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The Kisses of an Enemy
It's Saturday. Cries of anguish and despair fill the air. Mourning is rampant. A people who needed leadership and guidance; a people who needed deliverance and healing are now seemingly without hope. The nation is in shock. Why you ask? Because the Great Emancipator is dead.
At 12:10 p.m. on April 15, 1865, Dr. Joseph Janvier Woodward and Dr. Edward Curtis performed the autopsy of President Abraham Lincoln in the Guest Room at the northeast corner of the second floor of the White House. An excerpt from a letter Dr. Curtis wrote to his mother revealed the following:
"as I was lifting the latter [the brain] from the cavity of the skull, suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath. There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger—dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world's history as we may perhaps never realize."
A little black mass, seemingly so minute and yet the cause of great change.
It’s Thursday night. In a garden across the Kidron Valley. His friends sleeping while He prays. His agony so pronounced that while He prays more earnestly “. . . his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” (Lk 22:44) And then, in the still of the night, he comes . . . with a kiss. (Lk 22:47-48) A common greeting, this kiss, but this night it conveyed so much more.
Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.
Proverbs 27:6
You see, this kiss of betrayal was the kiss of an enemy; it was the kiss of death. It was the ultimate hypocrisy. This breech of trust was the beginning of the end. Or so it seemed.
It’s Saturday. Cries of anguish and despair fill the air. Mourning is rampant. A people who needed leadership and guidance; a people who needed deliverance and healing are now seemingly without hope. The world is in shock. Why you ask? Because the Great Redeemer is dead.
But what makes you think that’s the end?
The world was waiting – waiting for a happier ending to this travesty. Yes, the world was waiting, and Sunday came. Praise the Lord, Sunday came. When the women went to the tomb early that day – to cover Him with their tears and the customary burial spices they’d prepared – the stone which sealed the tomb had been pushed aside. Oh, how their hearts must have ached at the sight. To witness His betrayal, His brutal death, His burial and His absence, and now this? And then two men in dazzling apparel asked the question that reaches through the annals of time to our own aching, weary world: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5b)
And it all started with a kiss. A seemingly harmless, little kiss. And yet the cause of such mighty and wondrous change in the world’s history as many may perhaps never realize. But we do. Thanks be to our God.
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.
Romans 6:8-10
