. . .And the Greatest of These is Love

February 9, 2003

"And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

-1 Corinthians 13: 13 (NRSV)

The ancient Greeks had four words standing for four different sorts of love. At the bottom of the scale of love is epithemia, meaning simple desire or lust. Think of Jimmy Carter's famous campaign confession. Next up is eros, the Greek word for a love of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Unlike epithemia or "lust," eros contains an aesthetic and moral quality. If epithemia is appetite, eros is intellect. Think of the chivalric, unconsummated love of the medieval knights for their ladies fair.

Further up the scale of love is philia, the affection that one has for one's family and friends, or the ethically-tinged love that one has for humanity, writ large. Philadephia, the "city of brotherly love," comes from this word and from this meaning of love. You get the picture, though the reality may have strayed from the ideal.

Highest of all on the scale of love, though, is agape. Agape is the apex, the greatest form of love. It is actually agape that St. Paul means when he says, that of faith, hope and love, ". . .the greatest of these is love."

The word "love" in this passage used to be translated as "charity," but charity sounds too paternalistic to the modern ear. So in order to avoid the connotation of a type of social welfare that has fallen out of favor in recent years, the mushy word "love" has been substituted in place of "charity," leading to still more confusion. In his book The Good Life, Peter Gomes writes,

Over the years I have had a running battle with couples who wish to have portions of St. Paul's famous chapter on love . . . read as part of the wedding service . . . because I feel it my duty to remind the couple that the love of which the apostle speaks and the love they propose to pledge to one another are not the same thing. Paul did not have marriage in mind when he wrote those words, and he certainly did not have in mind the sort of romantic love we most associate with the wedding industry.

Rather, says, Gomes, ". . .we should think of love not in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it does, and why it does it." Now we are coming closer to Jesus' "Great Commandment" of love to God and neighbor. Perhaps we are even beginning to grasp the meaning of his troubling commandment, "love your enemies."

The 20th century theologian Daniel Day Williams wrote that,

Love does not put everything at rest; it puts everything in motion. Love does not resolve every conflict; it accepts conflict as the arena in which the work of love is to be done. Love does not separate the good people from the bad, bestowing endless bliss on one, and endless torment on the other. Love seeks reconciliation of every life so that it may share all the others.

Clearly, love is not just a warm, fuzzy feeling. At its highest level, love may not be a feeling at all, but a force, like velocity or propulsion in physics. Or, put another way, love may not necessarily be about us or our feelings. Nor is it simply something that we do to, or for, others.

In love, things do not stay the same: things change, and this is always threatening. As someone once said in a Friends, or Quaker, meeting, "If you can accept me as I am, and love me as I am, then I can change what I am." True love is not about stasis. We must not only allow the objects of our love to change, we must encourage them. Love, as Daniel Day Williams wrote, "puts everything in motion."

That is why the older notion of "charity" no longer holds. It was never meant to change things--it was just meant to maintain the status quo. Status quo is definitely not what Jesus, or St. Paul, had in mind in their uses of the word love.

Those of us in long-term, committed relationships, know that love is change. It is never static. Desire comes and goes. To build a relationship on desire only is folly. We, and our loved ones, do not always manage to embody "the good, the true, and the beautiful." We do not always hold each other in brotherly or sisterly affection, either. Love changes, and if our relationships are to survive we must learn to go with the flow. We must learn to live with those changes, and ideally, even to enable them. Can we manage to maintain our love for one another, even in our becoming?

Perhaps it was in response to such a question that Goethe wrote, "To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in another only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him." Can we give up our versions of each other so that we might become who we truly are? In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote,

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, fluidity--in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

To love anything means to give up some freedom. To love a friend, a spouse, a church, or a community is to enter into a relationship. One person does not control a relationship. Relationships are maintained by fidelity, commitment and responsibility. . . .

There is no such thing as free love. Love requires the giving up of some freedom. But in that choice we discover who we are, and who we are can never be known apart from our relationships.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in a casket or coffin of your own self- ishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only safe place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

We stand on the brink of yet another war, so perhaps it is foolish to be speaking this morning of love. I wish that I could offer you more moral clarity on this subject, but I am as conflicted as many of you. I doubt that another war will do much good in the long run. In the short run, I feel certain that it will only bring more misery to our already miserable planet. Many years ago, my colleague and mentor Charles Grady wrote,

Once, love of country was a noble passion, the highest form of self-sacrificing love. Men and women gave freely of themselves, and died for their nation and the good of the whole. Rightly we praised their devotion, their patriotism. Now we know that patriotism is not enough, in itself. We are learning, I hope, to identify Self with all humanity and not just one part of it. Today those who limit their self-identity to one people and one narrow piece of real estate, are doomed to dance the old bloody ballet of Belfast and Beirut, and end with the slaughter of children in the streets.

It would not, I suggest, necessarily mean liking them. It would not mean "feeling good" about them. As Peter Gomes writes near the end of his book, "Love is not something we believe, have, keep, or give: it is something we do, and in its doing, love shows forth its works." Where there is love, he says, there is transformation. Without love, there can never be a change in things as they are.

My conviction is that we have not yet risked enough and loved enough. And until we do, I fear that nothing in this tired old world is ever going to change. There will only continue to be "wars, and rumors of wars." And that is not a terribly hopeful thought, unless we can come to understand that we really have not tried, yet, the full power of love. We do not know what might happen if we did. That is where faith and hope really come in.

May we have the courage to risk all for love, and may we come to know the truth of those other hard and difficult words of Jesus, that only by losing our lives will we find them. May our lives and our world be blessed by the transforming power of love, now and in the days still to come. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock