Continuing his reflections on the Church, Paul composes a true hymn to love...
Continuing his reflections on the Church, Paul composes a true hymn to love. In composing it, the apostle undoubtedly must have remembered the Savior's words about the commandment of love, spoken during the Last Supper, words Paul could not have failed to know. And yet the assertion that any efforts are meaningless in the absence of love makes one stop and think (vv. 1-3). After all, the matter is undoubtedly the actions of a righteous person, and actions that are deeply motivated. Why, then, are they worthless in themselves, despite the rightness of the motivation, if there is no love? The answer to this question is not hard to find in the second part of the hymn (vv. 4-7). Indeed, to treat people as described here is completely impossible if one remains within the framework of our not yet transfigured world. One can love this way only by dwelling in the Kingdom and living its life.
Then it becomes clear what love the apostle is speaking about in the first part of his remarkable hymn. The matter is not the love that is possible even among fallen people in our not yet transfigured world. The matter is the love of the Kingdom, the love that permeates all relationships here, being their foundation and driving force. In our not yet fully transfigured world, love is possible as an act of the will and as a relationship. We love those to whom we actively wish good.
But the very fabric of interpersonal relationships in our not yet transfigured world has a different nature; it is not identical with love, though sometimes it can bear love. In the Kingdom, however, every relationship is by definition an act of love. No other forms of relationship are possible there in principle; the nature of the Kingdom does not allow them. And if a person does not have such love, it means only one thing: such a person has not yet touched the Kingdom. Therefore, whatever he may do, even from the highest motives, he cannot enter the Kingdom until love becomes for him the sole spiritual foundation of all life and all relationships, both with God and with neighbors. The sign of this change can be the kind of attitude toward life and toward people that is described in the second part of the hymn Paul wrote.
