Faith, hope and love,
these three, says Paul in the final verse of chapter 13 – the verse
everyone remembers. Then he adds… the greatest of these is love… and
people vaguely wonder why. Perhaps he is
saying, you can lose your faith -- some people do, or wonder if they have; and
you can lose hope… But if agapē/love
goes, you are in the abyss. As Simone
Weil put it, while she was starving and with tuberculosis, and writing about
affliction during the Nazi-occupation of France, If the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something
which is almost equivalent to hell.[1]
Now there is something to notice here. I am sure you remember the Greek menein (μενειν), to abide. It has prominence in the writings of John,
for instance: Abide in me, and I in you…
Earlier last year we had a series of talks about abiding, and how it describes
the special bond between God and us, between Jesus and the disciple. I mention it now because Paul chooses that
word here: And now abide faith, hope, love, these three… These three central gifts abide in
us. They are gifts – we did not put them
there. In the Letter to the Romans Paul
writes that hope does not disappoint us,
because God’s agapē/love
has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to
us.[2] Faith is given, and faith abides in us; hope
is given, and hope abides in us. They
are bound together, illumined, made meaningful, by love, agapē, God abiding in us. God is
love, writes John[3]. In contemplative life and prayer, consent to
God’s Spirit, these are the changes – gradual, subtle as they may be – that we
become aware of. Ego recedes, loosens
control. But the greatest is love, says Paul. Love abiding in us is simply the image of God
in us, our journey towards Christlikeness and to being fully human.
It may be that the primacy of agapē/love will become clearer
to Christ’s followers, with all that is happening in our day. The church is deeply and irremediably
compromised in the eyes of the world, widely rejected and despised. Meanwhile, human society is increasingly
besieged by climate change and natural disaster, fire and flood, by nationalism
and violence, even the clash of religions…
We are scarcely keeping pandemic disease at bay. Truth itself has become negotiable. More and more people are being governed by
despotism, cruelty and ignorance. The
light Jesus gives us is, as Paul wrote, faith, hope and love, but the greatest
of these is agapē/love.
God lit its spark in us, as John puts it, in the beginning – we are made in the
image of God, and God is agapē/love. In the Hebrew scriptures we are commanded to
love God, ourselves and our neighbour. Jesus
showed us the way, and abides in us, in agapē/love .
[1]
Simone Weil: The Love of God and
Affliction, in Waiting On God
(Fontana, 1959)
[2]
Romans 5:5
[3] I
John 4:8
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