Something to strive for

To be a Christian is to, as St. Paul says, "strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts."  And the greatest, he says, is excellence in love. Whatever we do without love is pointless.  Saint Paul is adamant when he writes, “Love never fails.”  We strive for the greatest of spiritual gifts, but Love is “a still more excellent way.”  When all else fails – tongues, prophecies, knowledge, even faith – and we can be certain they will, Love still remains. (1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13)

Faith without love isn’t real faith.  Because God is love, and whatever we do without Him is pointless.  Believing in Him and loving Him without also loving all whom He loves (which is everybody, no matter how bad of a jerk they are) is an insufficient faith.

How well we love is measured by how much we care about the people who make us unhappy -- those who reject us, hurt our feelings, or give us reasons to fear them, or those who put obstacles in our spiritual walk or oppose us in other ways. (Hey, there's no one who is easy to love all the time.)  And yet we care about them.  Right?

To be a mature Christian, we have to put aside the childish ways that Paul speaks of.  Children handle bullies by running away in fear.  Or they withdraw into a depression and hide in fantasy worlds.  Or they complain about how cruelly they were treated, bad-mouthing the bully every chance they get.  Or they find ways to retaliate and inflict revenge.

Mature Christians handle bullies by running to God for the healing of our wounds and the soothing of our aches.  We learn from His Word how to righteously protect our hearts without isolating ourselves.  And we find ways to love others in the very moments when they’re behaving as enemies, even uniting ourselves to Jesus on the cross when it's time for that.  Remember, even Jesus sometimes walked away (Matthew 8:18, Matthew 12:14-15, John 8:59, John 10:39-40, John 11:53-54 to cite a few).

To refuse to love bullies until they treat us nicely is to break away from our union with God.  Saint Paul lists some of the ways that we do this: impatience, unkind behaviors, jealousy, pride and pomposity, making ourselves seem better than others, rudeness, insisting on our own way, being quick-tempered, brooding over how we've been hurt, rejoicing when something bad happens to those who were bad to us, refusing to bear all things including unjust treatment, rejecting what the Bible and Church teachings say about unconditional love, forgetting to hope for Christ's victory, and quitting when our love for others doesn’t produce the results we want.  Sounds like everyday life in American politics, doesn’t it?

Jesus gives us a simple definition of Love in the Gospel: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13)   Love is the surrender of all we hold dear and all we have, the surrender of our very selves.  As Saint Paul says, it never fails; rather, it builds up and brings all things to fulfillment, to perfection.

This seems quaint, clichéd perhaps, and repeated often in our society, although not with the fervor Saint Paul had in mind; and this repetition can dull the impact.  It can become the background noise to a wedding, the verse on a Valentine’s day card, or the syrupy lyric in an over-tuned song.

This isn’t, though, what Saint Paul has in mind here.  Look back over what he says about Love—not just the part about being patient and kind, but the whole treatise.  Love is what makes speech not just a clashing cymbal.  It’s what gives meaning to prophecy and to works of charity and self-sacrifice.  Our faith may be enough to move mountains but, without Love, it’s nothing.   Love is what takes us from the present things to the greater things; Love is what will bring us to full and perfect knowledge.  Not faith.  Not good works.  Love.  How radical that sounded in the First Century!   And how radical it is even today!

The invitation for us is, and always has been, to critically examine what we do in our lives and why we do those things.  And to ask if we do them as loving responses.  And, whatever our response, does it come out of a place of Love?  Do we offer good works out of Love for those we serve?   That is, do we stand with them as brother and sister?  Or are we doing it out of some sense of obligation, to win an award, or just habit?  Do we insist upon an orthodoxy in faith and belief out of Love for God, or out of a desire to be correct?

None of the things Saint Paul compares to Love are bad things.  And life would be far worse off if we lost any of them.  Yet, in the absence of Love, they can and do grow twisted and gnarled.  All words become clashing cymbals without the Word of Love to guide them.  And so we are invited to a deeper sense of Love in our lives.  To strive for it.  To be guided by it.  Love never fails.