1 Corinthians 13.1-13
Paul – the only thing that matters is faith worked out as love.
Today our reading from Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians continues directly on from last week, and is a particularly well-loved and popular passage of Scripture. It speaks about love, and does so beautifully.
Because it is so spiritually powerful, it demands much from us and is a hard reading in many ways because we can struggle to understand the breath-taking beauty of the great love of God revealed here.
But it is also one of the most faith-affirming passages in Scripture and brings as very close to God indeed.
So let’s look at what Paul calls “a still more excellent way". It is the way of Agape love, the love of God himself. The way of self-sacrificial love.
Some context: Last week we reminded ourselves that we are already one and fully unified in and by the Spirit, because we become one with and in Christ and are baptised into one unified body.
How God gives all of we (us?) individuals who make up this holy body of Christ called the parish of Drayton, various gifts to build each other and our neighbour up. These gifts are expressed by our individual souls according to the nature God gave us.
Paul tells us we are to desire the greater gifts, so what follows is the most excellent way to ensure the fullest fruiting of these gifts.
The first thing our text says, in the first three verses is, "without Love, I am nothing!" None of the things I can do have any power or importance without love.
Without love, the sort of love that God has and shows toward me/us, none of it matters. It is useless and possibly even counter-productive. Even the best we have and do and intend, is nothing without a genuine, self-sacrificing, God-like love.
Paul starts with speaking in tongues - both those languages that can be understood by men and those languages that only angels understand. Tongues alone mean nothing.
Without love, all the words we can say in any language in which we may say them are no more than an irritating gong or discordant cymbals.
"But what if I have the learned all of the doctrines of the Church, then I am at least part way there." Paul says, "No." He says that I am nothing even if I know everything, and even if God Himself speaks through me, if I do not have love.
The Church needs all these things, but they are less than not enough by themselves. They are not even significant without love.
Faith. If I have faith I am safe because we are saved by grace through faith. But Paul says that even this is not enough because you have faith in the wrong God!
Faith is not genuine, saving faith without love because God is love.
So, what I say and what I know and what I believe is not enough. Surely, if I add my actions, and they were consistent with faith, then I am secure!
Once again, Paul writes that it profits me nothing. Even if I give all of my possessions to help the poor, or suffer horribly for the faith (the literal translation of “hand over my body”, v.3, “deliver my body to be burned.”
It does no good. I can still miss the mark. I can still fail to be a genuine disciple. The big thing to note here is even with the evident and abundant gifts of the Holy Spirit, without love I have nothing, and I am nothing. I must have love.
Then, Paul takes over four verses to picture this love for us. He does it positively and negatively - what love is like, and what love is not like. This is a picture of how love looks in real life.
We don’t have the time to look at each description of love, as much as we would love to!
Finally, Paul sums all of these qualities up by saying “love never fails.” Love never fails? But who of us could be like this? Who could love like this? Who could possibly qualify?
The answer is that Paul is not writing about us, first and foremost. He is writing about God's love! He is writing about real love not the corrupted, pale copy of love that we sing along to in our love songs (to which I confess.)
God is telling us about His love for us, and the love that he would have us live out for one another in our Saviour.
We each have it in us, because God gives it to us - pours his own on us and into us, and installs it within us along with his Holy Spirit when he makes us his own!
This is the still more excellent way of which Paul writes.
In vv.11-12, Paul then seems to break away from this love talk to talk about other things, like how we perceive reality.
“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.”
But Paul is still talking about love and the most excellent way. He is challenging us to think like grown-ups, to see clearly, and to face the truth. And what is the truth about this agape love?
The love Paul was writing about is not simply ‘just like’ God’s love for us, it is the actual love which God has for us and which he has poured out on us! It is God’s love through us.
The only way we can have this love for others is if God pours his love into us until it runs over and flows out of us. He loved us. He saw our need in sin, and planned to do the impossible, because that is what we needed.
As Jesus says in John 4: The living water, which is the great love of God, wells up within us and flows out through our cracks and flaws (John 4:14).
Now God uses every part of our nature (especially those parts we think are cracked) to spread his love. Because “All things work together for good to those who love God and have been called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28)
This is agape love: That Jesus loves us so much he died for us, taking the judgement of God against our sins on himself, and dying the death we have earned, so that he could forgive us and give to all who believe eternal life with Him.
That is the love about which Paul writes. Without this love we are nothing but death even as we live.
Agape is essential and it is eternal. We needed it from God, and God has given it to us. His love. If we are God’s, this love must be part of us for God is love. We cannot be anything or do anything that is significant or lasting or valuable without this love.
This love is not best described as an emotion.
It is a Spirit-given and Spirit-worked act of both the mind and the will. Being a believer is therefore a deliberate, not a natural, "doing what comes naturally" kind of thing.
Word and Sacrament play into our living out of this love very powerfully because God is the Source and the Power behind this love for us, and behind this love in us, and behind this love from us.
Our minds and hearts can’t contain this love, and it just pours out through all our cracks and transforms the world.
The message from Paul is that real Christian love is the most excellent way; anything else is a deception.
Jesus said all of this just as beautifully, if more simply, in John 13:35, "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Let me pray ...