We’ve heard today the 13th chapter of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, which is the Blessed Apostle’s great “Hymn to Charity.” This is a very famous passage of Sacred Scripture, and rightly so; it’s well-known and it’s commonly used, often at weddings. I Corinthians 13 is one of those chapters of the Bible that’s worth going back to, again and again, reading slowly, contemplating, praying with. It’s one of the most beautiful passages in all of human literature; and it’s theologically profound.
It’s helpful first to know a bit about its context. The Corinthians were a pretty rowdy people. Corinth was sort of the Atlantic City of the ancient world. It was a port town, a hot-bed for various kinds of profligate activity. It was also a very cosmopolitan place, a diverse place, a place where all kinds of different cultures came together. The last several weeks, we’ve been reading St. Paul’s advice about finding unity amid diversity, and this is why. Corinth was a very diverse community, and they needed help seeing how they could dwell in unity as brothers and sisters despite their differences. So St. Paul gave them the image of the various limbs and organs of the body that we talked about last week; the week before, he had talked about the many gifts being united in the one spirit of God. Today he ties it all together. Today he gives the fundamental unifying principle. It’s love. Charity, to be precise. Not some gooey Rom-Com emotion, but true love. Amid the various indulgent false forms of love that the Corinthians lived in the middle of, many of the same sorts of temptations and pitfalls we have in our society today in fact, St. Paul needed to teach them what real, true, meaningful Love really is. Love is described here as the necessary condition for all good works, a law strictly binding upon all Christians as the norm of our behavior. St. Paul talks about Faith and Hope as well, intimately connected. Faith, Hope, and Love: the three great realities which abide in Christian experience, when all else passes away. And the greatest of these is Love. He uses the word nine times in this chapter. Love is a consequence of faith, but it’s more than that. It’s also the greatest expression of the Christian spirit and the closest imitation of the life of God: we are most like God when we have true profound Love. And Love is our source and sign of unity even when we seem to be divided by various differences and diversities.
St. Paul describes all the things which are good but don’t have much meaning without Love, like prophecy, and knowledge, and gift of tongues. Love isn’t talked about abstractly or only conceptually; it’s described through its characteristics and its activities. Love is a capacity rather than a commodity. Love is about how broken open your heart is. This capacity gives focus to the other human gifts, like wisdom and knowledge, which have no anchor without love. Love is the capacity to live for others. The capacity to be selfless. The capacity to make sacrifices. And we grow in love, like anything else, by practicing. We grow in love by loving well. Acts of love, acts of charity, acts of selflessness increase our capacity for love, increase the love which is in our hearts and ready to be realized when needed. Love is the measure of all other things: all other spiritual gifts are judged in terms of love. It is the sure and certain guidepost to determine whether one’s life, one’s decisions, one’s preferences are in accordance with the will of God. Are my decisions rooted in love, rooted in a capacity to live for the sake of others? Do I have that capacity? How much do I need to expand my heart, how much does that heart need to be broken open, to increase that capacity? How central is real sacrificial love to me?
St. Paul almost gets to that incredible insight that his counterpart St. John had expressed in his epistles: love is so powerful and so real, true love is so profound and tangible, it’s almost like a person. And St. John eventually realized, you know, love is a person. In fact, love is the person of God. God is love. God doesn’t just represent love; he doesn’t just show us how to love; he doesn’t just manifest love more perfectly than the rest of us. He is love. And when we pass from this earthly life, our sorrows and struggles at an end, we will spend eternity in the presence of Love itself, Love Himself. In the meantime, here from this altar, in his Sacred Body and Blood, Our Lord gives us a foretaste of that heavenly life of perfect love, as he fills us with his grace in the Blessed Sacrament: food for our journey, the medicine of immortality, a deep infusion of that same love that we desire to place at the center of our lives. That Love which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, which never fails. Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, one day, we will see love, face to face. Now abideth faith, hope, and love; these three; but the greatest of these is love.