‘Love is complicated’ does not appear in the long list of facts about love that Paul wrote in one of his letters, twenty years after the life of Jesus. But it should have done!
Just like you can mistake ice cream for love, people seeking happiness are wide open to mistaking other things for love. So Paul wrote to his friends in Corinth about how you tell love – the real thing – from the ice cream versions. This is actually the subject of most chick flick movies. Teenagers could save themselves six quid and ninety minutes with Kirsten Dunst, and instead use Paul’s words as a checklist to find out what is going on with a girlfriend or boyfriend. Is what is happening in this relationship patient, or am I being pushed too far too fast? Is it self-seeking, or are both people preferring to seek each other’s happiness? Is the other person using this relationship to boast to friends? Or am I?
Well, if love involves any of those things it is not going to lead to lasting happiness. Paul knew that – twenty centuries before we had Sex and the City to tell us. ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not boast, it is not self-seeking.’
But Paul’s words are a practical guide for worshippers as well. He is very scornful of people whose highlight is to go to a church service because they like a good sing. Or a good sermon, or any kind of emotional high! These things are not, according to Paul, what being a Christian is about.
| Christ has made love the stairway that would enable all Christians to climb up to heaven. So hold fast to love in all sincerity. Give each other practical proof of it. And by your progress in it, make the ascent together. Fulgentius of Ruspe, bishop in North Africa, 468–533 |
And nor (and this is rather unsettling) is faith the most significant thing about a Christian life. I suspect Paul may have been thinking of that hard-nosed, intolerant kind of Christian faith that despises any other point of view except a particular version of the truth. The kind of faith that allows someone to give every last penny to a charity for converting the poor of Africa, but cuts off a family member because he or she has made a moral decision that doesn’t fit a particular version of the truth.
For all the good that kind of worship or that kind of faith does, you might as well stand in a corner and bang a gong. Or as he put it: ‘If I speak in human tongues or sing in angelic tongues, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have a faith that could move mountains, if I give all I possess to the poor, but have not love, I’m nothing.’
This is all a bit disconcerting. You hear the part of the Bible in which Paul wrote about love read at weddings. But, to be honest, you’re not really in the mood at a wedding to think troubling things about what it means to be a Christian. You just want the moment to be romantic and the best man not to drop the rings!
But the famous words are actually a plea to a Christian community to get its priorities right so that there can be genuine happiness among them. Be driven by love, not by ice cream – in your romantic relationships, in your worship of God, in your relationships with others in the church, in the way you treat everyone with whom you engage from tomorrow onwards.
Please, says Paul, don’t have relationships with your parents ruined by resentments for things they did years ago that have shaped your life. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love does not keep an endless record of wrongs’. Please don’t have no-go areas in a church so as to avoid people with whom you have fallen out over the rota for flower-arranging. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love is not easily angered’. Please don’t find yourself secretly pleased when a friend doesn’t get the promotion that would have got them to a place one better than you. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love does not envy, it does not delight in evil’. Please don’t give up when your attempt to reach out to a fellow human being is met with a lack of gratitude. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love always perseveres; it never fails’.
Risk getting real about love. It may lead to some things you assumed to be love melting like a choc ice. It may lead to you recognizing as love some things that you had thought were just unremitting hard work. Love almost certainly won’t look like what you expect it to be. But the real thing, even at the cost of sacrifice and tears, will make you happy.
In front of me on the desk is a lilac envelope. Inside is a drawing of a man with an exceedingly round, bald head. There are hearts fluttering all around it like butterflies. The message says, in very wobbly handwriting, ‘Please come on holiday with us again soon.’ I believe I am loved.
| ‘And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?’ I did. ‘And what did you want?’ To call myself beloved. To feel myself beloved on the earth. Raymond Carver, North American poet, 1938–88 |
| Lord God, fill my whole being with love. Not the slushy kind or the greedy kind, but the kind that will help people I know be sure that their lives are worth living. Amen. |
| Be happy! Make a mental list of those you love. (This is not the same as the list of those whom you feel you ought to love.) It will probably consist mainly of people, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t include animals or even places and activities if it is easier to think of them than men and women. Read the list of qualities of love from the Bible that appears earlier in the chapter, and dwell on how it relates to those in your thoughts. For the situations where you recognize that the love you have is absolutely real, be happy. If you have ended up with some challenging questions, I am hoping that the chapters to come will help you work out what to do in response. |
Be Happy! Day 5
Come clean
| To some who … looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.’ Luke 18.9–14 |
One of the joys of listening to a story is being one step ahead of the storyteller. We hear thousands of stories in a lifetime, and from our earliest days we become canny at recognizing what lies ahead. So when someone begins, ‘I want to tell you a tale about Ivan the Terrible,’ we already know that it’s not going to be about how he won everyone’s hearts through his skill at flower-arranging. Likewise, we don’t settle down to listen to a legend about St Agnes the Chaste expecting to hear how she used her seductive feminine wiles to lure innocents to a hideous slaughter. The name gives it away!
A good storyteller can catch us out. And Jesus was a very good storyteller! But sometimes we are so familiar with his stories that we forget how good he was. For instance, as soon as we encounter a Pharisee in the Bible, we know he is going to come out of the story badly. We automatically assume that a Pharisee was a bad influence on the world. But to Jesus’ original hearers Pharisees represented something good about the world, and it was shocking that he criticized them. Pharisees did wonderful things for the culture and religion of the time. In the dust and heat of Jerusalem they went without water two days a week in order to pray for their nation. That puts me to shame!
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Who is a God like you, who pardons sin? …
You do not stay angry for ever but delight to show mercy.
You will again have
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