A lot of people think that Paul’s
writing is convoluted and hard to understand.
That it’s kind of baroque, and when it’s not baroque, it’s cranky. I’ve even heard some folks say he’s not very
pastoral, and apparently they mean by that that he isn’t always sugary or even particularly
sympathetic. And at times, all of that
is true: his writing can be hard to understand, and he certainly seems to get a little bit cranky at
times, although what seems that way to us is usually just a rhetorical
device. But he also wrote some of the
most beautiful prose in the New Testament . . . “I consider,” he wrote “that
the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing with the glory about to
be revealed to us,” and he pictured the “whole creation, waiting with eager
longing for the revealing of God’s children.”
And don’t forget it was Paul who assured us that “neither death, nor
life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor
anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
But arguably, the most popular of his
writings is today’s passage, especially at weddings, where it’s doubtless being
recited somewhere at any given hour
of the day. Here he describes one of the
core marks or attributes of the Christian life, or one of the supposed attributes, at any rate. He argues that not one other of our other
traits is as important, that this one mark overshadows them all: if we have
prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and all if we
have faith enough to move mountains,
but have no love, we are empty, we are nothing, we are pure noise. Bonging gongs and clanging symbols. Ringo
Starr on drums. Love washes everything
else away, it drowns them right out, it overshadows them in it’s
importance. All those other characteristics—prophecy,
faith, knowledge and all that jazz—don’t amount to a hill of beans without
love.
But just what is this love stuff? Paul talks about it as if it is a thing, something you can have, he
says: “if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am
nothing.” And if it is a thing that one can have—and presumably not have—what’s it made of? Of what does it consist? And more to the
point, how do we get some? Are we born
with it, or do we acquire it somehow, does someone come along and give it to us?
Well.
When we were children, our parents loved us—another way to put it is
gave us their love—and we loved them back.
And we hear all the time of people incapable of love, and the story-line
is it's because their mama or daddy didn't love them, so is that where we get love?
From parents, or others who love us? Is there some kind of age limit, some kind of
developmental stage, beyond which us getting love from somebody else doesn't
work? We’ve all heard stories about sociopaths
who are incapable of returning love . . .
And that returning business brings up another thing: love requires two
parties, an “I” and a “thou,” as Martin Buber puts it. It takes two to tango, a love-er and a lov-ee, but only the lov-er
has to actually have love. A staple of
television drama is unrequited love, and we’ve all loved an inanimate
object—I just love my iPad—which more
than likely can't love us back.
All in all, this love is a very
complicated business, but culturally, we tend to dumb it down to an emotion, as
something that makes our hearts go pity-pat.
Although we say love is a
many-splendored thing, when we say the word, what we’re really talking about is feelings, nothing more than feelings.
Modern science, of course, views this
kind of love as nothing but chemical reactions, and they’ve shown that a class
of opioids called endorphins, produced by the central nervous system, produces
these feelings of euphoria, and that in a romantic relationship, they tend to
not be produced after a certain number of years. leading to the infamous
seven-year itch of Hollywood fame and Marilyn Monroe’s dress.
The Greeks, of course, were well aware
of this all of this, much more so than we
seem to be, and had three words for that little thing we just call love. Eros is
the word they used for erotic love, or what we might call romantic love, whispered by two people one to another for thousands
of years. Philos is their word for familial, sisterly or brotherly love,
that between members of a family, mother to son, father to daughter. Agape
is what they called a “higher” form of love, an appreciation that arises based
on conscious evaluation and choice. Agape love is not something one “falls
into,” it's something one chooses and,
contrary to what you may have been taught in Sunday school, it’s applied to
humans as well as the divine. And that’s
the kind of love Paul is talking about here.
Agape.
So.
Let’s recap. Paul is talking
about love as a thing here, as
something we can have, if not hold.
Further, he’s using the word agape
here, which the ancient Greeks considered the “highest” species of love,
note the quotes around “highest.” Finally,
we’ve seen that agape is an
appreciation that results from conscious evaluation and choice. Thus, in a way, we’ve answered the question
of how do we get some love: by evaluating the person or object and choosing to love him, her or it.
And it makes a certain amount of sense,
doesn't it? This is how we just might be able to live out Jesus’
commandment to love our enemies: we evaluate, we gain knowledge about a person
or a peoples and thereby gain an appreciation, a love of them through understanding
and perhaps even empathy. Jesus
doesn't say we have to feel an emotion for them, we don't have to go all mushy
inside of us at the thought of them, but that we should open ourselves up to
them through knowledge, and learning and understanding. In other words, we are to appreciate them,
how they came to be who they are, or—as euphemism would have it—where they’re
coming from.
That's the point Paul is making here,
and he puts it very graphically: “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.” If I do not have love, I may speak with the
most silver tongue, sing the most beautiful tune, but what comes out will just
be noise, nothing to it but sound. If I
know everything, if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and
knowledge, but have no love, well . . . I am nothing. Without a relationship with my fellow human
beings, entered into with empathy and compassion, without an appreciation of the other, without being able to put ourselves in their place, walk a mile in
their shoes, then it is all worthless.
Our beautiful speech, our tremendous knowledge, all our fine deeds of
charity will come to naught.
In the last line of our passage, Paul speaks
of three attributes: faith, hope and love; says that they “abide.” And it's important to note that Paul uses the
Greek word we translate as “abide” in a permanent sense, in an indwelling
sense. They are virtues in the ancient Greco-Roman sense: eternal, changeless and
true. “Faith, hope, and love abide,
these three,,” he says, “and the greatest of these is love,” and it's not hard
to see why. Faith and hope are qualities
of individuals, but love is relational, it involves two parties, it involves Buber’s
I and Thou. It has the potential to glue
societies together, to bring peace between peoples.
The love Paul speaks of is a conscious
love, brought about by studying and learning about the “other.” And this appreciation breeds compassion and understanding,
it engenders a desire to help, to work together, instead of simply condemning
them when we get crosswise.
There’s a saying “hate the sin and love
the sinner” that is too often used in a trite, almost smug way by people who,
if they don't hate the sinner as well as the sin, do a pretty good imitation of
it. But if we think about agape, the love Paul writes about, you can almost see
how that might be. Paul isn't asking
that we condone what others do, that
we love what we consider “sin.” Neither
Paul—or Christ—expect us to condone or accept the beheading of journalists, to
feel all warm and fuzzy about murders or rapists or jihadi terrorists. But we are
expected to love them. We're
expected to acknowledge their humanity, that they are created by the same
loving, forgiving God as we. Before we condemn them, we are asked to understand
them, because that’s our vocation: to be the active presence of God’s love in
the World. After all, as the song goes,
they will know that we are Christians by our love. Amen.
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