I Corinthians 13
“Great Love”
July 12, 2020 – Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
They stare into each other’s eyes as the words are read, she in the lacy white dress and he in his crisp tuxedo. With rapt focus on one another, they believe with all their hearts everything they hear:
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 thing, endures all things.
Paul’s great hymn to love seems to express everything felt by bride and groom as they join their lives together, fully intending to live out the Bible’s description of what Paul calls the greatest of the greater gifts, the “more excellent way.” Love.
However, I’ll confess that engaged couples choosing this text to be read at their weddings is one of my pet peeves as a pastor. I’ll often begin a matrimonial mediation on this chapter by saying something like, “Look, Paul did not write these words to young people deeply in love. He wrote them to a church full of people who were fighting with each other.” Then I try to plant at least the seed of the thought that when we need to remember this description of love is not at moments of high romance, but in all the worst of our personal interactions, when we least feel like thinking about what love is.
Reading this whole letter to Corinth we find that one of the main issues of contention in that church was spiritual gifts. Things like wisdom and miracles and prophecy, blessings to Christians from the Holy Spirit, were being treated like gaming cards in some sort of spiritual competition. Some were rated higher than others. That led to ranking members of the church along with their gifts. Part of their fighting was about which gifts were most important.
Paul addressed some of that contention about spiritual gifts and individual ranking in chapter 12 by introducing a metaphor for human community which has affected even the way secular organizations talk about themselves. He pictured the church as a “body,” the Body of Christ and people within the church as “members,” which then meant literally and only “body parts,” organs of a physical organism. The connection Christians have with each other is organic in the way parts of a body are, with each part no less important to the well-being of the whole than the others are. That picture became so prevalent in the world that today clubs and retail companies and political parties all have “members.”
We can learn and grow a lot by reflecting on our membership in the Body of Christ, how, as Paul says in another letter to Rome in chapter 12 verse 5, “we are members of one another.” We can recognize that taking care of everyone in the body keeps us all healthy, that worrying about and protecting the seemingly weaker and less important among us benefits everyone. It’s a lesson we desperately need to remember when considering whether to wear masks and follow other health guidelines when we go out and interact in ordinary society.
Yet in all that body and membership imagery, there is an element that cannot quite be eliminated. Taking care of the rest of the body is good for me. Paul says we need those seemingly less important members. Even if I am strong and healthy, things are not as good as they could be for me if I ignore the welfare of my sisters and brothers. But in a strange way that still makes it all, as we sometimes say, still about me. I care for others, even other Christians, because it’s good for me. It benefits me. It blesses me.
Think about all those missions, short and long, in which some of us have taken part. How often have we come home after a week or months or years of serving the poor and needy in a big city in our own state or in some other country and said something like, “I received more than I gave. We were blessed as much as we blessed them.” That is a truly humble response to good lessons learned, but it may also reflect a troubling reality about our motivations for going. Did we go and build houses or give shots out of genuine concern for others or out of a need to feel good about ourselves?
So in chapter 13 of I Corinthians Paul wants to turn the conversation in a different direction. As beautiful as is that image of a connected and mutually supportive body, it can still be an image of self-interest. That’s why Paul says at the end of chapter 12, “And I will show you a more excellent way.”
That more excellent way begins with lowering the importance of some of the spiritual gifts the Corinthians thought were so monumentally significant. He begins in verse 1 with the most contentious of those Corinthian gifts, speaking in tongues. Then he says that gift is just noise, like a gong or clanging symbol, without what he will soon show is the most important gift, love. Prophecy and knowledge and faith, even self-sacrifice, all get the same treatment in verses 2 to 4. Without love, “I gain nothing,” which is an interesting reference to the self-interest I suggested is there in the body metaphor.
Paul then offers a positive description of love in verses 4 through 7, which I pictured for us being read at a wedding. And we begin to see the whole idea of gain or self-interest start to drop away, especially there in verse 5 as we read, “It does not insist on its own way.”
As I wrote on my blog this past week, we use the word “love” for many sorts of emotions and actions. I love my wife. I love fishing. I love science fiction. I love king crab. I love my dog. I love my children. I love the Bible. I love my Lord Jesus Christ. And you could go on and on with your own list like that. It’s hard to see what connects all those “loves” and how they could all be in any way similar.
So writers like Anders Nygren in the last century have made a big deal of different words for love and the different meanings for those words, especially in the Bible. Nygren particularly focuses on the Greek word eros, which is not just about erotic or romantic attraction, but about any sort of love based on need. Eros is what we feel when we want something or someone for our own benefit, whether it’s as benign as desiring a hug from our best friend or as awful as the wish to harm someone else for our own pleasure.
As you very possibly already know, agape is the Greek word found here for love in I Corinthians 13. Nygren describes agape as self-giving, other-regarding love. It’s a love directed outside ourselves, wanting not our own benefit but the benefit of that other person. Paul’s description of patient, kind, unenvious, unboastful, humble, polite love fits that picture. This sort of love is not needy or possessive, but instead gives itself away in gentle consideration for others.
It is frequently realized and noted that only one person has ever lived who really embodied what we read there in verses 4 to 7. Only Jesus always actually spoke and acted like that. As verses 5 and 6 continue, He was not irritated or resentful of wrongs but not happy about them either. Only Jesus always both spoke the truth and rejoiced in it. Only Jesus completely and absolutely, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Only the love of Jesus never ends, as verse 8 says about love.
The problem is that we are often tempted to stop there. Thank God we’ve got Jesus! We are a mess. All our loving is shot through and through with either overt or hidden concern for what we are getting out of it. No matter how loudly or sincerely we affirm that “It’s not about me,” it is always, at least to some extent, actually about me and what I think I want or need. We are constantly driven by what Nygren called eros and very seldom genuinely aspire to self-less, sacrificial, and truly generous agape.
So going back to the virtue of faith we just give up, trust in Jesus who got it right, and don’t worry too much about the fact that we constantly get love all wrong. God is love. We’re not, but that’s O.K., because Jesus has it covered for us. Yet that idea of faith is all wrong too. A faith that thinks it can leave the loving to Jesus is not real faith.
Remember what Peter Kreeft says about the theological virtues. Faith is the seed, hope is the stem, and love is the flower. Just like we heard in Jesus’ parable about the seeds and the soils in Matthew 13 today, the faith that is planted in us needs to grow into something more if it is to be any good at all.
Thomas Aquinas says that love is the “form” of faith. Love is what makes faith come alive. Love is what completes faith.[1] Jesus talked about the seeds producing grain. Kreeft talked about the flower growing from the plant. It’s all to say what Paul is saying here in I Corinthians 13. Love is the essential outgrowth of faith. Otherwise it’s all pointless noise. It’s all dead. In fact, Thomas called faith that has been properly formed by love, “living faith.” It is only “living faith” that can save us. Love is not just an extra, not just icing on the Christian cake of faith. It’s essential.
“God is love,” says I John 4:8, and Jesus shows us what God’s love looks like in action in a human life. But that love was never meant to stop there. John only says “God is love,” to offer a reason for you and I to love each other. That’s what Paul is also trying to communicate to the Corinthians and to you and me here too. We who have received the love of God by faith in Jesus are to come alive in that love and live it out, let it flower in us.
Paul wrote to a quarreling, embattled congregation in Corinth (I cannot help but think of the horrific news out of South Africa as I prepare to preach this Saturday morning, about a church where factions appear to have fought each other with guns). Paul is telling them, telling us it doesn’t have to be like that. It should not be like that. He wrote fighting Christians what may be the most beautiful passage in all the Bible not to shame them, but to call them to living faith, faith working itself out in love. You and I are called to that.
Of all the gifts, Paul says in verse 8, love is the one that’s never going to end. All our prophetic speaking and worship and learning together should be aiming at what is going to last, and that will be love. Love is what makes it all complete. Love is what we are growing up to be. In verse 11 he talks about thinking like a child, then growing up to put aside childish things. Beside love, everything else is childish. To grow up is to learn to love.
We grow up in Christ as faith comes alive in genuine acts of love. Yet that is a lesson that takes some learning. James Childs tells of riding his bicycle as a boy when his tires slid on gravel left on the street by construction work. He went down with the bike on top of him and lay there scraped, bleeding, and crying. A pious Christian lady in their town walked by on the other side of the street and called out to him, “Just pray, young man, just pray!”[2]
Childs wrote that he has no doubt of that woman’s sincere faith. But it was faith unformed by a desire to do anything. Jesus of course told a very similar story suggesting that love is better evidence of a properly formed faith than are pious calls for prayer, an orthodox statement of faith, or the correct manner of worship. Living faith is faith formed by and in love.
Right now I, and perhaps you, are facing new challenges to the formation of our faith in love. I will risk pushback and say that not wearing a mask when shopping or gathering with others is not only not an act of faith, it’s just the opposite. It is a faithless failure of love. All good medical authorities will tell you that mask wearing is more for the protection of others than it is for the protection of yourself. That means wearing a mask in public is just the sort of thing Paul means when he says that love does not insist on its own way, that it bears all things and endures all things. It’s the self-giving kind of action which Nygren says is the essence of agape love.
I will risk more pushback and say that the other major challenge of love for we who are white Christians in America today is our response to racism. The temptation is very great to just call for prayer while passing by on the other side of the road. The temptation is also great to downplay or disbelieve our sisters and brothers, even sisters and brothers in Christ, when they tell us they experience discrimination, distrust, and disadvantage because of the color of their skin. And the greatest temptation of all may be to just get tired of conversation about race, to find something else to talk about or be concerned about. Yet what we keep hearing is that white Christians have succumbed to all those temptations for centuries. We’ve walked along confident in our faith, but completely unmoved by love to do anything different than we’ve been doing. That’s not living faith because it is unformed by love. It’s faith like a gong or a clanging symbol, noisy but nothing much in the end.
What can we do differently in response to racism? In many ways, I honestly do not know. I suspect some of us might need to speak up more when we hear racism expressed, at work or even among family members or fellow church members. Some of us won’t like this, but I think there may be times we need to vote differently in order to show love in response to racism. More confidently, I do know that many, many of my black brothers and sisters are asking fellow Christians to listen, at the very least, to what they are saying and pay attention to what they are experiencing. That sort of attentive ear and eye seems to be just the barest beginning of a love that is patient and kind and does not insist on its own way. In today’s parlance, we might say that love does not insist on its own “point of view.”
At the end of this chapter which is a hymn, Paul envisions a time when the things that are hard to see now are made clear, a time when we won’t wonder what it means to act in love, but will simply be caught up in it. And he affirms in verse 12 that fully knowing such love depends on the fact that right now we are already fully known by such Love. Our Lord came without any regard for His own self and acted in sacrificial love for us. We are already known and gripped by His great love. The only question is whether we ourselves will turn and take hold of that love and begin to know and do it now.
Next week I hope that some of you will take up the challenge to share with the rest of us an example, perhaps a specific, personal example of what love is. To keep our worship from growing too long, we’ll limit the time for those, but I’m going to exert a little pastoral privilege right now to share an old story from my life to tell you what I think love looks like.
Pastor Monty and his wife Bev came to our little church when I was about 12 years old. They and their three sons, who were all around my age, moved into the little 3-bedroom parsonage next door to our church building. But they brought with them someone else, a man whom I hope may still politely called a “little person,” someone not even four feet tall. He had no job and no place to live, but that family of five made room for him in their small home for several years. He was able to find work and eventually married and moved out, but continued to be part of our church.
As a youth I never thought much about it, but I understand a little more now what sacrifices that family must have made to give a room, a place to live, to a person who faced such challenges in this world. That pastor and his family could have prayed for that man, could have given him financial help, could have showed him all sorts of encouragement, but in the end they gave him several years of their own lives. I think the love Paul is talking about here looks something like that.
It’s going to be different for each of us. Not only is the word “love” used in lots of different ways, but true Christian love works out and shows itself in our lives in a variety almost as vast as God’s own love for us. We can only pay attention and encourage each other in the varied work of love, never presuming to dictate exactly how it looks for someone else. But what we can be sure is what Paul tells us at the end here, that “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” Let us always remember which of the three is greatest and live our faith and hope in that direction.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 4.
[2] James M. Childs, Faith, Formation, and Decision: Ethics in the Community of Promise (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 35f.