The theme of I Corinthians 12:31b-13:13 is the “more excellent way” of love. Love is to guide them in their decisions, so that it is not the gifts for show, but the gifts that do the most good, that receive their attention. They are to exhibit a self-sacrificing love for the benefit of the whole body. What is the better way? Paul directs us to the best gifts and he offers direction in how to use them. Paul offers a meditation on the power of God's love. His congregation can live out God’s purposes in the world in this power. Paul, through the metaphor of the body of Christ, has managed to assure them that they live within this love now, and to exhort them to extend humility and grace toward each other. Love is a way of life. He wants to show how Christian love differs from their Greek cultural context. Christians have that issue in every culture and in the challenge presented by every new historical setting. The way of Christ is the way of love. God has shown us kindness in creating, reconciling, and redeeming us. Love is the gift of grace that enables us to respond to what God has done. This Chapter describes the Christian way. The movement is away from self and toward others. Such love is of another who is different and simply because the other is there and valuable. One offers such love freely. Such love is far from merely another form of self-expression. It seeks a genuine regard and respect for the other. Thus, in verses 1-3, all other spiritual gifts we may have are worthless in comparison to love. Our actions are empty if done without love. One must have love if any spiritual gift is to lead to a well-lived Christian life. The believer who acts without love is repellent. Regardless of the other activities of a Christian community and in a Christian life, what must take place is love. Love alone counts. In verses 4-7, we find a list of the fourteen descriptive statements that characterize love. What is love? Love is passive in that it is not short-tempered. It receives injury without paying back or complaint. Love is active in its desire to decrease suffering and increase joy, thereby contributing to the happiness of others. Love refuses to focus on the status of the self in a way that leads to division in the Body of Christ. It refuses ostentation or pride. It is tactful and presentable. It refuses childishness of selfishly seeking its own way. Love rejects hasty anger. It absorbs and forgives rather than store up grievance or resentment. Love does not sympathize with injustice or sin. Such love unites with goodness, truth, and justice. Such love makes allowance and keeps confidences. Such love believes and hopes the best. It endures. Such love overcomes despair, fear, and hate. Although pastors often read such things at weddings, we can see that its application is far broader than the marriage relationship. We live a victorious Christian life when love determines the course of our lives. Love gives us victory over the impulse toward sin and self-destruction. Finally, in verses 8-13, love is for eternity. We can trust the permanence of love. Childish and immature ways of selfishness give way to the maturity of love for others. We rightly value knowledge. Christians have too often claimed to know more than any human being could know. Our knowledge of God is partial in comparison to the coming fullness of revelation. We shall receive a full vision of God. For now, what we have are faith, hope, and love. Such qualities will be the primary marks of Christian community and of the Christian life. Recognizing we are on the way to fullness calls us to participate in the love God has for this world by loving in thought, word, and deed. Love forms the vocation and discipleship of the Christian. Every other gift, talent, or passion abides only as one does it love.
I have offered a brief restatement of what I think Paul is saying in I Corinthians 13. This exposition on love may seem out of place amid Paul’s discussion of the spiritual gifts. Some scholars think Chapter 13 is a composition of Paul, but written independently of this context. Paul has included it here. If we one goes from 12:31a to 14:1a, one can catch the continuity of the original thought. Paul or one of his followers may have inserted this beloved early Christian hymn here as the capstone of Paul’s long discussion of church unity in Corinthians. The difficulty with this suggestion is that there is no manuscript evidence for such an addition and, besides that, Paul exhibits a similar pattern in chapters 8-10. Here, in the middle of his discussion about eating idol meat (chapters 8 and 10), he inserts himself as an example of the character quality he is trying to recommend (chapter 9). This chapter has a similar relationship to its subjects as Chapter 9 is to its subject. Paul raises the whole discussion to the general principle. Hence, chapter 13 might be Paul’s personal example of the importance of love in his own life. After encouraging them to pursue the greater gifts (12:31), he provides an example of the more excellent way.
Love is not just a concept for Paul. It is a way of life. He seems to refer especially to love for other people, a way of life the people seem especially deficient. Bultmann suggested that if the theme of this letter is the last things as a reality in the life of Christians, then the climax of the letter is actually Chapter 13. If so, the point of this chapter is not to provide a list of platitudes on love but is integral to Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians.
The challenge for Paul was to delineate how Christian love differs from what the Corinthians might have thought love to be in its pagan context. In a sense, today's preacher faces the same challenge. What makes Christian love special? A self-sacrificial spirit seems to pervade Paul's delineation of specifically Christian love. Christian love is agape type of love, love that "seeks not its own."
12:31b Further, I will show you a still more excellent way. The way of the Christ is love.[1] Paul could call love a gift. One of the lasting insights of Augustine was that love is a gift of grace that enables us for the first time to respond to the kindness of God as Creator and to the redeeming love of the Father to participate in creation.[2]
I Corinthians 13 is a full description of the Christian way.[3] What we have here, in Christian love, is a movement in which an individual turns away from self. In the continuation, love turns to another, to one different from the one who loves. Christian love turns to the other for the sake of the other. It loves the other simply because the other is there as this other, with all its value. It loves freely. In Christian love, the one who loves gives to the other, the object of love, what it has. To do this, the loving individual gives up control of self and places oneself under the control of the object of love. The individual is free to do this. In this freedom, one loves as a Christian loves. Where this movement reaches its goal in self-giving of the one who loves, we find Christian love. Christian love is different from other movements that claim the name of love. Such non-Christian love intensifies and strengthens self-assertion. Such love is hungry, demanding the food that the other seems to hold out. The individual wants the other for personal use, as in upholding, magnifying, deepening, broadening, illuminating, or enriching oneself. Such love is another occasion to express oneself. Such love desires to find satisfaction in all one’s personal unrest. The movement of this love takes the form of a circle. It seeks the Infinite in a transcendence of everything finite, but it must always return to its beginning. The object of such love does not have to be sensual. One may even direct it to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Even in its sexual form, it may refer to the soul, and not just the body. Beyond all other goods and values, it may even reach out to the divine in its purest form, and thus be a most wonderful love of God. In all its forms, it will be a grasping, taking, possessive love, a self-love, and in some way will always betray itself as such. As such, such love is the direct opposite of Christian love.
The New Testament has no hymn of praise to the manner of faith or hope, but it does with the manner of love in I Corinthians 13. Love alone counts, love alone conquers, and love alone endures. We can do no better than to give our attempt to describe the manner of love in the form of a paraphrase and exposition of the context and content of this chapter.[4]
I Corinthians 13: 1-3 are a list of all the worthless gifts in comparison with the quality of love. Paul presents his description of the emptiness of actions done without love in a series of three conditional statements. 1 If I speak in the tongues (γλώσσαις) of mortals and of angels, but do not have love (ἀγάπην), I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. He begins with the gift that believers in Corinth seem to have held in high esteem, the gift of tongues. It is too common at Corinth to speak in tongues without love. This highly valued practice, however, becomes as disturbing as a noisy instrument without the concomitant possession of love. Paul applies it to the excitement of religious revivals. Adherents used cymbals in the worship of Dionysus. He may be comparing tongues to the gongs and cymbals of pagan worship. He may also be pointing to their worthless character. 2And if I have prophetic powers (προφητείαν) (14:1-5, 24-25, 39), and understand all mysteries (μυστήρια)(2:7; 15:51) and all knowledge (γνῶσιν) (8:1), and if I have all faith (πίστιν), so as to remove mountains, faith in the sense of performing miracles, as in Mt 17:20. However, if I do not have love, I am nothing. Paul proceeds to bring gifts that he esteems into the same position relative to love. He may be referring to all of the teaching gifts, prophecy, knowledge, wisdom, apostles. Further, the possession of knowledge, a claim seemingly espoused by the Corinthians, and powerfully effective faith are equally meaningless without love. We see Paul’s hyperbole clearly (and the congregation would have heard clearly) with the repetition of panta. One must have love if any of the gifts are to lead to well-lived Christian life. This believer is not just the recipient one of the Spirit’s gifts, but also several. 3If I give away all my possessions, referring to administrative gifts, in the sense of the bodily needs of others, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast (καυχήσωμαι) or burned (καυθήσομα). We find attestation for both readings, καυχήσωμαι appears in the oldest manuscripts. It became the preferred reading in the most recent version of the Nestle-Aland Greek text. Nevertheless, if I do not have love, I gain nothing. His final hypothetical remark includes the selling of all his possessions and the handing over of his body. True love does not show itself only in extreme crises. As he will show, love manifests itself at all times and circumstances. Note that the gifts mentioned are of value, but the person is not, unless there is love. Paul’s overall position is unmistakable. Whoever lacks love, irrespective of the number or type of spiritual gifts received, is “a noisy gong,” “clanging cymbal” or absolutely “nothing” at all. In short, Paul’s portrayal of the loveless believer is repellent. Any disciple who acts without love serves as a warning and speaks to the futility of participating in the body of Christ without a humble heart that one has directed toward God and neighbor.
This first section says that the manner of this love is that it alone decisively determines human life in the Christian community as Christian life.[5] We cannot think too highly of the breadth, depth, and height of the possibilities given to the community and to each Christian. God shows who God is to the people of God as a Lord who is kind, noble, and generous. Thus, we can always expect great things from God rather than too little things. The Christian community can be the scene of many human activities that are new and astonishing to many of its own members, as well as to the world, because they rest on an endowment with extraordinary capacities. Where these are lacking, one justifiably asks whether pride or sloth has caused the community to evade this endowment, thus falsifying its relationship to its Lord. Yet, such activities do not decide the reality of this relationship. The determining factors in this relationship are the following. The life of the Christian and the community must derive from the Spirit and both must live in the Spirit. The life of the Christian and the community must conduct itself in the name of Jesus Christ and in the discipleship of Jesus Christ. The life of the Christian and the community must offer the appeal to God and to divine glory, and therefore as a sacrifice, that gives God pleasure. The true and proper thing that must take place is love. Love alone counts.
I Corinthians 13: 4-7 express the character of the one who has this one indispensable virtue. There are fourteen descriptive statements in pairs. He lists the characteristics of love. If love is so necessary, the question might arise, “What exactly is ἀγάπη?” 4Love is patient. Opposite is short-tempered, injured without paying back, willing to receive injuries over a long period without complaint. Love is kind [patience is passive while kind is active in terms of benefits bestowed. It suggests a desire to decrease suffering and increase joy. It carries another person's pain and contributes to happiness.Love is not envious, covering both jealousy and envy. See 3:1, where it leads to division. It suggests zealousness for one's own status as manifested by envy. Love is not boastful, ostentation, or arrogant, puffed up and prideful, 5or rude, and thus love is tactful, does not cause others to blush, suggesting presentable behavior. Chapter 14 deals with the opposite. It does not insist on its own way, possibly looking back to the lawsuits of Chapter 6. It suggests the childish characteristic of causing breakdown of interpersonal relationship. It is not irritable, refusing to allow injuries to cause bitterness. Flashes of anger may have some justification, but love eliminates hasty anger and irritation. It is not resentfulin storing up grievances, calculating evil, and thus, stores up no resentment. Love does not ignore evil, of course, but deals with it by absorbing evil and forgiving it. 6It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, does not sympathize with evil, and does not have joy at the successful sinner. The injustice may be personal or social. Rather, love rejoices in the truth, the context suggesting truth in its widest sense as goodness and desiring the victory of justice. 7It bears all things by making allowances, keeping confidences, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Forming a climax, love believes the best, hopes the best and is willing to wait courageously. The only sound basis for hope is love. Love overcomes despair, fear, and hate. Thus, in a final poetic statement that echoes the frequent use of “all” in verses 2-3, Paul asserts that love bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things. Here, however, the repetition of “all” does not seem to be hyperbolic. This is the true nature of love. Evidences of these qualities appear in Paul’s life. He and his associates have borne all things in their ministry (9:12). Paul confidently affirms his hope and faith in his assertion of the coming resurrection and reign of Christ (15:19, 24-26, and 51-57). How is it possible that this man, the least of all the apostles (15:9), can exhibit these amazing qualities of love? From where do they come? The answer, not surprising in the writings of Paul, is simply, God. Although Paul does not mention God explicitly in this entire chapter, here is the place in which the silent yet powerful divine presence seems to appear. Love, specifically the clear description of what love is and is not, is a gift from God.
Paul’s description of love’s via positiva and via negativa qualities has become familiar fare in the context of weddings. Some have argued that because this departs widely from Paul’s typical vocabulary and style, he must have borrowed it from another source. Even if this is the case, it is clear that Paul adapted this description to speak to the situation of his readers. The list of what love is not appears often in Paul’s charges against the behavior of the Corinthians. In their factual divisions, they embody jealousy and strife (3:3). They are puffed up by their rivalry (4:6), Paul’s delayed appearance (4:18-19), and about the man committing fornication with his father’s wife (5:2, 6). The fact that love does not show off (περπερεύεται) is set as a foil to the boasting of the Corinthians in human leaders (1:29; 3:21) and in themselves (4:7). Love does not seek things for itself, seemingly the opposite of what the Corinthians are doing concerning the meat sacrificed to idols. They have tolerated the evil of divisions (1:10), fornication (5:1), defaming law cases in front of the unrighteous (6:6-7), fellowship with demons (10:20), shaming of the poor (11:22), and denial of the resurrection (15:12). Instead, Paul explains to them that love is patient, kind, and rejoices with the truth.
In this second section, the manner of this love is that one lives a victorious human life in the community only as determined by love. The nature of the true and proper thing that takes place in love alone is that love conquers, triumphs, and gains victory. As far as it is love, it triumphs over the forces that menacingly resist its fulfillment as self-giving to God and the neighbor, and therefore the fulfillment of the Christian existence as such in the Christian as a sinful person, in the neighbor who is also a sinner, and finally its fulfillment as self-giving to God. Love alone conquers. We can say this unconditionally. Love triumphs indeed.[6]
I Corinthians 13: 8-13 teach that love is for eternity, while gifts are for this world only. Paul offers for their reflection the permanence of love. 8Love never ends. Paul could be implying that when one practices love in the way he has just described, it will never result in failure. In addition to the present ethical advantage of love, Paul also introduces the idea of the continuity of love. From the standpoint of durability, love exceeds all of the gifts. The weight of this continuity increases when Paul compares love with the temporary nature of the gifts. However, as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part. Prophecy and tongues, although beneficial gifts, will not last forever. 10 Nevertheless,when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. The gifts will have no use when God reveals the completeness, and therefore they are inferior to love. When perfection comes, it will eliminate the partial knowledge we have now. Paul utilizes two metaphors to explicate his point. First, 11When 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 ways. To confirm the above he appeals to personal experience. He provides an analogy from his experience of moving from childhood to adulthood, as the type of thing that will happen when the complete or perfect will come. Second, 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. If adults abandon the things of childhood, how much more will we abandon the reflected images of truth when God reveals the whole? Our knowledge is indirect, through the medium of human thought. Unfortunately, Christians too often claim more than it is possible to know. Just as children grow out of childish things and just as a mirror reflects an indirect image (compared to seeing someone face to face), so, too, will some things practiced in the church be unnecessary when the end comes. Paul asserts that when the “then” time arrives, he will know fully to the same degree that God has fully known him. This is a clear echo of Paul’s discussion of knowledge and love in chapter 8. Someday human knowledge will be just as complete as God’s knowledge of humanity. For those who enjoy theology, here is a good reminder that the knowledge of Christian theology is always partial in comparison to the definitive revelation of God in the future of the reign of God. Recognizing the finitude and inappropriateness of all human talk about God is an essential part of theological sobriety. Such recognition is a condition of the possible truth of what we say. This recognition also means that our talk about God becomes doxology. One can expand this notion to that of the confession of faith, which also occurs in this eschatological situation. The provisional nature characterizes the present confession. The Christian community can expect a more profound instruction on the content of their faith based on its faith and confession that comes from the revelation of God that took place in Jesus Christ. We should note that the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II adopted the reformation that the church in its confession always stands in need of reformation. Faith or the confession of faith always stands between an initial and a deeper knowledge until we reach the full and final vision of God. Paul is aware of the difference between the present life of the Christian life and the ultimate future of God that has already dawned in Jesus Christ, but whose consummation is still ahead for us. Only in the eschatological consummation will there be full knowledge of the Father, the vision of God.[7] 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. The three virtues have durability that the gifts, so coveted by the church, do not have. Such love encapsulates the balance between time and eternity, which is vital to the practice of hope. Paul has made clear that love is not for an ideal human being, living in a state of abstract perfection. Rather, love is for someone in particular, someone encountered in our daily lives. Love places us inescapably in particular times and places. In a sense, the neighbor stands before us as a representative of every human being and even of the God who has created and dignified every human being. Such love immerses us in this time and place and orients us toward eternity.[8] His point is that the sign of a mature congregation is not spiritual gifts, but rather, faith, hope, and love. Love is superior because it is the foundation of the other two. Paul concludes in much the same way he began this passage by noting the abiding quality of love. In the present time, faith, hope and love sustain the church, but the greatest is love. It is possible that it is greatest because it is lasting. Love is an ethic that will abide into the future, but one we can practice in the present as well. Love takes up the believer into the act of the nature and operation of God and participates in the movement of the love for the world. For this reason, Paul could call love the greatest among the gifts of the Spirit, for it not only mediates but also already constitutes the relationship with God.[9]
This third and final section says that the manner of this love is that of the promise that has eternal content is peculiar only to human life in the community, as it is determined by it and lived as such.[10] The life-act of the Christian takes part in the strict and proper sense to the extent that it takes place in the form of love. Love breaks the dominion of the sinister forces to which the individual alienated from God, the neighbor and self is subject. Love has an indestructible content and therefore certain continuance. Love is participation in the eternal life of God. To the extent that the Christian loves, the eternal future of one’s own life and of all created things becomes near enough, present even though it remains future, at the heart of the temporal fulfillment of this existence. God designs every gift of the Holy Spirit to empower the people of God and its members for this movement, this pilgrimage. Love is the greatest of the gifts, but is also the limit of these gifts. One exercises such gifts as works that must take place between the times. However, when the living Christ returns, they will reach their goal that is also their end, since the ministry of the pilgrim people of God will then find completion. However, one continuing form in which this ministry will continue and outlast the present. This ministry is already an eternal ministry, taking place as a pre-figuration of the return of Jesus Christ, and therefore of the consummation, of redemption, to the extent that it is love. In the form of love, the life-act of the Christian has this promise. To be sure, it also has it as faith and hope. However, it has it as faith and hope only to the extent that love is the form of the Christian life-act accomplished in faith and hope. Love alone abides. Everything else that one may do, even by Christians and based on a spiritual endowment, abides only to the extent that one does it in love, and is thus the act of love.
I trust the reader will not mind if I write a bit more personally and directly. After all, we are learning to love.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used to play a practical joke on his father, Leopold, who was also a musician. After a wild night out on the town with his friends, Wolfgang would stumble into the house, sit down at the piano and pound out a rising scale of notes. However, he would not finish the scale. He would just get up from the piano bench and go to bed. Wolfgang knew the unfinished scale would drive his father crazy. Leopold would toss and turn in his bed, sleepless, until he had to get up, go to the piano and finish the scale his son had started. Paul describes the call of love, the call of life itself. The calling is like an unfinished scale, going ahead of us into the future of God. The music of love will find its completion. Our destiny is to be part of its completion.[11] Paul even suggests that the future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love will occupy and fill eternity. Love is like the divine spark within and among us, incorruptible, indivisible, and imperishable. Love is a point of fire that exists within and among us, immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine or extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones. We see it beaming in the very depths of earth and the heights of heaven.[12]
We often hear I Corinthians 13 during weddings. Although the text is quite appropriate in that setting, the context for Paul is the need for the church as the body of Christ to show love in practical ways within its community. History has shown the wisdom of the concern Paul had for the church at this point. Although Paul was the first theologian of the church, in this passage he has a practical concern. He wants the church to adopt a way of living, and not just a way of thinking.
Paul clearly wants us to grasp the importance of love. If love is this important, what is it?
Love determines the Christian community. We cannot think too highly of the breadth, depth, and height of the possibilities given to the community and to each Christian. God is the Lord of our lives who is kind, noble, and generous. Thus, we can always expect great things from God rather than too little things. Because of the gifts of God to the church, the Christian community can be the scene of many human activities that are new and astonishing. Where these are lacking, one justifiably asks whether pride or sloth has caused the community to evade its gifts and power, thus falsifying its relationship to its Lord. The true and proper thing that must take place in the Christian community and in Christian life is love. Love alone counts.
One leads a victorious Christian life within the Christian community as determined by love. Love conquers, triumphs, and gains victory. As far as it is love, it triumphs over the forces that menacingly resist its fulfillment in our love to God, to neighbor, and to self. Love alone conquers. We can say this unconditionally. Love triumphs indeed.
Love is the promise that has eternal content. Love breaks the dominion of the sinister forces to which the individual alienated from God, the neighbor and self is subject. Love has an indestructible content and therefore certain continuance. Love is participation in the eternal life of God. To the extent that the Christian loves, the eternal future of one’s own life and of all created things becomes near enough. God designs every gift of the Holy Spirit to empower the people of God and its members for this movement, this pilgrimage. Love is the greatest of the gifts, but also the limit of these gifts. One exercises such gifts as works that must take place between the times. However, when the living Christ returns, they will reach their goal that is also their end. Victorious love in the Christian and in the Christian community is this promise. To be sure, it also has it as faith and hope. However, love alone abides. Everything else that one may do, even by Christians and based on a spiritual endowment, abides only to the extent that one does it in love, and is thus the act of love.
At one level, nothing seems more obvious than our need to love and be loved. In the opening scene of the film Love Actually, Hugh Grant’s character says, “When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge. They were all messages of love.”
At another level, nothing is more difficult than loving and being loved. I do not care what type of music you like today; some of its best songs are about love. “What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love.” “I'll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Goodbye to Love,” “Lady Down on Love,” and, of course, “All You Need is Love.”
Foreigner had a hit single in 1984, “I want to know what love is.” Here are the opening lines.
I gotta take a little time, a little time to think things over. / I better read between the lines, in case I need it when I’m older. / Now this mountain I must climb, feels like the world upon my shoulders. /
Through the clouds I see love shine, it keeps me warm as life grows colder. / In my life there’s been heartache and pain. / I don't know if I can face it again. / Can’t stop now, I’ve traveled so far, to change this lonely life. /
I want to know what love is, I want you to show me. / I want to feel what love is, I know you can show me.
Our songs about love do not suggest that love is easy. In fact, love is difficult.
Think of the difference between falling in love and being in love. Both imply that nothing is easier or more natural than love. Yet, hardly any human enterprise begins with such hope and expectation, and which fails so regularly, as love. So we must be clear that love takes time, effort, and training. It is not for novices. Love is an art. In our society, in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, society considers almost everything more important than love. We expend our energy upon how to achieve success, prestige, money, and power. We seem to expend very little to learn the art of loving.[13] When love seems to come alive in us, love will find itself engaged in a battle with our envy, hate, and ill will. The way of love is a way of strife for the continuing victory of love in our lives.[14] Christians rightly and confidently speak of salvation by faith. Our justification before God is by faith, without the works of the law. Yet, Paul makes clear hear that our faith may be great and strong and still not lead us to eternal life with God and holiness of hear and life. Love is the path by which God wants to save us from our pride, unholy passion, impatience, arrogance, anger, bitterness, discontent, complaining, and worry. Yet, some Christians think they are on the way to heaven without fighting this battle for love.[15]
Paul seems convinced that love invites us to reconsider our tendency to place self before others. In part, the difficulty is placing others before self does not come naturally. Richard Dawkins pointed out in his biological study, The Selfish Gene that our genes want to duplicate themselves. The basic drive, as some would suggest, is self-preservation. We do not love, some philosophers would say, out of concern for others. We love out of concern for our social standing. Frankly, what we may think of as love can be grasping, taking, and possessive.
Paul seems aware of this issue when he uses the Greek word agape instead of the more common phileo. True, nothing seems more natural than love. Yet, from another perspective, when we look at the way we express love in real life, there is hardly anything we human beings do that can begin with such a hope and expectation, and yet so often fails so regularly, as love. We discover that our craving for love is not enough. It will take an act of will and decision to put oneself on the way of love. Love is a choice. Our choices define us. It may take common courtesy to love in the way Paul writes here. It will also take heroism and courage to fight the inward battles over arrogance, pride, stubbornness and the need to control. Personally, I like reading this passage at weddings, simply because it reminds us that people like spouse and children, as well as co-workers and friends, may be the people who help us fight the battle. We may well need heroism to fight envy or resist rudeness. In this case, however, you conquer yourself rather than someone else. If love is to become our way of life, it will take a decision to behave in certain ways, and to train ourselves in that way.
This need to train ourselves in the way of love invites us to look upon our difficulty in loving from another perspective. Love is a learning opportunity. Learning can be enjoyable and a source of personal satisfaction. We will learn to love by engaging other human beings in relationship. To say that in a different way, accepting Christ brings instant forgiveness of sin and immediately makes us righteous before God, but it also signs us up for a lifelong character-formation course. Paul offers guidance on what Christian love will look like and invites us to make these qualities part of our daily actions and attitudes. In this journey, we learn that self-discipline is love translated into action. If we genuinely love another, we will order our behavior in such a way as to contribute the most to the spiritual growth of the other. The more we love, the longer we live, the larger we become. Genuine love is self-replenishing. The more we nurture the spiritual growth of others, the more we discover that we also nurture our own spiritual growth. In a sense, doing something for somebody else is a way of doing it for ourselves as well. As we grow through love, so grows our joy.[16]We steadily learn to make our lives more about what is important in life. Yes, that will mean honoring the unique giftedness and passion that mark us as individuals. It will also mean openness to the needs and desires of others in our lives.
[1] Barth, CD, I.2 [18.2] 372.
[2] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 78.
[3] Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.1], 727-51.
[4] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.4] 824-28.
[5] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.4] 828-31.
[6] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.4] 831-35.
[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 55, 118, 138, and 554.
[8] – Glenn Tinder, The Fabric of Hope: An Essay, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pp. 44–45
[9] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 184.
[10] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.4] 835-40.
[11] --N.T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: First Corinthians (SPCK, 2004), 175-76.
[12] --Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (T.Y. Crowell & Co, 1887), 105.
[13] Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving, 4-5.
[14] Charles Spurgeon, Sermon 1617, “Love’s Labors.” Charles Spurgeon once said: No sooner is love born than she finds herself at war. Everything is against her, for the world is full of envy, hate, and ill-will. I would warn the most loving-hearted that they have entered upon a war for peace, a strife for love: they are born to hate hatred, and to contend against contention.
[15] John Wesley, Sermon 91, “On Charity.”
[16] M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled,
This is good. As Christians we are soon to be living in a hostile culture so, the question becomes, what makes us different? The answer has to be love a you have eloquently pointed out. Wouldn't be great to have churchs full of this kind of love? Surely, it was this kind of love, in the christian communities, that drew the pagans out of their cultures and into the christian community. One more thought, while other gifts are worthless without love they are not worthless with love and have their place in the church. (Christian community) . they should not be ignored.-Lynn East
ReplyDelete