It was the first wedding I was called to perform. I remember the couple coming to meet with me in my office. Using the marriage liturgy as a point of reference, I explained to them to the best of my ability the meaning and purpose of Christian marriage. After we completed our review of the marriage liturgy, I asked them if it was indeed their intention to marry in the Lord. When they affirmed that it was, I then asked them if they had a scripture passage picked out for the ceremony. They didn’t have one to give to me, and so I gave to them a number of passages from which I invited them to choose. Can you guess which one they chose? If you guessed the passage which serves as our scripture lesson for this evening, you would be right. But then, this is an easy guess. Three years later, another couple approached me to ask me to officiate at their wedding, and without hesitation they chose 1 Corinthians 13 as the scripture they wanted me to read and expound at their wedding. And I suppose that most of you have heard this passage at weddings that you’ve attended. Maybe you even chose it for your own wedding.
Read and expounded at weddings and included in anthologies of the world’s greatest literary masterpieces, this passage is perhaps the most familiar of all the Apostle Paul’s writings. It’s been called the hymn to love. Now we don’t dispute its suitability as a text to be read and proclaimed at a wedding. It is beautiful. Capable of turning an elegant phrase in the Greek in which he wrote to the churches, Paul certainly has given us a poetic tribute to love in this passage.
But it should come as no news to you that Paul does not write it with marriage in mind. He writes it rather to address a set of problems that beset the church at Corinth. Now the community that Paul established there grew to be strong. He’d spent about a year and a half there teaching the people about Christ, and the grace that God gave to them in Christ was not without effect. Because of this grace, they excelled in speech and knowledge. They eagerly sought spiritual gifts, in which they already abounded.
And this is a good thing. Paul certainly can and does celebrate with them this tangible evidence of God’s grace at work among them. But the manifestation of these spiritual gifts gave rise to strife and dissension among them. We can easily see how this happens. If I regard the gift I have as superior to the gift that you have, my arrogance will make you feel small and unappreciated, and you will resent me. Soon you will want nothing to do with me. In the preceding chapter, Paul has to remind the Christians at Corinth that each has been given a gift to serve the common good. Each person has an indispensable part to play in the building up of the community with the gift that he or she has been given. Each one is needed.
Paul brings this out by comparing the community to a human body. The church is the body of Christ. Each part of the body has its own function, which it performs for the function of the whole. The senses of sight and hearing and smell have to work together in order for us to navigate our world. The feet and hands have to work together in order for us to do our work. If all were a single part, where would the body be? The eye cannot say to the hand “I don’t need you.” Nor can the head say to the feet, “I don’t need you” (1 Cor. 12:21).
Paul is careful to warn the people at Corinth not to despise those whose gift does not make them prominent in the community. If we do, then we are making them feel less. But spiritual gifts are meant to help God’s people so that the whole body of Christ grows up and matures. In short, the exercise of spiritual gifts are motivated by love and serve love. Love ought to be the criterion by which they are tested. Love ought to be the goal toward which they are directed.
Paul wants to ensure that these failures to love do not happen. He wants his community to be characterized by love. That is why he feels compelled to show them a better way (1 Cor. 12:31).
Let us suggest then that the threat to the community as we have just described it provides the immediate occasion for what we find in our scripture lesson. Only in understanding it in relation to this threat will we grasp the direction that the lesson will be leading us. Our first task then is to determine what it is exactly that Paul sees as a threat to love. From there we will consider the power of love. Finally, we will contemplate the perfection of love.
We have already said that spiritual gifts are a good thing. But how they can give rise to problems that threaten community becomes clear when we call to mind an exceptionally gifted person we may happen to know. We may admire him. We may even acknowledge his usefulness to us and to our community. But we also see that he is very much aware of what he has that makes him special. He has an inflated sense of his own importance. That makes him somewhat distant and aloof. He strikes us as somewhat conceited. He is willing to associate with us, but gives us the impression that we are inferior to him. Therefore, he does not open himself up to us entirely. He constantly makes us aware of our difference from him.
It is to such a one that the first part of Paul’s reflection on love is directed. No doubt in the background here lies one or more of those specially gifted persons in the Corinthian community. Now Paul is a pastor. He is therefore responsible for correcting and instructing these persons in this faith in Christ to which they have been called by God. Carrying out this responsibility in itself is a demonstration of the very theme that forms the subject matter of this lesson, which is love.
Note that in the first part what Paul does is mostly to define what love is not. At the same time, he is telling us indirectly all that this exceptionally gifted person is. He is jealous and boastful. He can be arrogant and rude. And if you demand too much of his time, you will provoke him.
For the sake of illustration, let me recall for you an experience I had with a professor when I was in grad school. I wanted to talk with him about his lecture one day. But he told me to refer to the class schedule. On it I’d find his office hours. If I wanted to see him, I’d have to schedule in advance a time to do so. He then turned abruptly and walked away before I thought our conversation had ended.
This kind of behavior is a negation of love. The professor was neither patient nor kind with me. His behavior reveals that he was self-seeking, more concerned about himself than about others. His time to him was more important than that of others. Perhaps his students exist for him only in the sense that they provide a foil for his own superiority over them.
That violation of love seems obvious to us and easy to spot. But Paul tells us that love can be absent even from the most outstanding acts of spiritual devotion. If there is anyone who preaches like an angel or has faith to move mountains or gives all he has to the poor or even willingly dies as a martyr for his faith, but does not have love, he is nothing.
Well, we may say that all this sounds very interesting, but it really doesn’t apply to us. After all, we don’t have the gifts that set us apart as extraordinary. We cannot be tempted to boast about what we don’t have. But doesn’t what Paul say here also apply to the rich and complacent whose privileges allow them to keep their distance from those who have less? But those who are rich in material things are often the loneliest people. Conversely, those who are poor in material things are often the least lonely. It is interesting in this connection to recall Mother Teresa’s observation of America during her visit here. “There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. In the West there’s a hunger for love, there is a hunger for God.”
Again, let us remind ourselves that Paul celebrates spiritual gifts and does not hesitate to encourage the Corinthian believers to eagerly desire the greater gifts. But he is also aware that they can undermine community, whose members are called to invest lovingly in each other’s lives and thereby build up the body of Christ. “Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited,” as Paul tells the Christians in his Letter to the Romans (12:16).
We now turn to our next point. We refer here to the power of love. Love demonstrates its power by refusing to acknowledge that there are lost causes. To love, there are no lost causes. That seems contrary to fact, which is why we tend to dismiss it as cliché. We all know people, maybe even people very close to us, whose lives are a complete wreck. They suffer one hardship after another. Their lives are racked with pain and sorrow. They experience one failure after another. The hole they have dug for themselves is so deep that we don’t think they will ever get out. We hope and pray that things will turn around for them. But we’ve been clinging to this hope and prayer for years and even decades, and nothing seems to change. Or, if there is change, it’s usually for the worse. We then become weary and discouraged. We’re tempted to give up, withdraw our emotional energy, and consign them to the garbage heap of lost causes.
The travails of love are only too familiar to those whose hearts are open to love: the many painful burdens that love has to bear; the distressing absence of God in face of which love can only believe; the darkness of the present world order within which love can only hope; the never-ending and seemingly purposeless trials that love can only outlast and endure. But love does in fact do all these things, according to Paul. But what kind of love? Only the love that is taken up into God’s own love, which is the source of its power. For we have all known by painful experience that our own love under extreme circumstances has its limits.
In this regard, it is important to see in this list that love is the subject of faith and hope. The faith with which love believes all things is the victory that overcomes the world, according to 1 John 5:4. And the hope with which love hopes all things is the hope that is not disappointed, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to us, according to Romans 5:5. And according to Romans 8:27 we may be convinced that in and despite all these things that we have to endure we are more than conquerors. How? Through him who loved us. The cry “Jesus is victor,” is more than the applause of spectators. It is the cry of those who are his followers and therefore triumph with him. The final statement in this series, that love endures all things, leads us to our third and final point.
We speak here about the perfection of love. Paul urges the gifted persons in the Corinthian community to see their gifts in proper proportion. The gifts that they have received exist only imperfectly, incompletely, for a time and for a set purpose. Consider here, for example, the gift of prophecy. Prophecy in the New Testament means to say something to the community in the name of God at the moment the community needs to hear it. It is a spiritual gift. Not all in the community are gifted with the discernment to know what to say and how and when to say it; only those with the gift of prophecy.
The equivalent to prophecy for us is preaching. Those who preach ideally have the gift of discerning what it is their congregation needs to hear from God, as well as the ability to say it. But what need do we have for prophecy or preaching in the age to come? Those things will no longer be needed; they will pass away. Then what we understand only in part we will understand fully. Then what we see only in a glass darkly we will see face to face. Then what we know only in fragments we will know fully, even as we are fully known.
Paul’s intent here is to relativize the value of the spiritual gifts. He finds this necessary because of the gifted persons there in Corinth who are bragging about their gifts. Yes, spiritual gifts are important; they are not to be neglected. But they are not the ultimate.
And yet, at the same time, we have to be careful here. We still live on this side of eternity. We still need these gifts in our community. We need actively to be pursuing the greater gifts. After all, we are still children. And as children we still have to grow, as long as we draw breath. But this growth involves learning to order our priorities.
Here we come full circle. Whatever gift we may have received, we have always to exercise it with a view to how it may serve and promote love. We are not always so comfortable with gifts. That is to say, we don’t always find it so easy to give and receive them. But when gifts do not circulate, when there is an interruption in their exchange, one or more among us will be the worse off for it. This one here does not receive from us that which can make her more of the person she is meant to be. That one there is denied the opportunity to contribute his gift for the enrichment of the community. When we deprive others in either of these ways, we diminish them. In short, whether we realize it or not, we are not showing them love.
We ought to begin our day in prayer, asking God to show us how to use the gifts he has given to us to show love to those we meet as we go through the routines of our day. This is how we redeem the time that is left to us. This is how we find our greatest satisfaction as disciples of Jesus Christ. When we invest the gifts we have been given into love, we have the promise of a lasting return on our investment. For everything else in this world will pass away. Only faith, hope and love will remain. And the greatest of these is love. Amen.