NOT IN LOVE

1 Corinthians 13:1-13 (RSV)

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

First Corinthians Thirteen comes round cyclically in our lectionary, but is heard more often at weddings because of the word love. Most people don’t realize though, that Paul is not talking about romantic love, he’s not talking about “being in love” with each other, the word is αγαπη. Aγαπη is love that is not a feeling at all, but how we treat others; especially, I taught my middle school students when I was their chaplain and teacher years ago, how we treat people whom we don’t know, or don't know well, or people we never even heard of.

In the years that Beverly McDaniel and I made the New Testament Greek word αγαπη the central theme of our school, with “love God, love neighbor,” every student learned that love in the biblical sense is kindness, help given, generosity, thoughtfulness, consideration, courtesy, sympathy, charity, patience, humanity. Lovingkindness. chesed.

Teaching and working with those young people was the most important thing I have ever done in my life. My hope is that some of those then-children whom we taught, many of them college students and beyond, remember.

Love is not a feeling. Love is how you treat other people.

TW+