By Our Love: A Theology of Mask-Wearing

It was an odd custom. Not that it didn’t exist elsewhere in their culture. It was actually quite common for the aristocracy to greet each other in that way. But leave it to the Christians to take something so pedestrian and turn it into something scandalous.

The Christians. They would kiss anyone.

In his book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, church historian Alan Kreider details the habitus, or ways of being, that characterized early Christian worship. Set against the power dynamics of the Roman Empire, the early church was bizarre. Their worship practices often took something familiar to the surrounding culture–something as simple as a kiss used to denote rank among equals–and turned it into something uncomfortable and confronting. In the hands of the Christians, the cultural custom used to delineate class demolished it instead.

The remnants of the “kiss of peace” still linger in Catholic masses and many Mainline Protestant liturgies. And even today, the thought of “passing the peace” can make an introvert cringe. Most evangelical churches have watered down the kiss to an awkward pause to “Greet your neighbors.” But for the first Christians, the kiss of peace was an essential, embodied act of worship.

Sandwiched between prayers and the Eucharist, the kiss of peace was an act of identity, unity, and peacemaking. Whoever they were outside the walls of the church–a soldier, a storekeeper, a senator–at the point of the kiss, they were one. With the act, they reconciled the social and economic differences between them and created what L. Edward Phillips would call a “radical intimacy” as followers of Christ. The practice was important, Kreider explains, “Because the kiss of peace (as it came to be called) in an embodied way defined their identity, and because it maintained their life as communities of peace.”

Throughout the Pauline epistles, the churches are urged to “greet each other with a holy kiss.” And the writer of 1 Peter also references “the kiss of love.” They had to be reminded to do it, because it was easier to avoid it. It was awkward and misunderstood. And that’s exactly why it was effective as a counterformation.

In a time of social distancing, why speak of the kiss of peace? When it’s questionable if we should even be gathering corporately, what does it benefit us to examine this intimate act of embodied worship? The kiss of peace, much like foot washing, serves a very unique purpose in Christian liturgies. It serves to humble us.

Self-sacrificing rituals insist we live out the model of our kenotic Savior who “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.” In the same way, the kiss of peace forced the early church to “in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” The kiss proclaims the good news that everyone is dignified, everyone is valued, everyone will be protected.

Wearing a mask is a kiss of peace.

It is an act of Christian solidarity that signals to the culture at large that there is value in every human created in the image of God. It declares to everyone who sees it that their life has immeasurable worth. That there is no self-interest that can usurp their wellbeing.

But wearing a mask is uncomfortable. So was kissing the person the next pew over.

But wearing a mask invites ridicule. The Romans most certainly gave the early church a significant amount of shade and side-eye for their egalitarian greeting.

But wearing a mask is a violation of my rights. Maybe. But, like the kiss of peace, it requires us to lay our own privilege down so that another in the community may be lifted up, and in doing so, we demonstrate the alternative to a defensive stance of fierce independence. The liberating freedom of interdependence.

The early church did not grow by holding rallies in amphitheaters, or handing out tracts at the gladiatorial games. The early church grew patiently through counter-cultural acts of unexplainable, embodied, self-sacrificial love.

Jesus makes it clear, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will find it.”

For now, wearing a mask is how we are being asked to deny ourselves. As Christians, we can present our bodies “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual act of worship.”

A mask is a small, simple cross to bear for the healing love of Christ to be revealed.