We’ve heard today the 13^th 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.  For many of you, I suspect it may have been read at your wedding.  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 paragraphs in all of human literature; and it’s theologically profound.  

It’s helpful first to know a bit about its context.  The Corinthians were kind of a rowdy sort of people.  Corinth was sort of the Atlantic City of the ancient world. It was a port town, a hot-bet 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.  It 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 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.  Love is described as the condition for all good works: it’s a law strictly binding upon all Christians as the norm of our behavior.  He 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 an 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.  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, knowledge, and gift of tongues.  Love isn’t talked about abstractly or conceptually; it’s described through its characteristics and activities.  Love is a capacity rather than a commodity.  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.  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 ready to be realized whenever 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, to increase my capacity?  How central is real love to me?  St. Paul almost gets there, to that incredible insight that his counterpart St. John had and expressed in his epistles: love is so powerful, it’s so real; true love is so profound and tangible, it’s almost like a person.  And St. John realized, you know, love is a person.  In fact, love is the person of God.  God is love.  He 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 Himself.  In the meantime, here from this altar, in his Sacred Body and Blood, Our Lord gives us a foretaste of that heavenly life, as he fills us with his grace in the Blessed Sacrament: food for our journey, the medicine of immortality, and 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.  That Love which never fails: for whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.  For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.  But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am also known.  And now abideth faith, hope, and love; these three; but the greatest of these is love.