Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

“In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love.”

-- 1 Corinthians 13:13

We have one of the best-known passages in the Bible for our meditation today. Even those who do not know that Genesis is the first book know the St Paul considered love the greatest of all. Why this fame? Because the passage is read repeatedly at weddings, and most wedding guests these days do not know the Bible. I am not sad that the only biblical passage many people know is this hymn to love; better this than one of many other rather appalling passages in the Bible. You might have noticed that I like to pose a question at the beginning of a sermon, to give direction to our thought and to engage you listeners by putting the answer at stake. My question today is, “Why is love the greatest of all, greater than faith and hope?”

Faith is the attitude by which we make contact with God, and surely that is the greatest of all? Hope is our confidence in the life hereafter, which gives us the courage to carry on, and surely that is as important as love? Without faith we could not know God, and therefore we would not trust God, and without hope we would have no reason to carry on. Nevertheless, Paul says, that even if I have faith enough to move mountains, I am nothing if I do not love (13:2), and that hope, the attitude of confident openness to the future, without which we would sink into despair, is not as great as love.

In order to understand Paul’s point we have to take account of the context of our passage. Individual Corinthian Christians were boasting of the spiritual gifts each one had. Some could speak in the tongues of men and angels, others had faith that gave them the power to work miracles, while yet others were so self-giving that they might even have given themselves to be burned for the sake of others – clearly an exaggeration on Paul’s part.  The previous chapter has been taken up with his attempts to persuade them that they must work together, like the limbs and organs of a human body, and that although their gifts differ they all serve the same Christ in the same Spirit. Paul now tells them of the best way of all, the way of love. The most spectacular gifts, he says, are worth nothing if they are not received and given in love.

In the structure of the argument love corresponds to the Holy Spirit (12:4), which is, in turn, the Spirit of the Body of Christ (12:27), and thus we come upon the answer to our question, “Why is love the greatest of all?” Love is the greatest of all because it is the life of God in the lives of men and women. The school of St John, with which we might compare Paul’s vision of love, says explicitly that God is Love (1John 4: 7-8: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is Love”). Paul comes as close to saying that as one can without being as explicit as John, and this is in any case a bedrock conviction of our faith. God is love therefore love is the greatest thing of all in our human experience, the highest of our possibilities. Love is the life of God in the lives of men and women.

It is much easier to say that love is God’s life in our lives than it is to explain what we mean when we say that. What we humans call love is powerful yet so elusive and that it is almost impossible to specify it by means of a description. John says that love is essentially the self-giving of God in Jesus Christ on our behalf (1 John 4:10-11), an action that is itself beyond our understanding. If God is love, love must be for us past understanding, but perhaps not past experiencing and recognizing.

Because of its divine nature love is beyond human understanding, nevertheless it is integral to human experience. Love is something elusively present in every experience, if only in the fact that we are alive at all to have the experience and regard ourselves as the most important and beloved thing in the world. Thus even self-love is of God, is God in the act of affirming our creation and endorsing our being. So despite this difficulty in understanding love, both John and Paul venture to give us a few hints of what it is like, to which we might return.

In this life, John tells us, love is seen most clearly in the sharing of our self and our substance with others, especially those in need (3:17). He also says, very astutely, that the opposite of love is not hatred but fear, and that perfect love casts out fear, because fear is essentially the fear of judgment, and we Christians are already assured of a good outcome in the judgment (4:17-18). This thought of John’s reminds me of a recent saying on my mind that friends are those we no longer need to impress, because they are no longer judging us, and so in those relationships of friendship we can truthfully say that love has driven out fear. There is nothing like constant criticism to instill the fear that casts out love and inhibits friendship.

Paul is more specific than John in his description of love in action. He writes,  “Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.” I think this list is based on the behavior of the recipients of the letter, whom we have already remarked were boasting and wrangling about the importance of their respective spiritual gifts. I read a passage like this as if it were an indictment of myself. Look at the list again: patient, kind, never jealous, not boastful, not conceited, not rude, not selfish, not ready to take offence, not resentful, no pleasure in the sins of others (i.e. no self-righteousness; When last did you rejoice to see someone else’s false step, unfortunate remark, rejoice because now you had something more to tell others and thus consolidate the negative opinion of that person?), rejoicing in the truth (how often have we preferred our own interpretation of that person’s action to the true interpretation or even to hearing the other side?), ready to excuse, to trust, to hope and to endure. If I measure myself against that list as if it were a moral checklist, I am ashamed.

What would you say are your weak and strong points in regard to this list?  I could probably claim only that I have trusted, hoped and endured and that very imperfectly. But as John says, love casts out fear because fear is the fear of condemnation and God has shown us that He at least is willing to acquit, even though we may refuse to hold the other guiltless.

I wonder if Paul wants us to use his description of love as a checklist? He does say that all our knowledge is provisional and will pass away,(13:8-13) so how can we be sure that we know ourselves and others well enough to measure against such a list? I think he wants us to use it privately for our own edification, always aware that we do not know even ourselves well enough to judge and certainly do not know others well enough, always convinced that the God who knows us perfectly loves us perfectly and that that perfect love has cast out all fear. Because of the work of God in Christ we are already acquitted and our moral lives unfold under the banner of love not of fear, of grace not of condemnation and threat.

I close with the suggestion that we all take this list not as a checklist for sprucing up our love and congratulating ourselves, but as an indictment, a memo of our offences against love. If we have any conscience at all we will try to cease from the negative things it describes and be driven by this portrait of love into the arms of the divine love, which has all these characteristics described by Paul and more, and we shall put away the childish overestimation of our own capacities for love, and allow the divine love at last to bring us face to face with ourselves so that we might see not puzzling reflections in a mirror but ourselves at last even as God who is perfect love, sees and knows us.

Amen.