace that St. Paul refers to four times in his letters to the far-flung church communities: repeatedly he ends his letters “greet one another with a holy kiss,” and the first letter of St. Peter encourages us to share “the kiss of love.”

From the earliest of times, this ritualized action entered into the celebration of the Eucharist after the Lord’s Prayer’s invocation of forgiveness and before sharing at the table of grace. It got lost along the way across the centuries, and became an stylized artifact reserved only to the clergy at the most solemn celebrations. Our “sign of peace” was restored to us in the Roman rite with Vatican II in the 1960s as a preparation of our hearts for Holy Communion and as reminder of the unity and love we are called upon to share and create.

The icons of Peter and Paul are relevant “teaching aids” here. Reading the Acts of the Apostles, we know that Paul’s career began in controversy. After his vocation-forging vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, the former doctor of the law and persecutor of the Christian community eventually met up with Peter and some of the original apostles in Jerusalem, where they argued heatedly about the admission of gentiles, non-Jewish converts to The Way of Jesus. Peter and Paul in effect “duked it out” and Paul’s persuasive arguments let Peter to approve of Paul’s ministry to the non-Jewish world. They had disagreed, yet after prayer and discussion and even harsh words, the Spirit led them from division to accord. They acknowledged their shared belief, and they exchanged the kiss of peace. Legends tell us that they embraced one last time in Rome before they were led away to their respective fates.

It seems to me that there’s something to be learned here. We are all different, with as Paul puts it many gifts, but there is one Lord who draws us together as different as we may be. Our stance toward one another needs to mirror that mutual respect and affection, even when we find it necessary and even appropriate to challenge, correct, or encourage. If Peter and Paul, such different characters, could find ways to get along, so can we. So when you extend a greeting of peace to the person in the pew in front of or behind you, mean it. If Paul and Peter could do it, so can we.