1 Corinthians 13:1-8a, 13
J. B. Phillips Version
If I speak with the eloquence of men and of angels, but have no love, I become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbal. If I have the gift of foretelling the future and hold in my mind not only all human knowledge but the very secrets of God, and if I also have that absolute faith which can move mountains, but have no love, I amount to nothing at all. If I dispose of all that I possess, yes, even if I give my own body to be burned, but have no love, I achieve precisely nothing.
This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience – it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive; it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance.
Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage. It is not touchy. It does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it shares the joy of those who live by the truth.
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love never fails.
In this life we have three lasting qualities – faith, hope and love. But the greatest of them is love.
There was a story on the news this week about how many weddings are expected to take place this year, and how wedding gowns and other items may be in short supply. Like everything else, it seems like, the stores are low on the most desired items. People may have to wait for months to get the dresses they really want to make their special day perfect.
It wouldn’t be a great stretch of the imagination to say that many of those weddings would include the reading of 1 Corinthians 13. For many people – maybe for most of us – these words have been so closely associated with weddings, that we take it for granted that they were written about the love between a married couple. But that assumption is entirely wrong. The apostle Paul had nothing like that in mind when he wrote this passage.
In fact, Paul wrote these words in response to a crisis in the church in Corinth. Church members were in conflict over spiritual gifts. They were arguing over which spiritual gifts were better than others and trying to use spiritual gifts as a means of claiming higher positions in the church. Paul’s response to all of this quarreling and quibbling was to tell them that there was something more important than any of the spiritual gifts, and that something is love. And he went on to describe what that love looks like.
Love means doing or not doing certain things. Love means not losing patience with others, not being possessive, not being anxious to impress others, and not being overly proud of yourself. Love is not being selfish or touchy, it is not keeping a record of the wrongs that other people commit or gloating over their wickedness. Love means having good manners, feeling joy over others who are living by the truth, having no limit to its ability to endure or trust or hope, and being able to outlast anything. Love never fails. This kind of love is not so much an emotion as it is an act of will. When Jesus taught in Matthew 22:37-40 that we are to love God and love others, he doesn’t necessarily mean a feeling in our hearts towards others; but we are to be concerned for their well-being.
Frederick Buechner writes in his book, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, “In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them … This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving. It is hard to work for somebody’s well-being very long without coming in the end to rather liking him too.”
It seems like our country could do with some Jesus-kind-of-love right now. As Adam Weber writes in his book, Love Has a Name: Learning to Love the Different, the Difficult & Everyone Else, “now more than any other time (at least it feels this way to me!), love seems absent from our attitudes, words, and actions. We say we love others, but we really don’t. Instead, we’re quick to shake our fists at drivers, judge the stranger who looks strange, and trash the person online who thinks differently than we do. We gossip behind the backs of our coworkers and daydream about body-slamming certain family members. Instead of loving people, we hurt, belittle, and overlook them.”
Some of that kind of attitude has come about because of the divisions in our country. We are seriously divided in our politics. We are divided in our theology. We are divided in our stance on COVID and vaccinations. We are divided within our friendship groups, within our families, and even within our own homes. Pandemic fatigue doesn’t help the situation any. People are frustrated and angry, and they are looking for places to take out those feelings. There are angry exchanges in grocery stores or pharmacies. There are incidents of road rage. People are blocked on Facebook. We might begin to ask ourselves, Is the kind of love that Paul described even possible?
Loving others is certainly easier said than done. It is one thing to say that we love people, but quite another thing to actually love individual people. Weber writes, “Jesus didn’t just talk about love generally … Instead, Jesus loved people personally. He got face to face with people. He didn’t just talk about love. He loved specific people. Sick people. Bad people. Normal people. Broken people. Religious people. Judgmental people. Awkward people. Overlooked people. Contagious people. Ugly people. Different people, who were different in every possible way. Difficult people, who were so incredibly hard to love. Jesus knew their stories. Who they were. Their names. Their status – or lack thereof. And he loved them anyway.”
That is the kind of love that Jesus calls us to. We are to love people no matter what. We are to love people – different people, difficult people – anyway. Whether those people sit across the table from us at dinner every night, or sit in the pew near us in church, or work with us, or attend the same club meetings as we do, or are members of our extended family, we are to love them even if we can’t seem to get along with them. Even if we think they are dead wrong in all of their opinions. Even if we have never voted for the same political party. Even if we believe different things about God. Even if we disagree about COVID protocols and vaccinations. We are to love each other because Jesus said so. And we are to love each other the way Paul said to love.
Why is this important? Because it is our most important Christian witness. Weber goes on to say, “Hear this: people will know our love for God by the way we love others. Not by our church attendance. Not by how many Bible verses we have memorized. Not by all the good religious things we do. Not even by our theology … People will know our love for God by the way we love them and others and ourselves.”
I asked earlier if it was possible to love like this. Jerry Irish, a professor of religion at Pomona College in Claremont, California answers the question: “As an individual character trait or personal attitude, no; but as the presence of God’s love in Christ … and in a community of believers that live in that love, yes. To belong to God’s church … is to be an agent of God’s love in the world … working on behalf of others.”
Practicing Christ-like love is transformational. It changes the person who gives the love. In showing love to others – especially to those whom it is hard for you to love – you open your heart for God’s love to come through you, and your faith and your love grow immensely. You begin to see the world as God sees it, and to see people as God sees them. Not as adversaries or as difficulties, but as children of God, as brothers and sisters. That love can also transform those to whom we show the love. As they experience the grace in our love, and the grace of the God who gives us the love, their lives may be changed. As our acts of generosity and mercy and assistance in their times of need are experienced as sincere and authentic expressions of love, it will make an impression on them.
But practicing Christ-like love can make an even bigger difference than just on individual lives. It can change the world. Marcus Borg, in his book Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most, talks about how loving God means loving what and whom God loves. We are to love all creation and all people, especially “the least of these” – the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the sick, the naked, those in prison, the oppressed, and the poor. We are even to love our enemies. He says, “Imagine that Christianity is about loving God. Imagine that it’s not about the self and its concerns, about ‘what’s in it for me,’ whether that be a blessed afterlife or prosperity in this life. Imagine that loving God is … about loving what God loves. Imagine how that would change our lives. Imagine how it would change American Christianity and its relation to American politics and economics and our relationship to the rest of the world. Imagine how it would change our vision of what this world … might, could, and should be like.”
Over the next couple of weeks, we will hear a lot about love as the advertisers focus on Valentine’s Day. And romantic love is a wonderful thing. But the love that Paul described for us in 1 Corinthians 13 is an even more wonderful thing, and it is a love that every one of us can experience and practice. It is the way to live out Jesus’s call to love others. It is a love that is greater than any of us may achieve, but we are certainly blessed and become a blessing as we aspire to live up to its full potential.
