If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have 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 do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13
Some weeks are real stress tests for our nation. They are, in turn, stress tests for how much we (in our congregation) can keep a vision of a community that lives and loves each other across the political spectrum. Maybe because it has been an intense week, I think this vision is as vital as ever to be the kind of Christian community that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13. This passage is as close to the architecture and spiritual ethos of the church as we get; it’s a shame it’s often only read at weddings because it’s calling us to have this agape (Greek ἀγάπη, or “uh-gah-pay”) love between all of us.
So I’m gonna cover four things here: first, I’m gonna say a little about why agape love breaks the math of the universe with a new math. Then I’m gonna talk about what we tend to do and what we should not do with this passage. Then I’m gonna talk about how love hurts. Finally, swimming.
The Maths
So what is agape love? Love is one of those words so big that it’s almost meaningless, but here, Scripture gets helpfully specific on what agape love is—self-sacrificial, self-giving love. We Christians are called to that love because we were first given agape love. Any time we can just get a smidge of that between us, we taste the pure, true, original agape of God: self-giving without conditions. This breaks the old math of the universe.
The normal, “selfish” math of the universe is zero-sum; if one wins, then another must lose. You wrong me, I wrong you; you want my help, what’s in it for me? In many places in the world, you have to haggle like you expect the other person is trying to rip you off (because they probably are). The selfish math of the universe is like one eye for one eye, or one race only loving its own one race, all the way down until you reach the core of the selfish math: my one self only loves my one self.
At best, the selfish math of the universe is 1+1 = 2, and that’s only if everything goes perfectly. Often, it is a self-defeating, zero-sum game: 1-1 = 0.
But in Christ, God’s agape love introduces a new math that is like 1+1 = 3 logic (maybe even 1 - (-1) = 3). This math pours itself into history through a God who creates stars and planets and calls them by name (Psalm 147:4), much less a man dying and rising from the dead, appearing to over 500—that is breaking the math of the universe.
And it’s anything but selfish. As Jesus says in John’s gospel, he doesn’t do it for his own glory, he doesn’t do it for human praise, but God so loves the world he gave his son. In other words, the author of love gave love away until love was out…so more could be created. He broke the math of sin that enslaves humanity through death. The logic and power of sin is death (1 Cor 15:56), but God’s new math is love willfully choosing death for the sake of more love. From the Torah onward, Scripture points us to countless examples of how, through faith, God’s people can partake in the new math of faith, hope, and love.
And so we Christians are supposed to be students of the new math. The course is always ongoing. Agape love isn’t just an action, or even a series of actions, it’s the stream of our baptismal waters. In an agape community, there’s not just a designated agape specialist, we’re all swimming in it, practicing the new math where we don’t keep score. We just try to live into it in all we do, because without agape, we’re back to a math where gifts are not gifts but strings attached.
Sometimes people think that this passage is so jarring compared to what we talked about last week in 1 Cor 12 and the body of Christ, Paul’s chapter on spiritual gifts, but it makes total sense: the new math of agape love is the difference between whether our gifts are actually gifts or not. Does the body live for itself? Then it is not an agape body. Is your spiritual gift for someone else? If not, it’s not agape, and it’s not really a gift, for a gift must pass from you to someone else, no conditions, just offered. Per Paul, anything can be empty, useless, and selfish without agape love. All knowledge is partial, all prophecies are temporary, but agape is eternally embedded into God’s relationship to us and his world that it keeps going all the way until “completeness” (1 Cor 13:10). So when agape is truly present, by God’s grace, everything can be and is a gift.
Beware Self-Stories
So when we feel how big God’s agape love is, I hope we can see that one of the worst things we can do with this message is weaponize it, taking the “love” passages of Scripture as a brow-beating tool. If you’re trying to live a more loving life and really hold your love in high esteem only to think of your neighbor, “Look, they’re not being very loving, are they,” then you have missed the mark of this passage, keeping score, no longer in agape waters (this is not the same as not holding people accountable for wrongdoing, for if we fail to do so, we no longer are loving our wounded neighbor and others that may be harmed1).
But there’s another reason why using this passage as a point of pride over anyone else is probably a bad idea: we are so good at rationalizing our selfishness as selflessness. In the past twenty or thirty years, more movies have been made about the backstory of villains than in the previous 100 years of cinema—Joker, Wicked, Cruella, Mufasa to name a few. They almost all have one universal thing in common: yes, the person is deeply wrong, but they also have a story they tell themselves in which they are doing this out of love. A relatively small amount of the world’s evil is done by people who know it’s evil—I know it exists and happens, but it is still dwarfed by how much evil is done in the name of a falsely rationalized love, often a limited, self-centered love wrapped in the veneer of false goodness and counterfeit love. Those who have been on the wrong end of this know just how twisted and evil it can be.
So one reason we regularly confess in prayer is because we need to remember all the ways we have not been the hero of the story. We need to remember how many times we can deceive ourselves of our own goodness. There’s a sort of sneaky danger in the song, “They'll know we are Christians by our love,” because nobody knows better than Christians that Christians are experts at thinking they're being loving when they're not. And I would suspect all of us have done something in the name of love that were actually for self-love. We all fall short of the glory of God’s true agape love. We all need his agape to be given to us again and again.
Love Hurts
If it’s impossible for us humans to be fully and always agape, how can we know when we are getting close?
I think we can go to the title of that 70s song used in many-a-commercial, “Love Hurts.” But I’m not just talking about bad breakups, what I mean is that love has a cost. Even if it’s for more, Agape love really costs the giver something.
But we tend to avoid love that costs. We want a free lunch, even if there’s no such thing; it’s good in the economics of the old math to trade what isn’t precious for us. Billionaires can afford to be generous with their money, and I’m glad when they do, but what about their time? That would really cost them. And what about intangible things we might hold really dear? When is the last time you did something for love that really cost you your pride, or your “upper hand” moral position, or a boast you couldn’t resist making, or doing it your way?
I’m reminded of that saying, “You know it was a good negotiation if both parties felt like they lost.” I don’t think agape love is exactly like that. But sometimes, the only way you might really know you gave agape love is if you know it cost you something. If it didn’t cost you anything, it might still be love, but it might be hard to know.
So try to think, when’s the last time you gave something up where it really hurt you? Take a second and think of the last time you did something in love that felt like a leap of faith and a leap of pain. Maybe love doesn’t always require that, but when it does, you know you’re getting a flavor of agape.
I bet most of us have had experiences of love that we knew was love because it cost us something real. But also, can you remember what was gained with that true agape love? These are probably the hardest but best decisions you ever made in your life. Maybe you had to walk away from something good for you in order to follow what was truly loving and best for all, or you became a parent and realized you could only fully love your children by letting go of other things you loved, or you walked away from a career, or glory, or being well-liked because there was a call to love that was more important. And just because you knew you had to didn’t make it hurt less; it was the only thing that could let you get through the hurt.
So what does all this say about the love of God in Jesus Christ?
Sometimes, I think we get so disconnected from the sacrifices God has made for us, what it means that he poured out his blood for us, what we remember when we gather around the communion table, where Christ is really spiritually present with us as we remember that God gave himself away for us. God walked away from his divinity, his glory, his dignity, his power, the love and admiration of the people who knew him and more, all for us.
Let us not take it for granted that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ was real. It cost something; everything. It pained and anguished him, “Take this cup away.” We can’t fully know the mind of God, what it was like to literally let a piece of himself die, to let the most human person die. But we can know that the pain of our suffering hurt him even more, and it hurt him so much he would die for us. And he will keep coming back over and over for you.
Jump In
So, how do we respond to the grace of God’s agape? Let’s look at Peter.
I heard Jonathan Pageau talking earlier this week about Peter’s journey with water. We remember, of course, Peter trying to walk on water (Matt 14). He can make it a bit, but after only a few steps he starts sinking. Some of that has to do with lacking faith in Christ. But perhaps it also represents Peter trying to do it all himself. And if we think our agape love is what’s going to save us and earn a wage of salvation from God, we’re still trying to walk on water.
But what does Peter do after the resurrection? When Jesus is on the shore, and Peter realizes it’s him, he doesn’t try to walk on the water; he just jumps in (John 21). Now, he only wants to swim in love.
When we’re weaponizing love and comparing ourselves as more loving than others, or we’re trying to have a cost-free, pain-free love, we’re trying to walk on water, and we’ll fall through when the moment inevitably comes where we don’t. But when we remember that God is always giving us his selfless love, we can just swim in it. So, an agape community doesn’t think we can walk on water by our own power. We’ll get our swimming strokes wrong. Some of us need help swimming. We’ve just got to keep diving in the grace that God has given us by giving it to each other.
That’s exactly what we do in the Lord’s Supper. His feast, this communion, is where we remember God’s agape in the most core, sacred way, sharing it together. It’s his body and his blood, given for you—for all people. Everything in the universe is his body and blood given for you. The stars in the sky, the fulfilling career, the loyal friend, the loving parent…the heartbreaks, the waking up to your mistakes…the beautiful walks, or the afternoon ski….even the anxiety in a world where we know so much isn’t right, the sense that we need more agape in this world, even that is a gift of God’s agape. It’s all there in the body and blood.
So when we take and eat, know it has all been given for you. Go and do likewise. Jump in.
To be sure, Paul is describing his vision for the agape love of a Christian community—but is it possible to overfit this passage? For example, on the political level (as well as in cases of abuse, false teachers, and other public leaders), it’s often necessary to “keep score” and hold accountable, because part of loving your neighbor sometimes means helping protect your neighbor from your other neighbor.