'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.
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 do not have love, I am
nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that
I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is
patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It
does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not
rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes
all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for
prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for
knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy
only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
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. 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. And now faith,
hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.'
--I Corinthians 13: 1-13
The Most Rev. Michael Curry at the royal wedding last year.
“If it ain’t about love, it ain’t about God!” That has been the rallying cry for our
Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, even before the wider church—and non-church,
for that matter—got introduced to him on the grand stage of the royal wedding a
year ago. "If it ain't about love, it ain't about God!" For some, though, these words reeked of sentimentalism. It’s not that simple,
folks scoffed. It’s just fluff. Love alone won’t repair the breaches in our
world. The Beatles were wrong. You need more than love.
Certainly love by itself, love that is a mere feeling and is not turned into action, cannot and will not accomplish such a monumental
task as to repair the breaches and transform the world. But love
that is motivated? Love that inspires
and excites and is given flesh and blood and bone? Love that can look at another human being and
proclaim in the Nguni Bantu language, “Ubuntu!”—that is, “I am because we are!”—well,
that is the kind of love that can transform the world. That is the kind of love Bishop Curry preached then and that we hear proclaimed in one of the most quoted pieces of the New Testament.
There is a reason why we hear I Corinthians 13 at virtually
every wedding we attend. Paul’s great hymn
to love is something that we pray for, that we hope to experience in our own
time: Love that is patient and
kind; Love that is not arrogant or
rude; Love that hopes all things,
endures all things, believes all things; Love that never ends. Oh how we
long for that love! We read this passage
with such fire and passion at a wedding, praying that that kind of love will be lived
out by the couple. Can any of us hear those words and not be convinced of the
power of such love to make right all that has been wronged, to give life to
that which is left for dead?
Still, those cynics come back and remind us that there are many
kinds of love; in fact, the ancient Greeks had as many as six different words that
our somewhat inferior English language translates into love—philia, eros,
storge, pragma, philautia, and agape. What
kind of love, then, are we talking about here?
Is Paul saying that eros—romantic love—never ends? Is he saying that philia—brotherly love—is the
kind that hopes all things? Or perhaps storge—the
love between a parent and child—is so patient and kind? No, it is none of these. The word that is used over and over again is
agape. What agape is, however, is a bit complicated.
You see, of all the words that the Greeks used for love, agape
is the hardest to translate. There is no real English equivalent—the closest we
have is 'charity,' and that’s because Saint Jerome translated apage as caritas
when he wrote the Latin Vulgate. It is a word that is not found in any of the
contemporary Greek writers: Philo and Josephus never used it, nor did biblical writers
like Luke, Mark, and James. It is a word
that is practically unknown to any writer outside of the New Testament. What then, could it possibly mean? Scholar Preston Epps wrote in his seminal piece Thoughts From the Greeks: "it appears to grow out of a certain instant appeal and beneficent lift to all that is best in human nature and feelings that some persons experience whenever they come into the presence of the one who so affects them." (Epps, p. 68). It denotes a love that springs from
admiration and veneration, love which chooses its object with decision of will,
love that is rooted in compassion and self-denial. It is, as one of my Greek resources puts
it: love in its fullest conceivable form.
It is this kind of love that Paul proclaims to the
splintered community in Corinth. Rather
than a piece of poetry that we have admired and turned into quotes for our
wedding photo albums, this is a call to repentance, to a turning around of the individuals
of the community, to see that all of their religiosity means jack squat if it’s
not in the context of this kind of love. While we have romanticized I Corinthians 13, it certainly was not a sweet, adorable hymn for the folks who first heard it. Make no mistake, brothers and sisters, these words were not easy for the
Corinthians to swallow because they were a call for them to turn away from their current frame of mind and embrace something higher. Honestly, they’re
still hard for us to hear because the question inevitably is raised: “How could anyone actually love like that? "It’s not possible!" Oh, but it is, and Paul tells us why in verse
12: “Now I know only in part; then I
will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Paul has been fully known by God, called—if you
will—by God, and that knowledge, that being known by God, makes it possible for
him to proclaim such a love. That is how
mighty the call from God is, and the other two Scripture passages from this past Sunday also highlight the power of such a call.
'The word of the Lord came to me saying,
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations."
Then I
said, "Ah, Lord God!
Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy." But the Lord said to me,
"Do not say, 'I am only a boy';
for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you,
Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you."'
--Jeremiah 1: 4-8
'In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus read from the
book of the prophet Isaiah, and began to say, "Today this scripture has
been fulfilled in your hearing." All spoke well of him and were amazed at
the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this
Joseph's son?" He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this
proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your
hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" And he
said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.
But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when
the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe
famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow
at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the
prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian."
When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up,
drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their
town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed
through the midst of them and went on his way.'
--Luke 4: 21-30
Jeremiah was fully known, called by God as a young boy. He tried to run, but God never gave up on him. It was scary, as the people to whom Jeremiah
went would not believe him when he called them to repentance. Yet that call sustained him and allowed him
to proclaim his message. In the same
way, Jesus was fully known, called by God, and when he came home to Nazareth
and preached he had a message that was also hard for them to hear. It wasn’t just of repentance, but it was of
agape love, the kind of love that was not only for his own people but for all
people. The Nazarenes didn’t like this
very much, which is why they tried to kill Jesus when he pointed out God’s
redemptive love even for the Gentiles. Jesus was bold enough to proclaim that
message because he was fully known by God, and he knew it. He knew he was called, and when we know that
we are called we can proclaim with the same boldness as Paul, Jeremiah, and
yes, even Jesus, that such love can and will transform the world. I have been called to do that. You have been called to do that.
It is that call that enables us to proclaim such a message
with abandon. We get excited when folks
like Bishop Curry preach about it, but what we don’t realize is how radical that
message is! Agape love—love in its
fullest conceivable form—is terrifying.
Because it means that what we thought we knew about the world is not all
that there is. It means that there might
be other thoughts, other people out there on the other side of the tracks from
me whom God loves just as much. It means
that my way of thinking about them and about God might just be limited, and
that is scary. When we are confronted
with that we so very often lash out, we get defensive, and in the worst cases
we hurt each other. We kill the
prophets, like Jeremiah. We crucify the Lord of love
and life. We then retreat to our own
silos and proclaim our own version of love that is just for us, and we let
those people over there do their own thing while we do ours during the most segregated
hour of the week. That is not agape! That is not the love that Paul proclaims or
the love that Bishop Curry preaches. If
we really do want to change the world, we must start by being bold enough,
vulnerable enough, to proclaim that agape is truly the greatest, that it is
that which will forever abide, and that by living into it we can make alive what
human sin has destroyed.
