Love Divine: Meditations for the Advent, Christmas, and New Year SeasonSample

"Introduction: The Love Chapter"

First Corinthians 13 provides the Bible’s most complete portrait of love. But as familiar as this passage is to many of us, the chapter is not understood nearly as well as it ought to be. 

The Corinthian church to whom the apostle Paul wrote was sharply divided over theology, practice, social class, and spiritual gifts. So when Paul wrote about love in chapter 13, he was not trying to give people something nice to read at weddings. In fact, the love he writes about here is not eros (romantic love), but agape (the selfless love of brothers and sisters in Christ). 

The Love Chapter is not for lovers, primarily, but for all the loveless people in the church who think that their way of talking about God, or worshiping God, or serving God, or giving to God is better than everyone else’s. 

Another mistake that many people make is that they tend to read I Corinthians 13 as an encouraging, feel-good Bible passage full of happy thoughts about love. Instead, I find the passage to be almost terrifying, because it sets a standard for love I know I could never meet. 

As I read the opening verses, I have to wonder what hope there is for me. I have not conversed with angels, as far as I know, or moved any mountains, or suffered unto death. I have done much less—very little, actually—and even what I did was done with a lot less love than I should have shown. 

Yet in spite of my personal misgivings, I know there is hope for loveless sinners because the love in the Love Chapter is really about Christ’s love. Each verse of I Corinthians 13 directs us to the story of Jesus and his love: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). 

We will never learn how to love by working it up from our own hearts; the only way for us to become more loving of our spouses, our families, our neighbors, our communities, and our world is by allowing more of the love of Jesus—the one and only true Love Divine, whose coming we celebrate this Christmas season—into our lives.