January 30, 2022 “Without Love” – I Corinthians 13

I Corinthians 13
“Without Love”
January 30, 2022 – Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

My wife loves the music of Richard Wagner, who wrote beautiful and familiar tunes like “Ride of the Valkyries” or the “traditional” wedding march. Beth loves his music, but—here’s the thing—she does not love Wagner. She says he wrote gorgeous music but he was a terrible man. Even as he was writing his last great opera Parsifal, which was filled with Christian imagery and ideas of forgiveness and redemption, Wagner was consumed by interest in racist, anti-semitic ideas. Hitler was a great admirer of Wagner’s music and often used it at Nazi events, sometimes to the chagrin of Nazi hierarchy who resented sitting through lengthy Wagnerian concerts.

Wagner is one good picture of what Paul was getting at in the first three verses of I Corinthians 13. Still on the subject of spiritual gifts, Paul mentions several of them which demonstrate truly spiritual life and practice: speaking in tongues, prophecy, understanding and knowledge, miracle-working faith, and incredibly selfless generosity and self-sacrifice. All these, Paul says, are worthless, “nothing,” without love.

That same “nothing” might be said for incredibly beautiful music by a man who failed both in love for those around him (a life of sordid affairs) and in love for God’s chosen people. Though many, many people like my wife still hear his music and are deeply moved, Wagner’s lack of genuine love and its true fruits suggests that whatever artistic gifts he exercised were pointless and worthless in regard to his own soul, his own salvation. Jesus asked, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?”

Paul wrote this beautiful hymn about love to a squabbling, conflicted church. Part of the conflict was that some in the congregation were enjoying a fair amount of spiritual success. There were talented, spiritually-gifted leaders who taught well, worked miracles, and spoke in tongues. As the second letter to Corinth shows, there were also some extremely generous believers there. Yet they were fighting with each other. They had divided into parties and were arguing about who was more spiritual.

Paul wrote chapter 12, which provided our texts for the last two weeks, to address some aspects of the division and to give the Corinthians (and us) a vivid image of how followers of Jesus are to live in organic unity with each other, in the same way parts of a human body live and function together. Now, in a “still more excellent way” (12:31), he goes to the heart of the matter and holds up love as the highest of the Christian virtues. Without it, all other virtues and gifts, including faith, in verse 2, are worthless.

Of course, Paul and Christians are not unique in recognizing the supreme value of love. Long before Jesus and Paul, Plato wrote one of his most famous dialogues on the subject of love. In the Symposium, a whole dinner party takes up the topic of love. One after the other, the guests make speeches about it. Those Greeks spoke of Love as a god. One named Agathon made a beautiful speech about that god, saying Love

…unites us in friendly gatherings such as this—presiding at the table, at the dance, and at the altar, cultivating courtesy and weeding out brutality, lavish of kindness and sparing of malevolence, affable and gracious, the wonder of the wise, the admiration of the gods, the despair of him that lacks, and the happiness of him that has, the father of delicacy, daintiness, elegance, and grace, of longing and desire, heedful of the good and heedless of the bad, in toil or terror, in drink or dialectic, our helmsman and helper, our pilot and preserver, the richest ornament of heaven and earth alike, and, to conclude, the noblest and loveliest of leaders, whom every one of us must follow, raising our voices in harmony with the heavenly song of Love that charms both mortal and immortal hearts.[1]

You may hear the echoes of that ancient pagan speech, even to the making of Love into a person who acts, in what Paul says starting in verse 4, that

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

What Paul wrote resonates with what Plato wrote about Love being the noblest of virtues. What Christians have to say about love has deep connections with what humans have always and everywhere felt about love. It is wonderful and essential. It’s at the heart of human happiness. It’s the source of good and the enemy of evil. To have love is the greatest human blessing and to lack it is the greatest human despair.

Yet Paul goes beyond Plato. Even when Socrates gets up to speak in the Symposium, most of what he says about Love is all about what it does for a person. It’s about how love of another person, or of Beauty according to Socrates, elevates and makes you better. But Paul’s focus is in another direction. To say that love is patient and kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, to say it does not insist on its own way, is to make the aim and focus of love not so much on oneself as on that other person or thing which one loves. For Paul, love is not about self-improvement or self-fulfillment. It’s about self-giving.

Two years ago when I preached this same text in a four-sermon series on love, I griped about couples who want to have I Corinthians 13 read at their weddings. If it was read, I would carefully point out to the dewy-eyed bride and groom that it was Paul’s antidote for church conflicts. They should expect their own conflicts and that is when they should remember these words and exercise self-giving love.

Yet I also take back some of that pastoral grumpiness about this text and weddings. This is not just a gorgeous poem about human love. It’s the supreme description of God’s own love for us. It is how Jesus loves us. Paul also wrote in Ephesians that Christ is the bridegroom of the Church. So maybe it’s not too far off to inscribe this description of love on one’s heart on your wedding day.

However, we don’t want to imagine that such love among human beings is reserved for and exclusive to marriage. If that were true, there would be far too many of us in the dire situation Paul starts with, people without love. No, the very point of seeing the love described here as the love of Jesus Christ, is so that each and every person on earth might realize that they do not have to be hopelessly without love. In Jesus, God offers anyone, offers you, the gift of true, beautiful, self-giving love.

Paul wrote what he wrote because it is possible to refuse God’s gift of love in Jesus, to remain without love, even when someone professes to know and admire Jesus. That’s what happened in our Gospel text from Luke 4 today. Jesus was in His hometown of Nazareth. He had just spoken in the synagogue and in verse 22 we heard, “All spoke well of him, and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” But they didn’t like so much the words that came next.

Jesus told them they would soon be quoting an old proverb, “Physician, heal yourself!” and expecting Him to do miracles there like He did in other places. Yet, just as Paul says to the Corinthians, miracles weren’t going to do them any good because of what else was missing. They lacked love. So Jesus mentioned how God showed love to the kind of people they hated: Elijah helped a Gentile widow in a region known for its sinfulness; Elisha healed the commanding officer of deadly enemies of Israel. Their response was not to soften their hearts toward such people, but to harden their hearts toward Jesus. As we heard, they tried to throw Him off a cliff.

That episode at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and Paul’s words about being without love both demand that you and I consider our own hearts in regard to following Jesus. Does our admiration for and speaking well about Jesus include loving the kind of people He loved, people of other races, people of questionable morality, people who appear to us to be our enemies? Are we trying to have Jesus and His miraculous salvation while passing over His love for all people, even the least and worst of them? If we want to have Jesus but throw out that kind of love for others, then we too may find ourselves trying to throw Jesus Himself off a cliff made from the stone of our own hard hearts.

Like it did for Wagner, lack of love taints everything we do, no matter how grand and glorious it might be. Last year we watched three billionaires and a number of their rich and famous passengers blast off into space. Before those launches, space travel seemed to be a great human achievement, another way in which we might explore God’s magnificent creation. But the response to those private journeys to outer space was not so much admiration as it was resentment and mockery. Last July 20 after one of those rides, a tweet from “The Daily Show” read, “Jeff Bezos was in space for 5 minutes—or as it’s known at the Amazon warehouse, your allotted break time for a 16-hour day.” Another tweet on the same day read, “Jeff Bezos has decided he will not end world hunger today.”

Paul might say that if you build a huge rocket and take off to the ends of the galaxy, but have and show no love for the planet on which you were born and for the poorest people who live there, then it’s all worthless, all nothing.

Those billionaire rocket rides were quite brief, but Paul asks to realize that, in comparison to love, almost everything else is short-lived. In verse 8 he tells the Corinthians, “Love never ends.” Then he explains that many of the things they have argued and fought about will, in fact, come to an end, even some spiritual gifts. Prophesy will cease. Speaking in other tongues will stop. Even knowledge will come to an end. Those things, he says in verse 9, are only partial, only part of the story. Something better and more complete is still to come, something that we approach by love.

Plato also realized that love is meant to lead to something better, more lasting, and more complete. In Socrates’ speech in the Symposium, he suggests that bodily love for physical beauty ought to pass on to love of beautiful minds and then to love of knowledge. Finally, instead of loving beautiful things the wise person comes to love Beauty itself and will become virtuous. And then Plato says, “he shall be called the friend of God, and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him.”[2]

That Greek philosopher probably barely understood what he was saying, but it was one of what C. S. Lewis called the “good dreams” of all non-Christian people everywhere. To seek to love truly and well is to seek that which lasts forever, to seek God Himself. In other work, Plato taught that physical things we see on earth are like shadows or reflections of what is truly good and eternal. Likewise, Paul wrote in verse 12, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

Some followers of Plato later got him all wrong and supposed that he was teaching that this world and all the stuff in it does not matter. Some Christians make the same mistake. It’s possible that error was being made there in Corinth when Paul wrote this letter. But what Paul meant is that, while there are many partial and incomplete possessions and virtues in our lives, they all reflect, dimly as in a mirror, the true Good, the true Love, which lasts forever.

The Corinthians were fighting like children over toys which would not last. The toys are not bad, any more than our grandson’s rocking horse or toy xylophone are bad, but they are meant to lead on toward greater things. We hope John grows and learns to do things like ride a live horse or play a real musical instrument. In verse 11 Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult I put an end to childish things.” It’s not that spiritual gifts—prophecy, tongues, knowledge of all sorts—are bad. It’s that they need to be put into the perspective of what is most important and will last forever.

Continue a single verse into chapter 14 and you read, “Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts.” God’s love and eternity with Him enjoying such love are the best things we can pursue. But spiritual gifts and all sorts of other good human activity are also worth striving for, as long as they pursued in and with love.

If Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk had matched or exceeded what they spent on space travel with donations for hungry people or for dealing with climate change, if they had brought poor children along with them, then their rocket jaunts might have been something better. You and I are free in Jesus to pursue college degrees and solid careers. In our spiritual lives we can seek deeper understanding and profound faith. It’s even fine to remodel a kitchen or go on a trip to Europe. But is it all being done together with and through our pursuit of love? If so, then those things can be worthwhile, even beautiful. If not, without love, they are worthless, nothing.

The worthlessness of life without love constantly reminds us that we are all on a journey, not a joyride to outer space, but a ride of joy into the perfect and complete love of God in and through Jesus Christ. We want to see Him face to face. We want to know Him as completely and wonderfully as He knows us.

As I said to begin, Richard Wagner had very little grasp of the significance of what he set to music in his last opera Parsifal. His lust and hatred kept him from rising to true love for God and others. Yet he did understand that there was more for him to see. Near the end of Parsifal, that knight, now baptized or anointed on Good Friday, sees the Holy Grail for which he had been seeking. He perceives in the Grail the holy blood of the Redeemer which heals and makes even the earth bloom with flowers. He sings:

Nicht soll der mehr verschlossen sein:
Enthüllet den Gral! – Öffnet den Schrein!
No more shall it be hidden:
uncover the Grail, open the Shrine!

The opera ends with Parsifal raising and showing the Grail to all his fellow knights as light surrounds them.

That’s how our story is also meant to end. By the love of Jesus, we come through faith and hope into His presence. Along the way we do our best to uncover and reveal His love in ourselves to anyone who needs and wants it. Without that love, there’s nothing to see. But with that love, and with faith and hope, it all becomes clearer and clearer. Faith, hope and love abide. Love is the greatest of these, and we will abide forever in that Love.

Amen.

[1] Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, editors, Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 550, Symposium 193d-e.

[2] Ibid., p. 463, Symposium 212a.