1 Corinthians: You Are a People - Part 5

In the fifth part of our series we looked at the famous love passage: 1 Corinthians 13. This passage has been used so often at wedding after wedding that it is difficult not to think of it as mushy sentimentalism that comes part and parcel with wedding cake and toasts to the bride and groom and confetti. For this reason New Testament scholar Richard Hayes suggests that ‘this passage needs to be rescued from the quagmire of romantic sentimentality in which popular piety has embedded it.’ In a secular democracy - where we prize the freedom to choose between different religious narratives while also ensuring that no religious authority should influence our political decisions - love is removed from the specifically Christian narrative which gave it a distinctive shape and elevated love to the greatest of all virtues. In the context of a secular democracy love becomes an abstract idea. But for Paul there is nothing abstract about love: 'Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.' Love is not a fleeting moment of feeling, it’s not an ethereal experience or a vague impression. Paul thinks love looks like something and he is describing what it looks like. We might think that by making love so concrete, by demystifying love as it were, we lose any sense of love’s transcendent quality. But - perhaps counterintuitively - it is by describing love so clearly as Paul does, that love becomes something transcendent. Because in Paul’s concrete description there are no qualifications. Paul doesn’t say love is patient so long as, love is kind only if, love sometimes hopes, love usually perseveres. There is no contingency, there is no escape clause; instead Paul says love is an unqualified posture towards everyone and that’s what makes love something transcendent no longer subordinate to the strategies of our secular democracy. No wonder Saint Augustine is able to say: ‘Love and do as you will’.

 

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