NOTES for Co1 13:8

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.