NOTES for Co1 13:1-13

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.

Why Paul puts so high the charity? Why even faithfulness till death in itself, turns out little for the Kingdom without charity? Of course, we could say many things on what is faith, including the religious faith without charity. Moreover, there is probably no sense today to speak much about it: the examples of religious fanaticism (and this is what it is, in fact, the fullness of faith without a lesser grain of charity) are in front of the eyes of all. It is obvious that such a faith only destroys man, not talking of the fact that it is rather often dangerous for the close relations. But the problem is probably not only in it. The apostle indeed, does not probably want to speak here about only this human charity, which was known in all times, but also about the love of the Kingdom, witnessed by Jesus Himself, in particular at the Last Supper. And it obliges a little to look otherwise on the words.

Indeed, this charity, about which speaks, including, and also the Bible, is itself, above all, a relationship, an intention, directed on the neighbor and carrying in itself the desire to do good to this neighbor. Of course, such an intention can be accompanied by reflections, and feelings, but one and another are only the complement to the main part. Jesus speaks of something big, He speaks about the Kingdom, where charity is this spiritual environment, inside which we build all the relationships binding the inhabitants of the Kingdom.

We could call the charity in a certain sense the spiritual substance of the Kingdom, and the one who is not involved in this charity, in fact will not be also involved in the Kingdom. And then everything is meaningless: because, the sense of the Christian life consists only of it, to join the life of the Kingdom. The Christian needs nothing else, and everything is useless. And Paul himself, living the life of the Kingdom, understands that of course perfectly. And, as seen, does not get tired to remind these fundamental things for the Christian life to the coreligionists.

Even before Christ's coming, it was commonly held that love of God and neighbour contained the whole essence of ‘the Torah and the Prophets’, as Holy Scripture was then called. But in the context of Christian revelation, the concept of love acquired a different, new content. Of course, love—at least in the biblical sense—had already meant, above all, an attitude towards another person that wished them only good, and dealings with them that would be for their good. Biblical love has little to do with likes or dislikes, with how personally pleasant or unpleasant we find our neighbour, or even with how that neighbour behaves. Even if they prove to be an enemy, we must not hate them, take revenge on them or repay them with evil, although sometimes, of course, we must stop such a person from trying to harm someone, and stop them quite firmly. Yet even then, love of neighbour implies the possibility of giving them another chance to restore normal relationships with those whose enemy they were, if there are any grounds at all for hoping that such restoration is possible.

All this belonged to the understanding of righteousness and of the righteous person's attitude towards their neighbours that had developed before the Christian era. Paul insists that everything said above remains valid for Christians. But he also speaks of something more. Previously, righteousness was a possibility that might or might not be realized in a particular person's life. Such a person might fall short of the fullness of a righteous life, but everything they had done along the path of righteousness still had its meaning. Even if someone could not manifest the fullness of love, they could sometimes still say that they had moved in the right direction and achieved some success. Paul, however, says: all that is wonderful, but unless you go all the way and learn to build relationships of love with your neighbours, everything else is worth nothing.

For only relationships of love are possible in the Kingdom. If they are absent, if a person has not learned to build such relationships with their neighbours, they cannot enter the Kingdom. Not because someone wants to punish them or disregards their achievements, but because without that ability it is impossible to live the life of the Kingdom. That is why the apostle speaks of love as the one thing that gives meaning to every other achievement: without love, a person will still remain outside the Kingdom, with all their achievements.

These words of the apostle Paul occupy an utterly exceptional place in Holy Scripture, because in them the apostle speaks of what matters most, without which there is no Christianity. And it is precisely because what matters most in our faith is what the apostle speaks of here that our faith grants us life. He places many important, necessary and beautiful things alongside love: faith that moves mountains; the gift of prophecy and insight into mysteries; other gifts of the Holy Spirit — and all of these pale and recede into the background beside love. Judging by what the apostle goes on to say, for him love is eternity today. It is the life of the age to come, which did not wait for us to reach that future, but burst powerfully into our colourless existence.

These astonishing words, like the whole of chapter 13 of the First Letter to the Corinthians, speak of love not as a state of the human heart or spirit, still less as feelings, changeable and unreliable. What the apostle writes of cannot even be called a relationship between persons. In his words, love is that which works mysteriously within us and becomes a law inscribed on the tablets of flesh that are our hearts. In the apostle's words, Love becomes a person: it is Christ Himself, living in His disciples.

The apostle speaks of how love is expressed in our lives, of how it manifests itself. It is a great mercy of the Holy Spirit that He inspired Paul to write these words. For everything the apostle writes of consists of actions, attitudes towards others and deeds that we can try to put into practice. Clearly, much of this is beyond human strength, and much entails genuine suffering of the Cross. Yet the apostle's words are a path along which we can travel to open the doors of our hearts to God.

For Paul, love is undoubtedly the foundation of all the relationships that connect people living in the Kingdom with God and with one another. That is why it remains relevant even when everything else ceases to be so (v. 8). But the apostle is not speaking simply about life in the Kingdom. He clearly has in mind a certain fullness of the Kingdom itself, so to speak, the fullness of fullness. All the spiritual gifts that Paul described so vividly only a short time earlier now disappear, dissolving into love. The apostle gives a completely unambiguous explanation for this: all the gifts we can have today are still far from the fullness of that love with which the Kingdom is permeated, and therefore they are temporary (vv. 9-10). This incompleteness is connected with our own spiritual state: from the point of view of that fullness of life that will become possible in the Kingdom revealed to the end, we are still children, having only the most general ideas about the life of the Kingdom and having taken only our first steps in it (v. 11).

As one can see, for Paul the spiritual path of individual people living in the Kingdom is inseparable from the history of the Kingdom itself. For him the spiritual maturing of Christians is inseparable from the becoming of the Kingdom and its development in our world, which is being transfigured but has not yet been transfigured to the end. The realities of the Kingdom are perceived with difficulty today not only because our eyes have not yet developed enough to see the objects of the spiritual world clearly, but also because these realities themselves have not yet fully taken shape and have not been completely revealed (v. 12). But the full revelation of the Kingdom will happen only at the end of time with the Savior's return. Until then, the love of the Kingdom, which we can experience only in part, is joined with faith that the day will come when it will be revealed to the world in all its fullness, and with hope that we ourselves too will become part of this fullness (v. 13).

It is very difficult to speak about such “abstract” concepts, let alone compare them. With a certain degree of approximation, we might put it this way: in ordinary usage, faith and hope describe our relationship to facts. Faith concerns facts that “already are” (I believe that God exists, that He is good, that He created the world, that He ordered the world in such-and-such a way, that He gave His only-begotten Son...), while hope concerns facts that are “still ahead” (I hope for salvation, resurrection from the dead, eternal life...). But sometimes these words are used to express our relationship with another person: faith as trust in God, hope as reliance upon Him. The word “love” belongs to this same series: it speaks of our relationship with someone else. Yet this word truly is “greater” than faith and hope, because love means the fullness of relationship and, of course, includes both trust and hope.

Paul speaks of love as the one thing that exists eternally and in eternity, surpassing everything else in this respect. Paul's words here echo Jesus' own words about love as a new commandment. It would seem that there is nothing new in love: even before the Messiah came, experts in the Torah knew that its whole essence could be reduced to two commandments, the commandment to love God and the commandment to love one's neighbor. Yet the presence of love did not abolish everything else that could be present in a person's life and in his relationships with God and other people. Jesus, however, calls love a new commandment, and Paul, as if continuing the Teacher's thought, speaks of love as something surpassing everything imaginable that may be connected with human existence in the Kingdom.

Apparently something new connected with love entered the world with Christ. Before the Messiah came, love was primarily a relationship binding a person to God and to other people. It was the intention on which such relationships rested. The space of relationship itself remained natural and psychic. In the Kingdom everything is different: there love becomes the space of relationship, the environment within which all relationships exist—with God, with Christ, and with other people.

The breath of the Kingdom that embraces a person becomes for him an environment of love. At the end of time, when the whole world once again becomes the Kingdom as it was on the first day of creation, this breath will embrace everything and become the only possible environment in which renewed nature will exist. Then love will become the sole reality of every human action, every relationship, and all of life in general. This is what the apostle reminds us when he says that without love everything else loses its meaning. For then it will remain outside the Kingdom, and therefore outside God's world.

Paul's words about how, in our present state, we see the realities of the spiritual world like a dim reflection in a dusty mirror echo the thoughts of certain philosophers of the pagan world. The first to come to mind is, of course, Plato, with his image of the cave and the shadows on its walls. Yet the apostle is speaking not of the untransfigured world, from which spiritual reality after the Fall can indeed be discerned only with difficulty, if at all, but of the Kingdom and its life. There would seem to be no place for such obscurity there, nor should there be: for the Kingdom is by its very nature ‘not of this world’. It belongs wholly to the spiritual world—or, more precisely, it is itself the spiritual world, at least in the dimension in which that world comes into contact with human beings.

And yet, at the present stage of the Kingdom's history, its inhabitants are not fully transfigured; they do not yet possess in all its fullness the new nature without which it is impossible to become one of its inhabitants. This is not surprising, since the Kingdom itself has not yet been fully revealed to the world, in all its fullness. We live in a transitional age, the age of the advancing Kingdom. And if we are Christians, the spiritual destiny of each of us is bound up with the history of the Kingdom. Paul understands this perfectly: he knows that his own spiritual journey will end not on the day of his death but on the day of the Saviour's return, the day of the complete and final triumph of the Kingdom to which he devoted his whole life as a witness. Until that day, every Christian, like the apostle, lives on the boundary between two worlds, a boundary that distorts the perception of spiritual realities. This is not, of course, the same as in Plato, for in Plato's cave one can see nothing at all but shadows. From the boundary between worlds where every Christian must live today, the Kingdom is visible, just as the untransfigured world is visible from there.

Yet until their own physical nature is fully transfigured, all who live on earth see the Kingdom as distorted as the underwater world appears to someone without special goggles or a mask. Just as our physical sight is not adapted to perceiving the underwater world accurately, so our spiritual sight is not adapted—and cannot be adapted until our full transfiguration—to perceiving the Kingdom accurately. But this is not so terrible: God leads each person with these peculiarities of perception in mind. The main thing is to listen to Him, without relying entirely on our own spiritual sight, which is prone to aberrations.

To recognize that one’s "knowledge is partial ", "vision through a glass, darkly" - is an every day exercise. No matter how clear we could have seen evident objects, we cannot say we have reached a perfect knowledge, that we understood the intention in its plenitude, that we acknowledged the sense. Time, as a component of our existence, brings its correctives in all.

What seemed to us to be a point yesterday, will become a straight line today, but already tomorrow will turn out to be a flat figure. After again a certain time it will turn out that all this is just a shadow, and then we shall see the volume, the shape and the color, then we shall realize that the object moves and changes.

So we perceive the world and all which lives inside. God opens to us also gradually Who He is. Although it seems to us today that the knowledge opened to us is finished and completes, it is simply a pale shadow of what we know, even when the glass, darkly will become clearly - when the window will open we shall see the One, Who called us to His wonderful Light; the One, Who is beyond any knowledge, because He is the Truth.

Faith, hope, charity are the traditional triad of so called in the Middle Ages the "theological" virtues, which were considered proper only for Christians, unlike the virtues "heathen", who, according to the same representations of the Middle Ages, are proper to all people, including heathen virtuous. And Paul, as we see, from the three accentuates on charity, without denying moreover that faith and hope are inseparably connected to it. Then what means the apostle? We would have been able of course to explain everything only by the peculiarities of the spiritual device of the human personality.

Indeed, trust, and hope are always connected somehow or other to those relationships, which join man with God and with the neighbor. And charity understood as understand this word the authors of the biblical books, is the relationship, around which is built all the rest. It is particular on charity that is based every trust, and only charity allows to hope on something, whether it is related to God or to man. But the problem is probably not only in it.

All the expectations of Christians are connected somehow or other with the Kingdom, with the fact that will come the day of its full and final triumph, the day of the last Judgment and the return of the Savior. And the faith of every Christian is also connected to the Kingdom and to the One who brought the Kingdom to the world. And when will come the day waited by every Christian of the end of the current stage of the history of the Kingdom, charity will stop being only a relationship, having become this spiritual environment, in which are going to live from now on all the inhabitants of the Kingdom.

Indeed, in the Kingdom charity is the spiritual environment, inside which are build all the relationships forming its basis: the relationships of its inhabitants between themselves, their relationships with God and with Jesus, the relationship of Jesus with His Heavenly Father. And if faith and hope under their current form still belong to the world partially not transformed to a certain extent defining their form, charity as for it, manifested by the Savior Himself, this charity, which He left to His followers, belongs already now to the Kingdom entirely.