The Love Chapter
Overview
- Testament: New
- Book: 1 Corinthians
- Chapters: 1 Corinthians 13:1–13
- Summary: Paul’s celebrated hymn to love (agape/charity) placed at the center of his discussion of spiritual gifts, demonstrating that love is not a gift among others but the very atmosphere in which all gifts must operate — and the one thing that never fails.
Details
First Corinthians 13 sits between chapters 12 and 14, which deal with spiritual gifts, tongues, and orderly worship. The placement is deliberate: Paul has been correcting a Corinthian church intoxicated with charismatic display and faction. Before prescribing the governance of gifts in chapter 14, he sets before them something that transcends all of it. The structure of chapter 13 is tripartite: the indispensability of love (vv. 1-3), the character of love (vv. 4-7), and the permanence of love (vv. 8-13).
The opening verses deploy a series of “if…but have not charity” conditionals that are almost shocking in their scope. Speaking in all human and angelic languages without love — sounding brass, tinkling cymbal. Having prophecy, understanding all mysteries, all knowledge, all faith to move mountains — without love, nothing. Giving all goods to feed the poor, giving one’s body to be burned — without love, it profits nothing. Paul is not diminishing spectacular spiritual achievement; he is saying that the Corinthians’ very sources of pride are hollow without the animating force of love. The gifts are the instrument; love is the musician.
The character of love in verses 4-7 is the most concentrated ethical portrait in the New Testament — fifteen positive and negative qualities, most of them verbs (love acts rather than simply feels): “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” (vv. 4-7). The positive and negative verbs read as a counter-portrait of the Corinthian church’s known failures: their envy, boasting, unseemly conduct in worship, self-seeking, provocation, and tolerance of iniquity.
The final movement grounds love in eschatology: prophecy will fail, tongues will cease, knowledge will be superseded. The gifts are for the present age of incompleteness — “for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (13:12). When the perfect comes, partial means give way. But love belongs to the age to come as well as this one; it never fails. “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (13:13). Faith will become sight; hope will be realized; love alone perdures because God is love.
Important Verses
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” — 1 Corinthians 13:1
“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” — 1 Corinthians 13:4
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” — 1 Corinthians 13:13
Cross-References
- Context: 1 Corinthians chapters 12 and 14, the gift chapters
- Related People: Paul (Apostle)
- Related: Fruit of the Spirit — Galatians 5’s portrait of the Spirit’s character overlaps with love’s portrait here
- Theme: The New Creation — love as the quality of the age to come