1 Corinthians 13

1 Corinthians 13 St Ursula’s, Bern: 30 January 2022 At many of the weddings I’ve conducted one of the readings chosen by the couple was 1 Corinthians 13, today’s New Testament lesson. It’s a natural choice. In my sermon I would usually refer to some of its phrases, saying that every marriage faces difficulties of some kind and if a marriage is to survive and flourish the couple must grow in love – not just feel in love but learn to love in practical ways and persist in doing so, however they feel. 1 Corinthians 13 is a good reference point for any married couple, offering inspiration and a challenging check-list. But despite strong associations between weddings and this famous passage, Paul is not writing about marriage here. In fact, it’s addressed to the life of a local church. This chapter is part of a long, wide-ranging letter from Paul to the recently established church in Corinth. This community as yet has no church building but is what Paul calls the Body of Christ, people brought together by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and fellowship in God’s Spirit. In this first letter to the Corinthians, Paul responds to various questions they’ve sent him, and also comments on what he has heard about what’s going on among them. Paul begins with some encouraging remarks to the Corinthians, but he also names a number of problems among them, things that shouldn’t be happening in the Body of Christ. He speaks of divisions, quarrelling, and even law-suits between church-members. He mentions sexual scandal. He criticizes arrogance, boasting, immaturity. He laments how richer members relate to those who are poorer. And it seems that worship at Corinth was often chaotic and unedifying. Just like us, the early Church was very imperfect, But Paul seeks to lead the Corinthians forward in their life as the Body of Christ. Above all, he points them to the foundation of the Church, Christ himself, and the salvation God gives us through his death and resurrection. Paul speaks of the presence of the Spirit among them, giving each one of them gifts to use for the sake of the whole community. He says much about worship, including the Eucharist. He addresses questions about singleness and marriage, and about how to live as a Christian in a world where many different gods are worshipped. It’s towards the end of this busy letter that we read 1 Corinthians 13. What is it doing here? It’s as if Paul pauses for a moment, amidst all the questions he has to address, perhaps thinking there’s a danger that we won’t see the wood for the trees, that we’ll miss the big picture because of all the details that have to be addressed, and he says: Let me tell you the most excellent way. Paul addresses the Christians at Corinth, and us with them, telling us that the heart of the Christian faith is not about knowledge and wisdom, impressive sermons and moving worship, miracles and powerful spiritual experiences. These all have their place, but the heart of the Christian life – in fact the one enduring reality behind all life – is love: the eternal love of God working itself out in time in the love between us. And in this short chapter Paul unpacks what he means by love, in ways that are both practical and profound. Paul begins by saying in three different ways that unless they are accompanied by love even the most impressive gifts and abilities at work in the life of the Church ultimately have no meaning or value. He mentions spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongues and prophesying, which the Corinthians are very excited about, and says that even if such things are happening in a church, and if there is apparently strong faith and great dedication, if there is no real love, it means nothing and there is no lasting benefit. Without love, I am nothing. ‘So then, Paul’, we might ask, ‘this love that you say is so essential . . . what does this love actually look like?’ ‘Good question’, he replies, ‘I was just coming to that’: ‘Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.’ And so Paul goes on, describing both what love is like, positively, and, negatively, what love is not like, what love turns away from: ‘love is not irritable or resentful’ – or ‘love keeps no record of wrongs’. Note here that love must express itself actively, cannot just be a vague sense of good will. Note also that to love will often involve saying ‘no’ to what comes instinctively to us: being patient when the irritation building up inside me is nearing explosion; or saying ‘no’ to a deeply ingrained instinct to nurse resentments, to keep a record of wrongs. That’s the kind of thing it means, in practice, to love; and it doesn’t always come naturally to us. Some of the words Paul uses here to say what love is not like in fact echo things he has said earlier in the letter about the Corinthian Christians. Paul is not just making warm, uplifting comments about love. He is targetting what he knows to be the problems at Corinth. Paul confronts the Corinthians with their failure to love, and they know that. This wasn’t easy listening for them, and it shouldn’t be easy for us, either. Of course, I might do better on some points than others. I may think: Well, I’m pretty polite, nobody would call me rude; and I don’t boast (not too unsubtly, anyway). But what about irritability? What about rejoicing in wrongdoing? Can I resist a bit of critical gossip about someone who has annoyed me? Nobody with any self-knowledge can read Paul’s account of love and come away thinking: Yes, I can tick all those boxes. In fact the only human being who is accurately described by this account of love is Jesus himself. For the rest of us, what Paul says about love makes us uncomfortably aware of just how far short we fall, how we fail in love, how much more we have to grow in love. But Paul’s aim is not to leave us feeling like miserable failures. He wants to inspire us, to plant in us a vision of love as our goal, our greatest possible ambition. At the end of this chapter on love, Paul uses two images, both involving contrast. First, the contrast between a child and an adult. In the Bible childhood is often a positive symbol: to enter the kingdom we must become like children, open, trusting. That’s being ‘childlike’ in a good sense. But childhood can also symbolize negative qualities: being ‘childish’, immature, lacking understanding. Earlier in this letter, Paul tells the Corinthians that their jealousy and quarrelling is like spiritual childishness: they must grow up and put such infantile behaviour behind them (3:1-4). At times, we all behave in childish, immature ways; we insist on our own way; we lose our temper and are offensive; we make stupid decisions. At the heart of such failures is the reality that we are far from perfect in love, driven by our pride and fear, our selfish impulses and agendas; we have much growing up in love still before us, whatever our age, before we reach the full humanity, the true maturity that we see in Jesus, perfect in love towards God and neighbour. With his second image Paul makes a local reference, because Corinth was known for its production of mirrors, which were then made of polished bronze, not glass. It’s not entirely clear what the mirror symbolizes for Paul, but he seems to be comparing indirect, imperfect knowledge with knowledge that is direct and complete. He writes: ‘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.’ But what’s this got to do with love? Why is Paul talking about mirrors and face to face knowledge at the end of this chapter on love? Well, when Paul says ‘even as I have been fully known’ he means God’s knowledge of him, God’s knowledge of each of us. The deepest truth about each of us is not anything that we know, but rather the fact that we are known perfectly by the God who is love; we are known and loved perfectly by God. We know this because of Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus we know that the love into which we are called to grow is the love that already knows us and holds us. For Paul, knowledge is an ambiguous, tricky subject. Of course, true knowledge is greatly to be desired, but the problem is that in this world there are so many competing and contradictory claims to knowledge, including about God, and often claims to knowledge are mere human vanity. Earlier, Paul writes: ‘Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.’ (8:1) Our claims to know, to be wise, are often delusions, misleading us and puffing us up in ways that cause all kinds of problems. Our whole way of knowing needs to be humbled and re-centred on the primacy of love. We need to give up any illusion that through exercise of our own knowledge we can master the reality around us. Instead, we must start not from our knowledge of anything, but from God’s knowledge of us. Much more important than anything I can know is the truth that God knows me. In this life we can begin to know the peace and joy that this brings, and in the life to come we will see face to face the God who already knows and loves us. Paul ends this chapter on love by saying that love is the greatest and the most abiding of all realities. Love is greater than faith and hope, it endures beyond them into eternity, because when everything else falls away, there will still be love, the love that God is in God’s very self, the love that God pours out on us. Love is the energy that brought the universe into being; it is love that moves the sun and the other stars. That creative love is also the redemptive love that entered the world in human form in Jesus, dying and rising again for us. And we are invited to be part of it, to be drawn into this love and transformed by it: love bids us welcome again and again, as our weekly celebration of the Eucharist shows us. And God’s love for us teaches us to love one another, here in the Church, the Body of Christ, which is really Paul’s emphasis in 1 Corinthians 13. But of course it doesn’t stop there because God’s love sends us out to love our neighbours, both near neighbours, friends and family, and neighbours we do not know, maybe far away, especially those suffering most in our often loveless world. This is the love Paul describes. All we can do is thank God for this love that is before all things and will be at the end of all things – and be willing to let ourselves be transformed by it.