Soft Hearts & Holy Kisses: Reflections on Hebrews 3

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto

See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. --Hebrews 3:12-14

Greet one another with a holy kiss. --Romans 16:16

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The first time I knew I’d be friends with Lavi Lazarus, I was holding her foot in my hand.

Our junior year at Moody had just begun and we were in the thick of RA training. Our team, eleven of us in total, had been tasked with crossing the “Lava River,” an area marked off by our supervisor as dangerous. The only way to safely make progress toward the other side was by stepping on one of a limited number of cardboard squares, which had to be passed back and forth between us. To remain safe while not standing on a square, we had to be holding hands. Every time one of us let go, our supervisor sent us back to the start, erasing all of our progress.

Complicating this already difficult task was the fact that four of us were blindfolded. Lavi was one of these, and I was her guide. “I trust you,” she told me when I took her hand at the beginning. She had no reason to. We were essentially strangers.

Before stepping into the river, I assumed I could simply lead her by the hand, but our mission proved more complex. Lavi couldn’t see the safe squares. At each step forward, I had to halt my own progress to squat in the grass, take her sandaled foot between my palms, and place it gently onto the cardboard, all without letting her lose her balance. It was intimate, physical work. By the end of it, we were no longer strangers. My heart toward her was strangely soft.

I should not have been surprised. Touch is a bonding agent for humans. It releases oxytocin (sometimes called the “love hormone”), which promotes trust and connection. Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb, and we continue to use it to assess our world and relationships as we grow older. In fact, touch can serve as a more complex and accurate communication tool than any spoken language.

Four times throughout the New Testament, the authors tell their readers to greet one another with a holy kiss. Behind “love one another,” it is the second most repeated “one another” instruction in all of the epistles. Once in college, I studied these verses with friends, puzzled about why this particular instruction was so often emphasized. “What does this mean for us?” I asked.

“We need touch!” someone responded simply. We resolved in that season to be more intentional about touch, greeting each other with hugs and offering hands or shoulders even in moments of silence. And it made a difference. The people I touched the most then are the people I have stayed in touch with. Nearly four years later, Lavi and I are still close, trusting each other with deeper things than lava rivers.

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Meanwhile, there are some people I don’t touch. And by that I don’t just mean physically. There are people I avoid connecting with in any way, for a myriad of reasons. Some of them, I don’t trust. Others drain my energy. Many of them intimidate me. Even if it’s temporary, when I’ve had a spat with a friend or family member, the last thing I want to do is give them a hug. I frequently find it easier and more convenient to close myself off from others, rather than open up and reach out.

In this posture, though, my heart calcifies. It locks up. Like joints stiff from underuse, my affection for others begins to creak and harden and erode. My love atrophies.

Early last week, I found myself sitting with Jesus in Hebrews 3. It was assigned reading and I was tired, so I did not expect to learn much. As I read, though, the words seemed to shimmer on the page. My spirit sat up a little straighter. God was speaking to me.

In Hebrews 3, the author warns the readers against hardening their hearts and refusing to trust God’s Word, as the Israelites did before they entered the land God promised them. Soft heart, I whispered to myself as I skimmed over the passage. How do I keep a soft heart?

As if leaping off the page in answer, the words of verses 12-14 caught my eye:

See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.

How do I keep a soft heart toward God? By engaging with other believers. 

As is nearly always the case in cultivating my relationship with Jesus, it cannot be done without other people involved. In a very real way, a way that we don’t always acknowledge, Christian brothers and sisters are responsible for the upkeep of each other’s faith. We exercise and stir each other toward God, encouraging growth and movement. Our persistence in the faith is directly tied to our persistence with each other.

This only happens as we actively live together. Our faith grows only under the conditions of being deeply known and deeply loved.  We need to spend time together, and not just sterilized, Sunday morning time. We need to know one another on Tuesday nights, when life is ordinary and we’re wearing sweatpants. We need to listen to each other and ask good questions, slowly and generously peeling back the layers of each other’s souls. We need to know each other’s quirks, habits, and hangups, and to be able to call out the good and the bad in each other.

What holy work, I sighed happily as I sat there thinking about it, just me and Jesus alone in my apartment.

Then I woke up the next morning to face the holy work in flesh-and-blood. The glow of hearing God’s voice collided with the grit of my actual relationships, and I remembered that other people are hard. They misunderstand me, make confusing decisions, have unpredictable emotions, and run late when I’m in a time crunch. They are hard to read or hard to listen to. They are awkward, stubborn, unfiltered, and raw.

And so am I.

The call to keep a soft heart is difficult, because it requires being skin-to-skin with other human beings. It demands that I enter into their mess and allow them into mine. It requires touch, physically and emotionally. And sometimes, I’d rather not.

Choosing not to be soft toward others, though, means choosing not to be soft towards God. If I close my heart to the people God has put in front of me, I cannot open my heart to Him. 1 John 4:20 reads, “Whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” My faith in God cannot exist without fellowship with other people.

The writer of Hebrews is clear about where that choice leads when he (or she!) cites God’s declaration over the hard-hearted generation of Israelites in the wilderness: They shall not enter My rest.

I shudder to think of it.

What’s more, the consequence of hard-heartedness is collective. He does not say, “You shall not enter My rest.” He says “they,” plural. As in, all of us. My own stony heart affects the entire community. If I refuse to believe God, they do not enter His rest, and vice versa.

I think again of the lava river. Not one of us reached safety without the others. If I had chosen to leave Lavi behind in her blindness, I could not have made it across. If she had refused to trust me to lead her, she could not have gone on her own. We were entirely dependent on each other.

This is what Christ has done with His Church. We rise and fall together. When one part hurts, the whole hurts. When one rejoices, the whole resounds. The strong faith of one will bolster another in doubt or fear. Like my team crossing the lava river, the only way to reach the goal is to hold onto each other. We enter His rest together, or not at all.

As I ponder the practicalities of this call, I wonder if this is the reason the New Testament writers called for holy kisses. Culture played an enormous role in the specifics, but the concept remains: We need touch. We need to reach for each other, to connect in tangible, life-giving ways. Whether it’s a warm, firm handshake (a skill my brothers are perpetually urging me to improve) or a deep, sweet embrace, our bodies often lead the way to the posture our hearts ought to take. When we enact tenderness toward one another with our bodies, we soften in our spirits.

There are a hundred ways to connect with others. There are dozens of strategies to kill sin and unbelief and turn our hearts back to God. But they begin and end in the family of God. And sometimes, the first step in connecting to a brother or sister is simply to reach out and greet them with holy touch.

We might find that in the process of reaching for another person, our hearts are moved to also reach for God.