When Peace & Justice Kiss

Ps. 85:11-12

On this first day of the month of Av, as Jews worldwide enter the nine days of lament marking the historical tragedies that have become part of the national tapestry of our traumas, it is important to keep in mind and heart the visions of future repair and renewal. What if our most discordant aspects of self were able to overcome differences and meet, face to face, in a symbolic kiss? That’s the vision that we find in today’s psalm, and it has a surprising history all its own. 

“This psalm is a community lament, probably written during the period of Israel’s return from the Babylonian exile—to a ruined city, a fallen temple, and a mourning land. The people seek forgiveness for their covenant unfaithfulness,  and restoration, appealing to the benevolence God has shown them in the past. The closing section expresses confidence that salvation will come.”

Victoria Emily Jones, a writer who researches biblical art and theology, spent some time focusing on Psalm 85 and the vast attention it has received in world art - some of it quite surprisingly erotic. Well, maybe not that surprising considering this psalm includes a famous, and puzzling, kiss.  In the original words of the psalm, attributed to the Korach family of poets, the kiss is an aspiration - a futurist fusion not of people but of values:

חֶסֶד־וֶאֱמֶ֥ת נִפְגָּ֑שׁוּ צֶ֖דֶק וְשָׁל֣וֹם נָשָֽׁקוּ׃ אֱ֭מֶת מֵאֶ֣רֶץ תִּצְמָ֑ח וְ֝צֶ֗דֶק מִשָּׁמַ֥יִם נִשְׁקָֽף׃

Love and truth will meet;

justice and peace will kiss.

Truth springs up from the earth;

justice looks down from heaven.

Ps. 85:11-12

These four ideas are usually understood as icons that personify the divine virtues: Love, truth, justice and peace.   There are multiple ways to make sense of this powerful image of a better future and these words have made their ways into many different modes of reflection and commentary.

Eugene Peterson, a pastor who was known for his contemporary paraphrased translation of the Bible known as The Message, made sure to personify these encounters even further: 

“Love and Truth meet in the street,

Right Living and Whole Living embrace and kiss!

Truth sprouts green from the ground,

Right Living pours down from the skies!”

 The second of these verses is the most famous - ‘Truth shall spring from the earth” - is often seen as the origin for wholesome grassroots honest folk wisdom, from-the-ground-up.  

But what’s the story with the kiss? 

Jones writes about the fascination that this verse has held for artists over the ages:

“In medieval Christian writings these virtues came to be allegorized as the “four daughters of God”... “The Allegory of Justice and Peace,” or “Justice and Peace Kissing,” was a popular subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the art of the Italian and Flemish Baroque and the French Neoclassical…Although the image comes from the Hebrew Bible, where it is rooted in God’s dealings with his people, artists often used it for secular purposes, to express political peace… The iconography that developed draws on classical symbolism and mythology, with both virtues being personified as women…

In Laurent de La Hyre’s The Kiss of Peace and Justice, the action is set within a larger landscape. An olive-wreathed Peace embraces a blue-beribboned Justice beside a fountain inscribed with Iusticia et Pax // osculatae sunt, from the Latin Vulgate. The women are surrounded by ruins—upturned roadstones, crumbled walls and detached columns, a cracked garden urn. But this is an image of hope. A lion-faced spigot emits fresh, flowing water, which sheep flock to for refreshment, and trees part to reveal a vista. After the upheaval, healing and repair are underway. Justice and Peace have harmonized.”

There’s much to ponder here - why these virtues are depicted as the polar sides of values and how have they become depicted as same-sex, and so much more.

As we enter these days of lament into the Ninth of Av, in a world torn by war and so eager for us to overcome our harsh divisions that are causing so much sorrow, it is helpful to have this healing image of hope reminding of the possible water of salvation that will come from within the ruins, as this painting chooses to do. What will it look like for each of us to find this place of hope within ourselves, for our own imagined kiss of polar opposites and virtues, kiss ourselves within before finding a way to meet the others in our lives with similar intention that honor each other’s truths of justice, with  peace, and focus on love? 

Image: Laurent de La Hyre (French, 1606–1656),

The Kiss of Peace and Justice 1654. Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 × 30 in. (54.9 × 76.2 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA. See Full Picture.

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