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

"Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: Love Trusts"

The English Standard Version offers this translation: “Love…believes all things.” This does not mean that love will believe absolutely anything. Love is not so gullible that it will believe something that is logically impossible, or fraudulent to the faith, or against the holy will of the Love Divine. 

On the contrary, it is the person who does not love God who is the most likely to be taken in by spiritual falsehood. When people stop believing in the one true Love Divine, they do not believe in nothing at all but will believe almost anything! 

So what does the Bible mean when it says that “love believes all things”? Some commentators think this verse teaches us to love other people well enough to believe the best about them. Rather than simply accepting every word of malicious gossip that comes our way, we should protect the reputations of the people we are called to love, including our enemies. 

There is another way to take this verse, however, which is adopted by the majority of commentators. Rather than taking the word “all” (Greek panta) as a noun, meaning “all things,” we can take it as an adverb, meaning “always.”

This interpretation avoids any misunderstanding about what love does or does not believe. The verse is not about the object of love’s faith (what we believe); it is about the perseverance of love’s faith (under what circumstances we will keep believing) and its ability to continue believing through the most extreme situations. 

The most enduring example of God’s love is his willingness to send his Son to be born and live among us—the very coming of the Love Divine, which we celebrate at Christmas. Let us respond to this miraculous gift of enduring love by striving to love other people with the same kind of endurance with which Jesus loves us and loves them. 

When malicious gossip comes our way, do we protect or malign the reputations of the people in question?