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 he loved us and sent his Son as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God
so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 1 John 4:9-11
“And I will show you a still more excellent way”, Paul
says at the end of 1 Corinthians 12 where he has been speaking of the different
gifts which the Holy Spirit gives believers for the one purpose of proclaiming
that Jesus is Lord. He then launches
into “The Love Chapter”, which is how we often refer to 1 Corinthians 13. This chapter, often read at weddings and
presented in sermons with the idea that the bride and groom and all of us
should listen and do, gives us a daunting standard if we view it as an expectation
to fulfill. Let’s take a look at the
first three verses:
“If I speak in the tongues of men and
of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 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 have not
love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I
deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Paul basically goes down the list of the
spiritual gifts he has just been speaking of in chapter 12 and says that,
unless our underlying motive for the use of those gifts is love, our actions
serve no purpose. No matter how eloquent I am in the proclamation of God’s word,
I am just a lot of empty noise if I don’t have love. And, regardless of how profound my grasp of
Scripture may be or whether my faith has accomplished incredible feats, if I
don’t have love, I am nothing. That is harsh!
“I am nothing”! And finally, if I sacrifice everything,
including my life—allowing myself to be burned
at the stake, unless I did it from love, it was a pointless sacrifice! In other words, it does not matter how much
you say, how much you know or how much you give up, if you don’t have love,
it is meaningless as far as God is concerned.
In light of that, it seems important
to know how Paul defines this love which is so essential. Let’s keep going:
I don’t know about you (well, I do know about you, but it’s arrogant and rude to say so), but if I’m honest, I have to admit that I am frequently impatient and unkind. I am often envious of what others have that I do not. I like for people to notice things that I do, so I try to bring attention to those things. I think I know best in many situations, and sometimes have been known to rudely let people know that they need to do it my way. I admit to being happy sometimes when ‘what goes around comes around’ and someone ‘gets what’s coming to them’, which is Karma and not Christianity! There are plenty of situations where I’m not willing to bear ALL things, or believe everything I’m being asked to believe. When it comes to continued hope regarding some situations, I do have my limits; and there have been many times that I have been pushed beyond what I thought was my ability to endure. In my experience, and if you’re honest, in yours as well, love has been known to end. So where does that leave us if these verses are telling us what God requires in order for anything we do to have meaning?
The remainder of the chapter goes on to say that one day the gifts which the Holy Spirit gave us for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel will no longer have a point; the thing we, as Christians, have spent our lives talking about and looking forward to—will have happened; everything given to us will have served its purpose, which was simply a temporary, earthly purpose.
At that time, even the knowledge we were given about God will turn out to have been only a partial understanding, or a dim awareness of the truth. Paul says, the way we view things on earth versus the way we will understand them in eternity is comparable to the way we view things as children versus the way we understand them as adults. What we thought we understood will one day give way to what really is.
Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” The reality is, every gift but one will pass away. Even faith and hope will come to an end; there will be no more need for them because we will finally see God face to face, and know him fully, in the same way he has always fully known us. Only love will remain; this is why Paul says it is the greatest gift.
But, we still have the dilemma: if this chapter has been about how useless we and our works are without this great gift of love, yet we see that, compared to the definition of love given, we have no hope of reaching the standard, are we left with nothing? Fortunately, that is not the case.
Paul is not telling us that we must conjure up a flawless love as the motive for our actions. We have no ability to be anything but noisy gongs and clanging cymbals; we will always be nothing and gain nothing regardless of what we do if we are depending on our love, because, even at our very best, we do not remotely begin to possess the kind of love that is required. Only Christ possessed that love; and he gave it to us at the cross. The gift of love is not power given to us so that we can love; it is Christ’s love for us.
The love described in this chapter is the love of God, and “the more excellent way” Paul speaks of is our recognizing and resting in that love which has already been poured out for us. Action/Consequence wants us to think that God gave us gifts simply so that we could do good works for him, but that is just our way of striving for our own meaning with determination and gritted teeth. Death/Resurrection tells us that the gifts have been given to us for the purpose of sharing what Christ has already done for us; everything we do will flow from our gratitude for his love. We are called to love with joyful abandonment because he loved us; but it is Christ’s love alone, not our poor imitation of it, which infuses and gives true meaning to whatever we do.
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