1 Corinthians 12,31-13:13
Some years ago a popular song told us, “What the world needs now is love, love, love.” Perhaps the composer of this song was inspired by St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. At any rate, Paul of Tarsus would totally agree with the main lines of the song.
Only one person in the history of the United States has had the good fortune or, if you prefer, the misfortune to be inaugurated four times as President. He was the remarkable Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
As his biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin will attest, the man from Hyde Park, New York was not an especially religious person. Yet, he knew his St Paul. At each of his inaugurations, the Roosevelt family Bible was held by the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. And each time it was open to today’s superb second reading on love. The President was as much impressed by the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s letter to the small Christian colony at Corinth in Greece as we are.
This chapter has been correctly called a hymn of love. I suppose too we might name it a hymn to love. Many would argue that the thirteenth chapter of first Corinthians is not merely the finest prose in St Paul’s letters but also in the entire New Testament. Authors of whatever stripe would consider their oeuvre complete if they could run off such a sublime message on their word processors. The Holy Spirit had full burners working when He inspired Paul of Tarsus on this passage.
I recall as a boy listening to the late actor, James Mason, with his marvelous voice recite this chapter from memory. As young as I was, I felt goosepimples moving swiftly around my skin. I can well understand how Beethoven’s audience must have felt that night he first conducted his Ninth Symphony.
All of us at some time have asked in one form or another, “What is love?” There are of course many answers to the query. The one offered by mystics is the one I find most satisfying. They would say simply that love is a person. His name is Jesus. And, if you want to be an authentic lover, become that Jesus. To paraphrase Nobel Prize laureate Seamus Heaney, He is the “lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.”
One author further suggest a strategem for our instruction. Wherever Paul mentions the word “love,” we should substitute the word “Jesus.”
Listen! Jesus is always patient and kind. He is never jealous. He is never boastful or conceited. He is never rude or selfish. He does not take offense and is not resentful. He takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth. He is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.
The glorious language does fit our Leader well, does it not? But suppose that wherever St Paul mentions love, we substitute our own names. Is there anyone here who thinks the language fits us? If anything, we should grow red in the face – all of us – and hopefully sigh our regrets. Yet, the exercise does tell us the direction we Christ followers should be heading.
However, we might better be able to substitute our own names with more confidence if we were to begin to practice what someone has called the Golden Rules for Living. If you open it, close it. If you turn it on, turn it off. If you unlock it, lock it up. If you break it, admit it. If you can’t fix it, call in someone who can. If you borrow it, return it. If you value it, take care of it. If you make a mess, clean it up. If you move it, put it back. If it belongs to someone else, get permission to use it. If you don’t know how to operate it, leave it alone. If it’s none of your business, don’t ask questions.
Aldous Huxley spent some time as professor of the Humanities at the celebrated Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a world-class intellectual. There he told a friend, “…it’s rather embarrassing to have spent one’s entire lifetime pondering the human condition and to come toward its close and find that I really don’t have anything more profound to pass on by way of advice than, ‘Try to be a little kinder.'” St Paul would say, “Amen to that!”