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April 5, 2009
First Friends
1 Corinthians 13
‘It’s about Love’
Doug Gwyn
The passage Chris
just read is one we probably hear more than any other
Scripture. We hear it occasionally in worship services, but
more often at weddings and especially at funerals. Families
often choose 1 Corinthians 13, not only because it is reassuringly
familiar. I think we often choose it for a memorial service
as the final meaning of the person whose life we gather to
remember. When we have known someone over many years,
there’s lot of experience we share with
them. It’s bound to be filled with
ambiguities. We knew them at their best and their
worst. At their most loving and generous, and at their most
stubborn, stingy, even hurtful. Perhaps most ambiguous is
knowing someone in their everydayness. Their averageness,
humdrum-ness. The ways that person could be irritable and
irritating. With all that experience, all that ambiguity, we
have ambivalent feelings about even those we have loved the most
– or especially those we have loved the most!
Maybe we grieve
the loss of pets most purely, because their love was so
unconditional. Perhaps because they are nonverbal.
Words are so important, and yet we can hear them and interpret them in
many different ways. Even our most heartfelt words can leave
others with confused reactions and mixed feelings. Our pets
spare us all that. Pets rely the power of a soulful
look.
Of course, when we gather to mourn a loved one, we have recently seen
them go through a period of great suffering, sometimes over the course
of years. Or they have died suddenly, without warning, and we
are overwhelmed by the shock. In either case, the pain we
feel on their behalf purifies the mixed feelings we felt over the
years. We want to affirm the best about the ones we love and
our relationship to them. And 1 Corinthians 13 helps us do
that. It reminds us that in the final analysis,
it’s about love. And as we savor the love we knew
with that person, it’s also a time to renew our resolve to
love those we still have, while we still can.
We’re continuing to approach Easter through the reflections
of the apostle Paul. 1Corinthians 13 is not a text often
heard on Palm Sunday. But as we reflect on that last week of
Jesus’ life, when he experienced the pain of so much
betrayal, abandonment, rejection, and physical agony, 1 Corinthians 13
offers us a good opportunity to remember that, whatever else it was
about, most importantly, it was about love.
Jesus’ death on the cross has been the subject of so much
reflection and so many words over the last 2000 years. Much
of it inspired, much of it confused and unhelpful. The death
of Jesus on the cross does reveal something devastating about human
alienation and sin. The Passion story portrays the darkness
of the human heart – the cruel machinations of politics, the
worst aspects of religion, and the darkest inner secrets of individual
souls. At the same time, the death of Jesus on the cross does
reveal something about God’s desire to draw us out of that
alienation, to free us from the guilt and hopelessness of
sin. And the death of Jesus on the cross hints at the mystery
of God’s justice – a riddle in the middle of a
hideous moment of human injustice.
But the more words we try to use to explain these things, the more
ambiguous the truth becomes. The very truth we thought we
could clarify with just a few more words. Just one more book
on the subject! I said a few weeks ago that
‘atonement’ is a word I still struggle to
understand. The more I learn, the more I realize I
don’t know. Atonement has so many meanings, so many
subtleties. It may have only three syllables, but
‘atonement’ is the biggest word I know.
So sometimes it’s good to stop piling up words about it and
just remember that it’s about love. Your
dog’s brown eyes looking up at you may be all you really need
to know about God’s love coming down to us in the person of
Jesus.
Of course, no one in history has outdone the apostle Paul in piling up
paradoxes and abstruse arguments about the meaning of the
cross. But 1 Corinthians 13 also reminds us that Paul never
forgot that it’s really about love. Perhaps no one
has ever been turned around more abruptly and absolutely than Paul by
the love of God in Jesus. Saul the persecutor of the Church
was knocked down on the Damascus Road by the blinding light of
Christ. But it was not a voice of wrath he heard while he lay
on that road. It was the voice of absolute vulnerability and
infinite kindness: “Saul, Saul, why do you
persecute me? It hurts you to kick against the
goads.” In other words, you’re trying to
kill something that’s really goading you, really getting at
you. And you’re hurting yourself as much as anybody
else. I can show you another way.
And so, perhaps 20 years later, Paul summarizes in a few words what he
has learned about love from Jesus. Let me repeat those
familiar words. “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 or resentful; 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.” I won’t try to expand on those
four verses. I can’t improve on them.
This Thursday at 5:30 in the afternoon, some of us with gather in this
room to hear once again the story of Jesus’ last hours of
life, as told by Matthew. From his Passover meal with his
disciples, to his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, to his trial
before the chief priests and Pilate, to his death on the
cross. It will be the usual, familiar words of a story we
know by heart, yet still struggle to understand. We know that
Jesus played out those last days in Jerusalem, seeing pretty clearly
that was coming. Yet he forged ahead in faithfulness to
everything his ministry had been about in those three short
years. But we can only speculate on how he understood that
faithfulness. Or again, we know that Jesus forged ahead in
some kind of hope – hope that this lost cause, this doomed
ministry to a doomed city would somehow bear fruit. But we
can only speculate how Jesus entertained such a hope from where he
stood, in the midst of such escalating confusion and
conflict.
What we know most surely is that it was about love.
“Love was the first motion.”
That’s how John Woolman put it when he reflected on his own
motives for a dangerous mission in his own ministry. Love was
the motivating force from the start of Jesus’ ministry, and
he followed that motion of love to the end. We
don’t have to speculate on that. That’s
the most clear. Love powered the faith. Love fired
the hope. As Paul summarizes, “Now faith, hope, and
love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is
love.”
This Thursday, we will also hear our First Friends choir sing an anthem
very fitting for the occasion, “We Know How the Story
Ends.” We will not speak of the Good News of Easter
until next Sunday. But Thursday, we will listen to the story
knowing the Good News that follows. Knowing how the story
ends has its advantages and its disadvantages. The
disadvantage is that it may allow us to hide from the true horror and
tragedy of Good Friday. Tiptoeing past Good Friday like a
scary cellar door is always a temptation. But when we
don’t open that door and look down into the darkness from
time to time, we may be more prone to be devastated when death takes
those closest to us, or when tragedy strikes our neighbors, or our
nation. But knowing how the story ends also offers an
advantage. When we let both the cross and the resurrection of
Jesus be the guiding story of our lives, then we can measure the depths
of tragedy within a larger framework of hope, even triumph.
We don’t shrug off or laugh off life’s disasters,
but they don’t crush us either. I heard someone
comment once on surviving the loss of her husband.
“Life eventually becomes good again, but it’s a
different definition of good.” We keep living into
that different definition over the course of our lives.
It’s a definition we will know fully only on the other side,
where, as Paul says, “I will fully know, even as I have been
fully known.” In the meantime, as Paul writes,
“We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be
made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not
come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death
of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our
bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to
death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made
visible in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor. 4:7-11).
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