so long as you remember the trio, faith, hope, and love, you will not go wrong, for the greatest of these is love and no loveless person will ever really grow up. Love means giving yourself away to others. And the only way to find yourself is to give yourself away. The person who has only lived within the narrow world of his own acquisitive nature, who has never known the laughter and the tears of self-forgetfulness, is a narrow selfish child, who has missed and will go on missing the deep and mature experience of life.
One thing more. I think that as Paul wrote this chapter, he became more and more aware he was not writing about abstractions but about a person. Faith, hope, and love in personal terms that means Jesus of Nazareth, and if growing up to the full stature of human maturity means faith, hope and love then it means Jesus. For Jesus means faith in the sense which I have described it. Here was the most worldly of persons, always concerned to feed the hungry and heal the sick, and yet convinced he had been sent into the world and represented in it a Kingdom which was not the kingdom of this world.
And Jesus means hope for he shows us that real life is not an empty dream but a concrete possibility, and this means that however badly I have failed, there is hope for me, and hope for the corrupt society of which I am a part. And Jesus means love, unsentimental self-forgetting service, of one’s fellow human beings, worked out to a measure whose only limit is the Cross. This is love. People who don’t want to be Christian discovered long ago the best way out of it. They fix their gaze on the forbidding figure of the pastor, and perhaps even more the forbidding figure of the Scripture mashers, and say, “God forbid I should ever be like that.” But this is the conjurer’s trick of misdirection, and you should not look at us, but at Jesus. You will not be worse men and women, but better, you will not be worse examples of your profession but better if from this day on you keep your eye fixed firmly on that man from Nazareth.
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13. Editor’s Note: This is a British idiom. The American equivalent is “throw in the towel.” Interestingly both come from boxing apparently, and refer to quitting.
“FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE”—1 Corinthians 13.13
[Preached eight times between 2/24/74 at St. Chad’s College to 5/9/93 at Harrowgate Hill]
Up to a few years ago, I used to pride myself on the fact that, Dissenter though I was, I knew my way around the Church of England—Prayer Book, Psalms, lectionaries, and the like as well as most Anglicanisms. I have known and used them for some time. But since the new lectionaries, and Series 2, and Series 3 and all the rest came in, I have lost all my confidence, and though I researched it, I had to make inquiries before I could be sure that I could have 1 Corinthians 13 read in this service. And when in fact it was confirmed I did not know whether to be glad or sad. What I did know is that it was a passage I could not run away from. When I was an undergraduate, one of the “in” books (not that one used that term) was Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. It was Otto who, more or less, invented the word “numinous” and to define it by invoking the Latin mysterium tremendum ab fascinaus, expressing both repulsion and attraction, terrifying and fascinating. To a preacher, 1 Corinthians 13 is like that, not only because it presents an ideal one knows one ought to follow, and yet cannot hope to achieve, but also because it is possible to talk about it such unmitigated bilge.
Clearly one could say a good deal about it. One could even say a good deal that was sensible and true. The question is how to approach it on any give occasion. This time, circumstances drive us to approach it this way. In these days we are witnessing in schools and universities a flight from theology into religion. Several things which I need not detail, have impressed this upon me, in the last few weeks. It is an old thing because not so long ago, in the discovery of Bonhoeffer, everyone was talking about “religionless Christianity.” The trouble was, perhaps, that this created a vacuum, because the people who talked loudest about religionless Christianity seemed to have least idea about what you would have left if you got rid of all the religion. What does Christianity minus religion equal?
At all events, the wheel has now turned and what people want now is information about religion, the primary things people do when they set out to worship. What does the Christian do in his Church, the Moslem do in his mosque, the Buddhist do in his Temple and so on? Now all this is interesting enough in its way, like the odd ceremonies of a university congregation, but it is not theology, and by itself it is not Christianity either. And since there is nothing intrinsically better in the religious procedures of a Christian than in those of a Moslem, and since most people are not religious sociologists anyway, this sort of thing is not likely to win the masses nor to build up the faithful. The Church has to get back to a far more theological awareness of itself, its being and its actions. And this is where 1 Corinthians 13 comes in.
For this chapter is about the limitations of religion. I may do all the religious things there are; in themselves these are not enough. I may for example speak with tongues. People in Corinth did, and some people do today. There is no more popular religious manifestation in the world, and the charismatic movement has reached Durham also. There is no reason why it shouldn’t, there is nothing wrong in it, but if that is all, if for me Christianity is an enthusiastic emotionalism and nothing more, I have not begun to understand what it’s about.
I may have the gift of prophecy, to intervene, perhaps, like the prophets of the Old Testament, and apply religion to material life, not the gift of the predictor who can tell you what will happen next Thursday, but the gift of an Amos who can tell you what ought to happen. I may have this, I may understand all mysteries and all knowledge, but if that is all, it is nothing.
I may qualify as a director of Oxfam or Christian Aid, giving all I have for the benefit of the poor, teaching the philanthropists on the efficient use of religion, I may be so made a religious fanatic that I give up life itself. All this; but if it is all this and nothing more, what good does it do? I may have religion to the highest degree and in all its varieties, but that in itself will get me nowhere. What will?
This is the place where Paul begins to talk about faith, hope, and love, not only about love, but about all three. “Well,” you say, “is this not the story of religion all over again? Is not faith just a sort of faculty that some people seem to have? I don’t perhaps, and I therefore feel this doesn’t apply to me. What of peering into the unseen and having contact with a spiritual world? Perhaps the spiritual world is there and real, perhaps it isn’t. In any case it is only there for religious people. And is not hope the virtue of endurance, of never giving up, of believing against the probabilities, that things will turn out right in the end? A sort of optimism? A hunt for silver linings and a capacity for seeing them even when they are invisible? Or to put it less grandly, isn’t it the old opium of the masses, the pie in the sky when you die? Put up with all the rich and the powerful do to you now, but the positions will be reversed in heaven?”
“And have we not had love already do good to the poor, by pure and practical religion, the kind a person can practice who has no thirst for prayer, or sermons or hymns? Is this not just the old commandment, ‘be good,’ with a special flavor to it? Morality with more emotion?”
Now I have no intention at all of suggesting that insight, endurance, and charity are bad things, or that faith, hope, and charity are not practical. But it is not for nothing that Christians have always called faith, hope, and love the theological virtues over against the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice) that we inherited from the classical past from Plato and Aristotle. Faith, hope and love say something about God before they say anything about us. And these theological virtues are what human beings are running away from, they are therefore what I am emphasizing most here, in the very core of this sermon. If we love them in God, we shall love them in the practice of religion.
The first thing to say about God is that God is faithful, as the Bible declares that he is. It is because God is faithful
