Fr Peter Helman

Dearly beloved,

In the morning office today we encounter one of the most beautiful and familiar passages in the New Testament, at least from the writings of Saint Paul. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:4-7).

We find this passage among the several options of Epistle readings in the marriage rite of The Book of Common Prayer. Curiously, I remember a college professor telling our Introduction to the New Testament class that this passage has nothing really to do with marriage, nothing really to do with romantic love between two people.

I’m unsure that is entirely true, at least from one angle, for the love that Paul writes about is the sort of love that finally undermines and transforms our common assumption that natural affections are sufficient to sustain the bond of marriage. There is a greater love still that overleaps the bounds of romantic love and gestures towards love’s perfection. Paul tells of God’s charity manifest in pure gift; for God, who is love, took on human form and gave himself for the life of the world. And this act of love exceeds every natural affection, which, given the changes and chances of life, might bend or break. Paul tells of the necessity of sacrificial love to a community of Christians torn apart by faction and selfish ambition. He calls them to behold the gracious lovingkindness of God that is revealed in Jesus, who is the very revelation of Love.

To look upon Jesus and the cross he willingly endured, we discover the beginning and end of love. And as sisters and brothers in Christ, tethered to God’s love, we receive our singular vocation to love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God. To know the love we are to have for God, one another, and the world God gave himself to save, we must begin, as C. S. Lewis once wrote, “at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.” Love that is pure gift is the love we are to have one for another.

Yours in Christ,
Peter+