NOTES for Co1 13:13
Faith, hope, love—the traditional triad of the virtues known in the Middle Ages as “theological,” which were believed to be characteristic only of Christians, in contrast to the “pagan” virtues which, according to the same medieval ideas, were common to all people, including virtuous pagans. Paul, it seems, singles out love among the three, without, however, denying that faith and hope are inseparably connected with it.
So what does the apostle mean? One could, of course, explain everything solely in terms of the particular spiritual constitution of the human person. Indeed, both trust and hope are always connected in one way or another with the relationships that bind a person to God and to one’s neighbors. Love, understood as the authors of the biblical books understand the word, is the relationship itself around which everything else is built. All trust is founded precisely on love, and love alone enables one to hope for anything at all, whether it concerns God or another person.
But probably that is not all. All Christian hopes are in one way or another connected with the Kingdom, with the coming day of its full and final triumph, the day of the Last Judgment and the Savior’s return. And every Christian’s faith is likewise connected with the Kingdom and with the One who brought it into the world.
When the day awaited by all Christians—the completion of the present stage in the history of the Kingdom—comes, love will cease to be merely a relationship and will become the spiritual environment in which all its inhabitants will henceforth exist. For in the Kingdom love is the spiritual environment within which all the relationships that form its foundation are built: the relationships of its inhabitants with one another, with God and with Jesus, and Jesus’ relationship with His Heavenly Father. And if faith and hope in their present form still belong partly to the untransformed world, which to some extent determines their form, then the love revealed by the Savior Himself, the love He left to His disciples, already belongs to the Kingdom. Wholly and completely.