Sermon Audio
February 7, 2016 Quingagesima
The Greatest of These
Deuteronomy 10:12-11:1, Psalm 103, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, St. Luke 18:31-43
“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
Well, of course. They go together like Tom, Dick and Harry; Larry, Curly and Moe, win, place and show. Faith, hope and love; they’ve been with us always. Or have they?
When the apostle Paul stitched them together as though on a sampler, in fact, they amounted to something quite new – and not only in combination. Paul was putting one of them in a new frame and introducing the other two – in the context, anyway.
Let’s see if we can take a fresh look at them through first-century eyes.
To begin, we have before us this chapter from the apostle’s first letter to the Corinthians that many have called the zenith of the New Testament. It certainly ranks as the most soaring rhetoric Paul produced, a paean to love, the highest Christian virtue.
Some have thought the chapter misplaced, but they miss the point. It fits entirely naturally where we find it, within a discussion of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Faith, hope and love are not among the gifts under discussion, it’s true, but it’s more than appropriate to surface them here.
Paul’s point is that the members of the Corinthian church have given exaggerated weight to some gifts, notably prophecy and tongues. Might it be, he asks them to consider here, that the greatest gift the Holy Spirit bestows calls attention not to the one who receives but to the One who gives it?
We have come to the final Sunday before Lent. As we prepare to enter our season of meditation upon our humility as sinners before our Lord, we pause to ponder love, which we will never truly know without humility.
It proceeds not from the loveability of the loved one but from the loving nature of the Lover. If we think we have the love of our Lord because we have merited it, we know neither our Lord nor ourselves.
And yet we have it. At the end of the day . . . at the end of time . . . that is what matters. That . . . and the fact that because we have it we must live it out. We must live it out as a witness to the goodness and the greatness of the Lover on high and as our bounden duty as His emissaries to our fellow creatures who do not yet know His love.
Paul packages it with faith and hope in a trilogy of the virtues. “These three,” he writes, setting them apart from everything else, from eye-popping gifts of the Spirit and good works and lofty thoughts. And not here only. He links them also in Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians and 1 Thessalonians.
Whether in first-century Asia Minor and Greece or 21st-century Durango, faith, hope and love loom as hallmarks of the Christian life.
So we turn first to faith, that commonplace thing . . . to us. We find it so unremarkable largely because of Paul. He uses the word almost half again as many times as the rest of the New Testament writers combined, and that doesn’t count the adjective “faithful” and the verb “to believe.”
If he were addressing something routine, would he have made such an issue of it? For former pagans, who comprised most of the Corinthian church, faith in the divine would be an entirely foreign thing. Pagans do not believe in gods; they petition them, manipulate them, seduce them. But the gods’ response is unpredictable and even arbitrary. No one has the vaguest idea what in the end they will do.
Even in the Jewish church from which the New Testament church sprouted, faith was a remote idea. A Jew was a Jew by virtue of being born a Jew and, for a male, of being circumcised on the eighth day of life. He had come under the covenant.
Even the most fervent among the Jews left in their writings only a trace of a concept of faith. John the Baptist, the final Old Testament prophet, let it alone. He preached a baptism of repentance, not faith.
Little wonder. Faith in God is not possible absent the work of the Holy Spirit, and by John’s day the Spirit had not yet come. But for this new community, these followers of the Way, Christianity was a faith event.
Saying so does nothing to diminish the role of the Spirit; we mean only that we perceive our salvation in terms of the trust we invest in our Savior. Our faith is our shield against a hostile world that mocks our worldview. Our faith is not an inert deposit but a vital, growing thing that bears us upward and closer to God.
You and I believe God raised Jesus Christ from the dead; we believe we are fellow heirs with Him. If we did not we would be embarked here on a fool’s mission.
In “The Christ of Flanders” Honore de Balzac shows us a plainly dressed stranger, bareheaded, boarding a crowded ship at the island of Cadzant, bound for Ostend on the coast of Flanders, just before departure.
The fashionable passengers at the back recognize immediately that he is not one of them and arrange themselves so that he has no place to sit. The poor in the bow shuffle themselves to make a spot for him.
They are not long out of port when the sky turns a ghastly black, the wind begins puffing mightily and ominous sounds commence. The storm is upon them and it is fierce, but the clouds part for a moment and the transient light that pours through settles on the latecomer.
His golden hair tumbles down upon his shoulders and upon his face rests a radiance that seems to have been there all along.
But just then a huge wave breaks over the bow and a young mother wails, “Oh, my poor child, my child, who will save my child?” The stranger answers, “You yourself.” And the young mother feels hope in her heart.
The rich merchant falls to his knees and cries out, “Holy Virgin of Perpetual Succor, who art at Antwerp, I promise you twenty pounds of wax and a statue if you will get me out of this.” The stranger replies, “The Virgin is in heaven.”
A proud damsel begins to quiver and a young cavalier puts his arm around her and assures her that he can swim and he will save her. Her mother is on her knees asking absolution of the bishop, who is blessing the waves and ordering them to subside . . . all the while thinking of reaching his mistress in Ostend.
The haggard old prostitute exclaims, “Oh, if I could only hear the voice of a priest saying to me, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ I could believe him.” The stranger turns to her and says, “Have faith, and you will be saved.”
Through the sheets of rain they catch fleeting sight of the coast; they are not far now from port. But the storm increases its fury, driving the ship back, and it begins to sink.
The stranger arises calmly and steps out onto the waves, saying, “Those who have faith shall be saved. Let them follow me.”
The young mother, clutching her child in her arms, steps up and out forthwith, walking with him on the sea. The old prostitute comes next, then an aged soldier, then two peasants.
Finally comes a sailor, Thomas. He takes one step and then another . . . but he takes his eye off the stranger and begins to sink. He looks up to him again and rights himself. And he falters again. But after three times he locks his gaze on the stranger and walks with the rest of them.
The merchant drowns with his gold. A man of science, who has scoffed at the trust of the simple, goes down as well. The handsome young man does not swim well enough. He and the damsel and her mother and the bishop, heavy with the weight of their sins, are swallowed by the sea.
The little party that followed the stranger walks upon the raging sea – with dry feet – until they reach shore. He leads them to a fisherman’s cabin with a light flickering in the window and when they have all taken seats around the warming fire they look about and discover he has vanished from sight. This is faith.
After faith comes hope. Hope is not a new thing but one the church must adapt to the new reality. In the Old Testament God is hope for the righteous, who trust in His promises and wait patiently for their fulfillment. He has delivered on those promises to Israel repeatedly in the past and He will do so again.
God has promised to establish the throne of David forever, to put an end, in the end, to all terror and hardship and distress in His kingdom on earth. He will fulfill this promise through a redemptive-deliverer, Messiah, whose judgment will devour the ungodly and whose righteousness will rescue the saints.
The Christian shares in this hope . . . but his joy is so much fuller because Messiah has come in the person of Jesus Christ. The end – the beginning of the end – has come. The presence of the Holy Spirit proclaims this truth, and the Spirit seals those who believe and hope for the glorious day when the Lord transfers His throne from heaven to earth.
And so today, 2,000 years after Paul wrote, we continue to live in hope, for the reality of God’s promises looks so very different from the illusion that is the world around us. Hope comforts us and sustains us and propels us forward.
It assures us that the end has come, and is yet to come. And the glory of the end that is yet to come infuses our day, the end that has come, with the hope of God’s promise.
A traveler who has visited many museums and viewed many masterpieces found his memory haunted by a painting he saw in the Tate Gallery in London, “Hope,” by Frederic Watts.
A beautiful young woman sits upon a globe. She wears a blindfold and she holds a lute. All of the instrument’s strings are broken, save one. The blindfolded girl touches that one string with her hand as she inclines her lovely head toward it.
She is waiting, waiting, waiting . . . her focus never wavering, to catch the note of that one wire.
The traveler said the artist spoke to him more distinctly in that piece than had all the paintings he had seen of Christ descending from the cross, of transfigurations and resurrections. It seemed to him this painter had captured, with utmost simplicity, a hope that triumphs over pain and disaster, sorrow and sin. Hope on this scale can come only from God.
Faith opens the trilogy, hope extends it . . . “but the greatest of these is love.”
Like faith, love is for Paul’s first readers a new concept – in the way the New Testament uses the term. The word has an interesting history. Some older translations have here not “love” but “charity” – “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
That rendering goes back to the legendary translator John Wycliffe, who was working from the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible. There he found caritas, and so he translated, “charity.” The fourth-century scholar Jerome, who compiled the Vulgate, settled on caritas for the Greek agape because the only other word available to him was amor.
That word refers to a more human brand of love; Jerome was determined not to confuse that with the love of God – or for the love God wants His people to direct to Him and to their fellow creatures.
So the history of the word says something about the unfamiliarity of the idea behind it. The New Testament writers seized on agape, which existed before their time but hadn’t experienced much wear. Until then, “love” was an appreciation for the highest quality, the best.
Christians needed a word for . . . what? For what they saw upon the cross. They pressed agape into service. It is not the only word in the original New Testament translated “love” but it is the most common, appearing 116 times; more than three in five uses are in Paul’s letters.
This is love that proceeds from God who is love, from God who lavishes it on His creatures regardless of our merit. It transforms us, for when we see that He bestowed it on us while we were sinners we begin to see other sinners as those for whom Christ died – as objects of God’s love and objects of the love of God’s people.
A fellow arrived in heaven, took a quick look around him and told St. Peter how grateful he was to arrive in a place so glorious. He said he wanted never to lose his appreciation for the blessing of living there eternally and he had a request:
Could he have a quick glimpse of hell to plant the contrast firmly and forever in his mind? St. Peter agreed.
In hell the man looked down a table so long he could not see its end. It was sagging under dish after dish of all manner of savories. Yet everyone seated on either side was scarcely more than a skeleton.
He asked St. Peter why. “Everyone is required to take food from the table using four-foot-long chopsticks,” he was told. “They can remove the food from the table but it’s impossible for them to take it to their mouths. Everyone is dying of starvation.”
The newcomer had seen enough. They returned to heaven, and there, too, it was dinner time. He looked down an identical table laden with the same foods he had seen in hell, but everyone here was well-fed, healthy and happy.
“What do they use to take the food from the table here?” he asked.
“They’re allowed only to use four-foot-long chopsticks,” St. Peter replied.
“Then how can it be that those in hell are starving to death while these are all so healthy?”
“In heaven,” said St. Peter, “we feed each other.”
For Paul, love seeks nothing for itself, but only the good of the loved one. This is the humbling thought we carry into Lent, our season of humility. Amen.
The Greatest of These
Deuteronomy 10:12-11:1, Psalm 103, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, St. Luke 18:31-43
“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
Well, of course. They go together like Tom, Dick and Harry; Larry, Curly and Moe, win, place and show. Faith, hope and love; they’ve been with us always. Or have they?
When the apostle Paul stitched them together as though on a sampler, in fact, they amounted to something quite new – and not only in combination. Paul was putting one of them in a new frame and introducing the other two – in the context, anyway.
Let’s see if we can take a fresh look at them through first-century eyes.
To begin, we have before us this chapter from the apostle’s first letter to the Corinthians that many have called the zenith of the New Testament. It certainly ranks as the most soaring rhetoric Paul produced, a paean to love, the highest Christian virtue.
Some have thought the chapter misplaced, but they miss the point. It fits entirely naturally where we find it, within a discussion of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Faith, hope and love are not among the gifts under discussion, it’s true, but it’s more than appropriate to surface them here.
Paul’s point is that the members of the Corinthian church have given exaggerated weight to some gifts, notably prophecy and tongues. Might it be, he asks them to consider here, that the greatest gift the Holy Spirit bestows calls attention not to the one who receives but to the One who gives it?
We have come to the final Sunday before Lent. As we prepare to enter our season of meditation upon our humility as sinners before our Lord, we pause to ponder love, which we will never truly know without humility.
It proceeds not from the loveability of the loved one but from the loving nature of the Lover. If we think we have the love of our Lord because we have merited it, we know neither our Lord nor ourselves.
And yet we have it. At the end of the day . . . at the end of time . . . that is what matters. That . . . and the fact that because we have it we must live it out. We must live it out as a witness to the goodness and the greatness of the Lover on high and as our bounden duty as His emissaries to our fellow creatures who do not yet know His love.
Paul packages it with faith and hope in a trilogy of the virtues. “These three,” he writes, setting them apart from everything else, from eye-popping gifts of the Spirit and good works and lofty thoughts. And not here only. He links them also in Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians and 1 Thessalonians.
Whether in first-century Asia Minor and Greece or 21st-century Durango, faith, hope and love loom as hallmarks of the Christian life.
So we turn first to faith, that commonplace thing . . . to us. We find it so unremarkable largely because of Paul. He uses the word almost half again as many times as the rest of the New Testament writers combined, and that doesn’t count the adjective “faithful” and the verb “to believe.”
If he were addressing something routine, would he have made such an issue of it? For former pagans, who comprised most of the Corinthian church, faith in the divine would be an entirely foreign thing. Pagans do not believe in gods; they petition them, manipulate them, seduce them. But the gods’ response is unpredictable and even arbitrary. No one has the vaguest idea what in the end they will do.
Even in the Jewish church from which the New Testament church sprouted, faith was a remote idea. A Jew was a Jew by virtue of being born a Jew and, for a male, of being circumcised on the eighth day of life. He had come under the covenant.
Even the most fervent among the Jews left in their writings only a trace of a concept of faith. John the Baptist, the final Old Testament prophet, let it alone. He preached a baptism of repentance, not faith.
Little wonder. Faith in God is not possible absent the work of the Holy Spirit, and by John’s day the Spirit had not yet come. But for this new community, these followers of the Way, Christianity was a faith event.
Saying so does nothing to diminish the role of the Spirit; we mean only that we perceive our salvation in terms of the trust we invest in our Savior. Our faith is our shield against a hostile world that mocks our worldview. Our faith is not an inert deposit but a vital, growing thing that bears us upward and closer to God.
You and I believe God raised Jesus Christ from the dead; we believe we are fellow heirs with Him. If we did not we would be embarked here on a fool’s mission.
In “The Christ of Flanders” Honore de Balzac shows us a plainly dressed stranger, bareheaded, boarding a crowded ship at the island of Cadzant, bound for Ostend on the coast of Flanders, just before departure.
The fashionable passengers at the back recognize immediately that he is not one of them and arrange themselves so that he has no place to sit. The poor in the bow shuffle themselves to make a spot for him.
They are not long out of port when the sky turns a ghastly black, the wind begins puffing mightily and ominous sounds commence. The storm is upon them and it is fierce, but the clouds part for a moment and the transient light that pours through settles on the latecomer.
His golden hair tumbles down upon his shoulders and upon his face rests a radiance that seems to have been there all along.
But just then a huge wave breaks over the bow and a young mother wails, “Oh, my poor child, my child, who will save my child?” The stranger answers, “You yourself.” And the young mother feels hope in her heart.
The rich merchant falls to his knees and cries out, “Holy Virgin of Perpetual Succor, who art at Antwerp, I promise you twenty pounds of wax and a statue if you will get me out of this.” The stranger replies, “The Virgin is in heaven.”
A proud damsel begins to quiver and a young cavalier puts his arm around her and assures her that he can swim and he will save her. Her mother is on her knees asking absolution of the bishop, who is blessing the waves and ordering them to subside . . . all the while thinking of reaching his mistress in Ostend.
The haggard old prostitute exclaims, “Oh, if I could only hear the voice of a priest saying to me, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ I could believe him.” The stranger turns to her and says, “Have faith, and you will be saved.”
Through the sheets of rain they catch fleeting sight of the coast; they are not far now from port. But the storm increases its fury, driving the ship back, and it begins to sink.
The stranger arises calmly and steps out onto the waves, saying, “Those who have faith shall be saved. Let them follow me.”
The young mother, clutching her child in her arms, steps up and out forthwith, walking with him on the sea. The old prostitute comes next, then an aged soldier, then two peasants.
Finally comes a sailor, Thomas. He takes one step and then another . . . but he takes his eye off the stranger and begins to sink. He looks up to him again and rights himself. And he falters again. But after three times he locks his gaze on the stranger and walks with the rest of them.
The merchant drowns with his gold. A man of science, who has scoffed at the trust of the simple, goes down as well. The handsome young man does not swim well enough. He and the damsel and her mother and the bishop, heavy with the weight of their sins, are swallowed by the sea.
The little party that followed the stranger walks upon the raging sea – with dry feet – until they reach shore. He leads them to a fisherman’s cabin with a light flickering in the window and when they have all taken seats around the warming fire they look about and discover he has vanished from sight. This is faith.
After faith comes hope. Hope is not a new thing but one the church must adapt to the new reality. In the Old Testament God is hope for the righteous, who trust in His promises and wait patiently for their fulfillment. He has delivered on those promises to Israel repeatedly in the past and He will do so again.
God has promised to establish the throne of David forever, to put an end, in the end, to all terror and hardship and distress in His kingdom on earth. He will fulfill this promise through a redemptive-deliverer, Messiah, whose judgment will devour the ungodly and whose righteousness will rescue the saints.
The Christian shares in this hope . . . but his joy is so much fuller because Messiah has come in the person of Jesus Christ. The end – the beginning of the end – has come. The presence of the Holy Spirit proclaims this truth, and the Spirit seals those who believe and hope for the glorious day when the Lord transfers His throne from heaven to earth.
And so today, 2,000 years after Paul wrote, we continue to live in hope, for the reality of God’s promises looks so very different from the illusion that is the world around us. Hope comforts us and sustains us and propels us forward.
It assures us that the end has come, and is yet to come. And the glory of the end that is yet to come infuses our day, the end that has come, with the hope of God’s promise.
A traveler who has visited many museums and viewed many masterpieces found his memory haunted by a painting he saw in the Tate Gallery in London, “Hope,” by Frederic Watts.
A beautiful young woman sits upon a globe. She wears a blindfold and she holds a lute. All of the instrument’s strings are broken, save one. The blindfolded girl touches that one string with her hand as she inclines her lovely head toward it.
She is waiting, waiting, waiting . . . her focus never wavering, to catch the note of that one wire.
The traveler said the artist spoke to him more distinctly in that piece than had all the paintings he had seen of Christ descending from the cross, of transfigurations and resurrections. It seemed to him this painter had captured, with utmost simplicity, a hope that triumphs over pain and disaster, sorrow and sin. Hope on this scale can come only from God.
Faith opens the trilogy, hope extends it . . . “but the greatest of these is love.”
Like faith, love is for Paul’s first readers a new concept – in the way the New Testament uses the term. The word has an interesting history. Some older translations have here not “love” but “charity” – “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
That rendering goes back to the legendary translator John Wycliffe, who was working from the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible. There he found caritas, and so he translated, “charity.” The fourth-century scholar Jerome, who compiled the Vulgate, settled on caritas for the Greek agape because the only other word available to him was amor.
That word refers to a more human brand of love; Jerome was determined not to confuse that with the love of God – or for the love God wants His people to direct to Him and to their fellow creatures.
So the history of the word says something about the unfamiliarity of the idea behind it. The New Testament writers seized on agape, which existed before their time but hadn’t experienced much wear. Until then, “love” was an appreciation for the highest quality, the best.
Christians needed a word for . . . what? For what they saw upon the cross. They pressed agape into service. It is not the only word in the original New Testament translated “love” but it is the most common, appearing 116 times; more than three in five uses are in Paul’s letters.
This is love that proceeds from God who is love, from God who lavishes it on His creatures regardless of our merit. It transforms us, for when we see that He bestowed it on us while we were sinners we begin to see other sinners as those for whom Christ died – as objects of God’s love and objects of the love of God’s people.
A fellow arrived in heaven, took a quick look around him and told St. Peter how grateful he was to arrive in a place so glorious. He said he wanted never to lose his appreciation for the blessing of living there eternally and he had a request:
Could he have a quick glimpse of hell to plant the contrast firmly and forever in his mind? St. Peter agreed.
In hell the man looked down a table so long he could not see its end. It was sagging under dish after dish of all manner of savories. Yet everyone seated on either side was scarcely more than a skeleton.
He asked St. Peter why. “Everyone is required to take food from the table using four-foot-long chopsticks,” he was told. “They can remove the food from the table but it’s impossible for them to take it to their mouths. Everyone is dying of starvation.”
The newcomer had seen enough. They returned to heaven, and there, too, it was dinner time. He looked down an identical table laden with the same foods he had seen in hell, but everyone here was well-fed, healthy and happy.
“What do they use to take the food from the table here?” he asked.
“They’re allowed only to use four-foot-long chopsticks,” St. Peter replied.
“Then how can it be that those in hell are starving to death while these are all so healthy?”
“In heaven,” said St. Peter, “we feed each other.”
For Paul, love seeks nothing for itself, but only the good of the loved one. This is the humbling thought we carry into Lent, our season of humility. Amen.