020608

The Greatest of These
Margaret Manning

“When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason
as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.” So said
the apostle Paul in his exquisite exposition on love as the preeminent
Christian virtue. Oft quoted at weddings, our preeminent Western
celebration of romantic love, Paul’s poem on love transcends this lovely,
but limited understanding of this virtue. Romantic love was not in Paul’s
mind when he penned this verse. Instead, tremendous conflict in the
fledgling Corinthian church caused Paul great grief. There were
dissensions and quarrels over leadership and allegiance; there were
dissensions and quarrels over moral standards and immoral practices being
accepted by some in the church; quarrels existed over marriage and
singleness; lawsuits were being filed by believers against other
believers, and quarrels arose because of the inappropriate way some of the
Corinthians approached the Lord’s Supper.(1)

So, after reminding the Corinthians that they are one body with many
members and with many gifts, Paul tells the Corinthian church that the
height of Christian maturity and virtue is love. “If I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know
all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove
mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing....Love never fails; but if
there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues,
they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away....but now
abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is
love” (13:1-3, 8, 13).

Often, as I survey our present-day Christian landscape, I am not always
certain that love wins the day. More often than not, I encounter a war of
information, argumentation based on this book or that claim, this person’s
authority or that person’s expertise. I hear a noisy gong and a clanging
cymbal of purported knowledge and insight, but rarely do I see the gentle
preeminence of love. How are we to understand this, particularly in light
of Paul’s proclamation that without love we are nothing?

Oh, I’m well aware of the fear that begins to creep in when we talk about
love these days. Most of us feel the strong need to disassociate love
with the way we perceive it is proclaimed today--as total acceptance.
Surely, we must know that Paul is not equating love and acceptance when
he’s just spent the first half of his letter exhorting the Corinthian
church for their dissension and bad behavior.

Yet I worry that our own reticence to extend love to others without
condition belies our own forgetfulness about how God receives us. God
does not place conditions upon us to become disciples of Jesus. Paul also
wrote in his letter to the Romans, “But God demonstrates his own love
toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”
(5:8). If God loved us while we were yet sinners, why do we find it so
hard to love others--both within the Christian community and outside of
it?

In a world that largely perceives Christians to be in-fighters,
hypocritical, argumentative, and judgmental naysayers, would it not
demonstrate maturity to reexamine our fear of what it might look like if
we tried to take Paul’s words about love to heart?

As Christians concerned about truth, we want to grow in knowledge, in
convincing speech and argumentation, in miraculous displays of faith. And
yet without love, these pursuits, Paul warns us, are meaningless. Perhaps,
if we pursued love as earnestly and zealously as we pursued the truth, we
might learn, as Paul suggests in yet another of his letters filled with
admonitions to love “that speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in
all aspects into him, who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole
body, being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies,
according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth
of the body for the building up of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:15-16).

Since Jesus himself placed love as the fulfillment of all the law and the
prophets--love God and love your neighbor as yourself--shouldn’t we
likewise see love as our chief responsibility and chief goal?(2)

Margaret Manning is associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International
Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) See 1 Corinthians 1:10-14; 3:1-10; 4:14-21; 5:1-13; 6:1-11; 7; 8:1-4
as examples.
(2) Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34.


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