But every once in a while, when I'm presiding over a wedding, I feel like the priest from Spaceballs, who says in no uncertain terms 'Excuse me, I'm trying to conduct a wedding here which has nothing to do with love! Please be quiet!'
The reason I'm so tempted to say all this is because the weddings tend to get clouded by feelings. I know, I know, that's a ridiculous thing to say, but bear with me. Feelings are something that we tend to feel governs us, guides us, and propels us forward. But we also feel as though they're something over which we have no control. Your feelings are just something that happens to you. All you can do is to watch it happen, and watch things spiral out of control. You get together because of your feelings, but if you're captive to them, then what do you do when the feelings change? Nothing?
So, the question that 1 Corinthians attempts to answer is 'what is love,' and it does so by running down the list of what love is, and what it does. And by now, you know the reading well enough. Love is patient, love is kind, it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. And this is all well and good of course, but when you have this reading as part of a wedding, everyone nods and giggles, and focuses on love quite a bit. But beyond that, there isn't much of a knowledge of what that will entail in the future. Oh sure, we all love love, don't get me wrong, but beyond that initial senstaion, that initial feeling, what is love, really?
We find that from a different epistle, from 1st John 4, which says 'beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God, for God is love.' Perfect. God is love. That means that, in math terms, God = Love. No problem there, except for the big and glaring one, which is that all that we have done is to compare one abstract concept with which we have little practical familiarity with another abstract concept with which we have little familiarity. And this lack of famliarity with what this is acutally all about breeds sin. I'll explain.
Because there is no real-world application of what love is in 1st Corinthians, you get the situation in which you have a marriage, both of whose members sincerely believe that they are the patient and kind ones, and that the other party is messing it all up. They believe that they are trying to hope all things, believe all things, endure all things, etc. The other party is the one who is mucking it all up. And how do you arrive at this conclusion? Typically in the manner that things go in this short cartoon about a turtle. This comic in which someone is detecting a problem with their relationship and something is going wrong, but it seems to be all going wrong with the other person. That other person, the guy glowering behind his desk, when all his nice wife is trying to do is to work on her relationship. And how does she work on the relationship? By trying to work on the relationshp, not by working on things with her spouse, as though the relationship was something that existed externally from either of them. You have him, her, and then the relationship, which you ostensibly could work on without working on things with the person himself. And that's a disaster waiting to happen.
Which leads us to Christianity, and the Christian difference. And what is the Christian difference, really? Well, the first syllable ought to tell you. The difference is Christ. In Christ, you finally have something that breaks you through the theoretical, through the abstract, and into the real. Into the practical. If we take the earlier proposition from John as true, that God=love, and also the proposition from the first chapter of the Gospel of John, that Jesus=God, then we have Jesus = Love. And Jesus is God incarnate. Jesus is God incarnate, he is the very living God who we have had a hard time understanding until just now. Jesus shows us in what he does and who he is who God is, and what love is. And it's not what we would expect it to be. It's not based on a feeling. It's not based on how Jesus is feeling, rather it's based on what he does, and his commitment to us.
When the Bible talks about love, it doesn't talk about it as a feeling that either we or God are captive to, rather it talks about it as a commitment, an obligation, something specific that God has determined to do for us. You see this very clearly in his covenants that he makes with humans, most especially in the Hebrews. When God makes a covenant with the Hebrews, he does so by going through his commitment to them, rather than their obligations to him. When he makes a deal with Abraham, he does so by laying out his obligations, by setting forth his plans for what he has in mind to do, and then asks Abraham to respond to that promise by working through a visible response to that covenant. And God follows through on his obligations no matter what he's feeling. No matter his feelings or opinions towards us, he intends to follow through with his commitments to us.
Now, that's how love works. You see it working like that with Jesus Christ in the Gospel reading for Sunday, where he casts out demons and heals, where he restores Peter's mother in law, where he stays up late into the night working with people, and then when he withdraws by himself, and the people come and find him, he tells them 'I have to go and do more of this with more people.' Why? Because we were so loveable? Or because he was committed to us.
God = Love. Jesus = God. So then Jesus is patient and kind. He does not boast, he is not proud, he does not insist on his own way. He is not irritable or resentful. He does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That's what Jesus is all about, and that's what he does not just in that reading, but in all his life and work. In Jesus, you get to understand love, and you get to understand |God, and what God's understanding of love is. When Jesus talks about love, he does so by saying this:
Greater love has no man than this, that he lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends.
That's the understanding that God has of love, not that he feels a certain way, but that he promises to do a certain thing. He commits to something, and knows that love doesn't mean working with someone as long as you feel a certain way, but working with someone no matter how you feel. Jesus loves us, loves us greatly, whether he's feeling it or not, and I'm sure most of the time, he's not. But he doesn't think about love only as a noun. He thinks about it as a verb. And to love, you need to love someone. You can't love in a vacuum. It's like any sentence, really. You need that subject, verb and object. If you're going to love, you have to love someone. Your relationship box can't exist without loving and caring for the person in it. You can't try to paint over the problems without working with the other person.
In other words, God = Love, Jesus = God, Jesus = Love, and his love is expressed not in how he feels, but in what he does and his commitment to us. It's worth considering that Jesus shows his love for us on the cross, showing that there is no greater love that this, that he lay down his life for his friends. And at the moment where we might be tempted to see that he had been pushed outside of our relationship box, that we had jammed him out of there, instead of begging and pleading to be let back in, he tore the curtain down through his blood. That's what love is. And instead of giving us an impossible standard, the Christian faith gives us something far better. It tells us, as always, to seek first the kingdom of God, and to be reminded of what he has done for us. And our love for one another flows from that, as it has to. It has to flow from that spirit of forgiveness and renewal that Jesus brings. Our love for one another is rooted in the truth of Jesus, who loves, who forgives, who stays with us not just out of sunk time and cost, but out of hope for the future. Once that curtain between him and us has been torn down through his blood, then we can see clearly to wrench down the curtains between one another. To quote the holy scriptures one last time, we love because he first loved us.
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