“Now eagerly desire the greater gifts. And yet I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.-4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 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 ways. 12 For 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. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” I Cor. 12:31-13:13
If, upon hearing these words, you also hear in your mind a church organ striking up a wedding march, and a preacher saying, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the sight of God to unite in holy matrimony…” if you should suddenly smell Vienna sausages in barbecue sauce, sugary mints in a bowl, and wedding cake, I get it. This is the Bible passage which couples request most often to be read at their wedding. And it’s a perfectly good passage to read at a wedding. Take any phrase from this passage and you’ll have great advice for marriage. Like verse 4, “Love is patient.” If we haven’t learned patience before marriage, we’d better learn it quick after saying, “I do,” because marriage involves putting two people together who have different rhythms, different internal clocks, even different conceptions of time.
Or take verse 5: “Love…is not irritable or resentful.” So when one spouse realizes that the other is oblivious to the clutter and the chaos that is driving him or her crazy, like socks left on the floor, right next to the clothes hamper, dirty dishes piling up on the kitchen counter right next to the dishwasher, while the other spouse is getting irritated by the speed at which the first one gets irritated, what’s the plan? They’ll need to learn to appreciate the strengths in each other’s differences, how to adjust to each other, how to communicate with each other without it sounding like an attack, and how to work together before things go from irritation to exasperation, and then to resentment.
One just-married couple got into their car after the ceremony to find these words painted in shaving cream on the rear window: “First Eros, then Agape.” They knew immediately that the groom’s father had put it there, because his Dad was a pastor, who knew New Testament Greek, from which came the words “Eros” and Agape.” He had preached on those two words before. Eros is the Greek word for romantic love, love as a feeling, the strong physical and emotional attraction, affection and desire, with goose bumps and butterflies in the tummy that first convinced bride and groom that they belong together. That’s the kind of love that most pop songs are about. Nothing wrong with that; it brings each of us into the world.
The other word, “Agape,” is the ancient Greek word for selfless, disinterested love, love that simply wants to give for the rightness and virtue of giving, because we see the eternal value of the receiver. It’s what Mother Teresa exhibited, ministering to the sick and dying in the slums of Calcutta for so many years. It is love as a virtue, love as a choice, and that’s the word that this passage uses for “love” in the original Greek. The best definition I’ve heard of such love is, “to want and to work for the greatest good” of others, and oneself.
By painting on the getaway car the words, “First Eros, then Agape,” the groom’s father was telling the young couple what every long-married couple learns, that those bubbly fresh feelings that the songs call love, though vital, and wonderful and God-given, are not the whole of love. Falling in love is as easy as falling off a log. It’s staying in love and growing in love that require some willing, working and learning. Do that, keep at it, and you get to something deeper, more enduring, stable and satisfying than the first blush of romantic interest, even while the desire, affection and attraction endure. That steady, committed wanting and working for the greatest good of others and oneself is the kind of love that today’s passage speaks about.
Like the couple we knew when we lived in the Detroit area. They were married for only a few years when a horrible car accident inflicted terrible trauma on the wife. At first they didn’t know if she would survive the accident. She did, but then no one knew in what shape she would emerge. For quite some time she didn’t know who she was, nor did she know who this one man was who kept showing up at the hospital, then at the rehab center where she had to learn to walk, talk and eat all over again. He never knew if she would ever come to understand who he was and why he kept showing up to keep her company and cheer on her recovery and rehabilitation, but that didn’t stop her husband from doing so.
Eventually she came to learn and understand who he was to her, and who she was to him, and they picked up the threads of their marriage again, had children, and many more years together. But that was not the precondition of her husband’s loving support for her during her long time in rehabilitation.
But these words in I Corinthians 13 were not written for a marriage, nor for wedding service. They were written for a church, actually, a network of house churches. Paul gives this laundry list of things that love is not, like, love is not rude, love is not arrogant, or boastful, or irritable, or resentful or envious, because, according to the rest of this letter, that is precisely how the Corinthian Christians have been treating each other. He tells them what love is, that it is patient, kind, keeps no record of wrongs, and bears all, because that is how they need to start acting toward each other.
It’s not that the first Corinthian Christians weren’t smart or gifted people. They had great smarts and the most dramatic spiritual gifts, those mentioned in this chapter, like deep prophetic insight, speaking in the tongues of men and angels, and faith to move mountains. But these impressive, block-buster gifts were doing more to disrupt and destroy the church’s life and unity than to help, not because of the gifts themselves. God gave these gifts in order to help their relationships. It was because of the way the Corinthian Christians were using these gifts. They were using them to fight for power, prestige and position, to impress rather than to bless, to feed egos rather than to feed souls, to build walls between them, rather than to build community among them.
So Paul starts this part of the letter by telling them to “strive for the greater gifts,” and for “a still more excellent way.” That greatest gift, and that most excellent way, Paul says, is love, the selfless, disinterested, determined choice, to want and to work toward the highest, greatest good of others and oneself. Love is the greatest of God’s gifts, because without that kind of love, our other spiritual gifts and powers can become weapons for death and destruction, rather than tools for building up people and relationships.
Now we typically speak and think of love as a commandment of God. And it is. When someone asked Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment of all?” Jesus and his questioners agreed, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul and strength,” from Deuteronomy 6:5, and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” from Leviticus 19. It was unusual, in that time and place, to put those two commandments together like that, into one. Especially since his questioners asked Jesus for only one greatest commandment. From that combination of two commandments I cannot escape the implication that God takes personally the way we love and treat others, as a sign of how we love God, even, as a way of loving God.
It’s equally unusual, in our time and place, today, to place the command to love God first, and your neighbor second. From that order, with love for God mentioned first, I can’t escape the implication that our love for God, and God’s love for us, set the terms for how we love our neighbors, and not vice versa. That order suggests to me that we trust God more to tell us what love means and requires of us, and how to love our each and every neighbor, than we trust our each and every neighbor to tell us what love means, and how we are to love God. If we don’t remember that, then the world will drive us crazy with all its conflicting demands and definitions of love.
Especially in an election year.
But it doesn’t take us long to realize how hard the two-sided commandment to love can be, and how poor we are at it. But take heart, today’s passage speaks of love as a gift, and as a choice we can make and remake, however often we need to, even if we didn’t get it quite right yet. I don’t know who really has.
First, about love as a gift. Love is a gift of God in two ways: One way it is a gift is that we cannot generate such love, nor can we sustain such love, by our own virtue and power. All love is borrowed from its source: God. God loves us, often through others, and we only pass it along. Wrote John the Beloved in his First Letter, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God…. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
Paul also wrote the Roman Christians, that, since we have been justified by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” Writing on this very passage, the great theologian and scholar, Karl Barth, defined Christian faith as “the courage to accept that we are accepted.” When asked about what was the most profound theological insight he had ever heard or thought or read, this brilliant scholar of theology and the Bible replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
But love is also a gift of God in a second sense, namely, that love is God’s gift to us of himself. “Beloved, let us love one another, for God is love,” said John the Beloved. Whenever, then, we are giving and receiving the kind of love John enjoins upon us, we are experiencing not just a feeling, but nothing less than God, nothing less than God giving himself to us, and God giving himself through us. If ever we practice the ancient Christian discipline, at the end of each day, of examining ourselves and asking, “Where was God in my day? Where and how did God find me and encounter me?” we could start by remembering who showed us love, to whom did we show love, and how?
Like the time our family van broke down on the interstate in Kansas and a truck driver pulled over to see if we needed help. The trucker took me to a service station at the next exit, just a couple of miles up the road, where I could phone for a wrecker to come help us. This was before the day of cell phones.
The first thing the driver told me as I climbed up into his cab was, “I’m not supposed to do this, according to company rules. But it seems like the right thing to do.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Then he asked, “What do you do?” When I told him I was a pastor, he glanced at me sideways with a look that said, “Oh, one of them,” and said, “I don’t have much use for church, God, or religion. You could say, my religion is just doing the right thing and helping people in need.”
“The using kind of religion, can’t argue with that,” I told him, especially not when I’m the beneficiary of his help. That’s a step ahead of the un-used kind of religion.
Later that same year, I read a classic devotional book from 12th Century England, entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. In it, the unknown author, a monk as best we can tell, wrote that just as our physical senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell are our senses for knowing the world, so are faith, hope and love our senses for knowing the invisible God. The greatest of these senses for God is love, because God is love. When I read that book, and those words about love being our greatest way of sensing and seeing God, I thought of those who had shown love to me, as God in the act of making himself known to me. Whether we knew it or not at the time, that truck driver was experiencing the God he had no interest in through the love that he was showing to me. I also was experiencing God through the love that this person who didn’t feel the need for God was showing me. Nothing grand, cosmic or mystical in what we were experiencing and sharing of God, just the willingness to help, and my gratitude for receiving it. And God was there in all that, whether we recognized him or not. So again, love is a gift from God, and the gift of God, God’s gift of himself wherever we will receive him, even when it feels normal, natural and unremarkable.
But a gift is not fully a gift until we choose to receive it. So, while God was there in that truck driver’s action of helping me, that driver still had to choose to respond to God’s prompting, and to act in the loving way that he did. Every day, every minute, every beat of our hearts comes with an opportunity and an invitation again to choose love, no matter where we are, who we are, or what we have done before. But since love is from God and God is love, the gift precedes the choice; I wonder if there can even be a choice of ours to love without this gift of God called “love.”
So, what do we do about love as a virtue, love as a choice, and love as God’s gift, the gift of God for us, and the gift of God to us? Paul’s answer reminds me of what parents so often say to their children on long drives for vacation, when the kids get bored and fidgety and start saying, “You stay on your side of the seat; my side is right here, on this side of that line; Mom, he’s crowding my side of the back seat! Am not! Well, his finger is! Is not! I’m still this eentsy-teensty bit away! Ow, he hit me! Did not, and besides, she hit me first!” And Mom or Dad say……. “Don’t make me stop this car!” and, “Oh, grow up, will ya!”
Paul’s eloquent words about, “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 ways,” are a polite, poetic and pastoral way of saying to the quarreling Corinthian kids, “Grow up, will ya?” And what does growing up look like?
Christian growth is not about growing in the power to prophesy, not in ever greater and greater power to move more and bigger mountains, nor in greater fluency in the tongues of men and angels, unless that helps us love better, and more. All those things, Paul says, are incomplete and only temporary. Only some of us have any one or more of these lesser, temporary spiritual gifts. But love is the gift from God, and the gift of God, that is offered to all persons, available to all persons, and encouraged upon all persons.
On that day to come when all things are made new, when heaven and earth are reunited, when, “we shall know as we are known,” and, as the hymn says, “our faith shall be sight,” as we gaze directly into the loving, welcoming face of God, none of those other, lesser, temporary spiritual gifts will be necessary, nor functioning. Instead, all shall be love for us, and only love. But we don’t have to wait for that moment to taste something of that perfect, endless love. We can grow in it now, and toward it, by growing in the wisdom and the capacity to love.
If we should ask How we might grow in love, in this life, so that we don’t have to be “strangers in paradise” when we enter into the fullness of God’s complete and endless love, Jesus gave some practical advice to a man named Simon, while having dinner at his house one night. Simon’s dinner party was interrupted by the arrival of an uninvited woman, one with an unsavory reputation. She knelt down and anointed the feet of Jesus with perfume, and with her tears of repentance and gratitude. But Simon and his friends were scandalized that Jesus would tolerate such behavior. If this Jesus were truly a prophet, they thought, he would know what kind of woman she was and would not let her touch him.
At which point Jesus told them a story: “Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.
Then Jesus said… her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”
“Whoever has been forgiven little loves little.” I hope that Simon and his friends heard not only a challenge in those words of Jesus, but also good news and an invitation, an invitation to know more love, and to show more love, by knowing how much they too were forgiven. They were no less in need of forgiveness than the woman who crashed their party. For the more we know that we know we have been forgiven, the more we are likely to love in response to such forgiveness. I hope that Simon and his friends heard in their heart of hearts the same thing that I first heard in my heart of hearts some 43 years ago, when the Gospel first struck me as good news: that like Simon and his friends I too have been forgiven much, if not for sins like those of the woman weeping over Jesus’ feet, then for the sin of comparing myself to others like her, and seeking a sense of security and superiority in the comparison. I too have been forgiven much, for the grudges I held against those who hurt me or frightened me, for the resentments I nursed against those who fell short of my ideals and expectations, or who did not see things the way I did politically or religiously, for excusing my hardness of heart by calling it “high standards” and “idealism.” And somewhere within my deepest self I heard a still, small voice say that God was exchanging my heart of stone for a heart of flesh. For stones cannot love. Imagine my surprise when I later ran across those same words the first time I read the Book of Ezekiel.
So if we want to know how to grow in love for God and people and Creation, we could start by taking an honest look at how much we have needed forgiveness, of how much we have been forgiven, for evils that we deny too readily, and goodness and wisdom in which we may trust too much. By taking stock of how greatly we all need forgiveness, by considering how much we are all forgiven, we get a picture of how much we are loved. The more we accept such love for ourselves, the more we will want to give such love to all.