What you know about St. Valentine has to be very little because there is little to know. There is a record of a priest named Valentinus who was martyred in Rome in 270 during the persecution of Claudius II. Two other martyred Valentinuses lived a couple of centuries later in towns north of Rome. One of them was a bishop who was put to death by the barbarian King Totila in the fifth century. And that’s about all we know. The connection of St. Valentine and romantic love seems to date back to a poem Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in fourteenth century England about romantic love where he mentions St. Valentine’s Day as well as Cupid and Venus. After that it became a tradition to write love poetry on St. Valentine’s Day. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, St. Paul also wrote his own poetic passage about love in chapter 13 of his letter to the church at Corinth that continues to resonate in so many hearts 2000 years later.
In English the word “love” can be used in a very casual way, such as “I just love your shoes!” On Valentine’s Day “love” is associated with romantic love or sexual love. The ancient Greeks had a particular word for this kind of love which was “eros.” But they also had another word, “agape” which refers to the highest form of love which is self-sacrificing, passionately committed to the well-being of another, and it is volitional, that is, one chooses to love the other. In the New Testament the word agape is used for the way God loves us—He loves us self-sacrificially, he is passionately committed to our well-being, and he freely chooses to love us unconditionally. This is the kind of love that Paul is writing about in I Corinthians.The young church in Corinth had the rather typical church problems of jealousy, disagreements, and immorality—the usual human stuff. On top of that they were having problems even having an orderly worship service together. Paul’s letter was written to address these problems. In chapters 12-14 Paul is addressing the problem of the church’s misunderstandings about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, what they are for, who gets them, how they are to be used. He uses the image of the Body of Christ to illustrate that people are different and have different gifts, but we’re all intended to function together in unity for the sake of the mission of the church, which is to spread the good news. Christ is the head of the body, so we are all to be in submission to him.
But there are problems, as we’ve said. And he concludes chapter 12 with, “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” Then he launches into his famous chapter on agape love. He makes two very important points about agape love: first, love is to be the goal of everything we do; and second, love is eternal. Love is the goal, because love is eternal.
The problem Paul sees is that the Corinthians have made “doing church” the goal. They may have been well-intentioned folks wanting to be a good church, but they have lost their focus on love. As a result, they have gotten absorbed in questions of who is supposed to be doing what and which jobs are more important. They have gotten angry and jealous, worrying about who is getting more attention, and who is on the inside track. They blame one another when things go wrong and argue over who is the best teacher, Paul or Apollos. They are rude and inconsiderate of each other. They have control issues. In a nutshell, they have lost sight of what their primary goal is, and that is to love God and love each other. Instead they are pouring their energy into things and issues that Paul says, basically, will not amount to a hill of beans unless they learn to love each other with agape love.
With strong words Paul gives examples of what he means beginning at 13:1. Notice how he kindly puts his words in the first person rather than pointing the finger at them and saying “you”. He says:
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
He is saying that without love, the gifts of the Spirit don’t really exist in us. If we think we have spiritual gifts but don’t love people while we’re using them, we are just plain annoying—like a banging gong or a clanging cymbal—driving people crazy. On the other hand, if we make love our goal, the gifts of the Spirit will develop in us and flow in a wonderful life-giving way that builds up the church. Making love the goal puts the gifts of the Spirit into perspective. When we lose the focus on love, we get distracted by the gifts themselves, by what we have or don’t have, comparing ourselves with others. Or we can get focused on other things like ministry programs or finances or other churchy stuff. Then the Holy Spirit has to help us get refocused. Last fall our own Vestry had that wonderful experience of the Holy Spirit drawing them back to proper focus, the focus of loving others. Paul is not saying to the Corinthians that those other things are not important. But he is saying they must never be the goal. Love is the goal.
What does this love look like that we are to pursue? First of all we need to understand that “We love because God first loved us.” Before we are able to love others with agape love, we have to receive deeply within ourselves God’s love and forgiveness, his healing. Opening our hearts to God’s love is what starts the stream of love flowing to others. Paul describes agape love like this starting at verse 4: “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 the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
God’s love working in us transforms us into people like that: patient, kind, not envious, arrogant or rude. We don’t need to have things our own way to feel okay about ourselves. We don’t pout. We might even be happy when we don’t get our own way because we know we’re learning humility! We’re not irritable, cranky, and blaming of others. We don’t hold grudges. We rejoice in the truth, even if it makes us look bad. We don’t try to cover up the truth to save our own skin. We don’t rejoice in one-upping someone else, or find ourselves elated when things go wrong for our competition or our enemies. Love bears the circumstances of life with patience, it hopefully trusts God in all circumstances, love waits with expectation for God to act, love stands firm in all circumstances without wavering. This is what we should be aiming for and pursuing. This is our goal.
Paul’s second point is that love is eternal. The gifts of the Spirit on the other hand are temporal. He says in verse 8 that when we are face to face with Christ in heaven, we won’t need tongues or prophecy, or wisdom or knowledge, or teachers or evangelists, or miracles, because everything will be revealed and complete and perfect. The gifts of the Spirit are for now when we need to be building each other up, supporting the ministry of the church to bring the gospel to the world. What will last is love. And what we do now in love will never be lost.
Paul goes on to say that right now what we see and understand about God and ourselves is really only a partial picture, dim and distorted. Like children who grow out of their childish ways of thinking and understanding, we too will grow into perfect, complete understanding when we are face to face with God. It is important for us to accept that we have only partial understanding now. In 8:1,2 of this letter Paul says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge. But anyone who loves God is known by him.” Paul clearly was having trouble with ‘know-it-alls’. The knowledge they really needed was humility. The important thing is that we love God and are known fully by him. What we can know now is that our job is to grow in faith, hope and love, to walk in them, to live in them, to pursue them. But the greatest of these three is love, because Love is what will last into eternity with God.
To love with agape love, the way God loves us, is impossible unless we allow God to love through us. We don’t have the strength within ourselves. The hardest test is not usually Sunday morning at church. The hardest test is when we are with our spouses, our children, our parents, our employees, co-worker, or even the supermarket. How are you with others when you feel cranky, irritable, angry, or depressed. What do you do when you don’t feel loving, but you know God calls us to be loving?
The first thing to do is to turn to God and ask for his help. Ask him to help you figure out what’s really bothering you. And then turn it all over to him, trusting him to help you through it. You may need to get some help, maybe pastoral counseling. We all have times when we are struggling. Often they are minor. But sometimes they are long periods of struggle, when we feel really empty inside. God is always there to help us through dark times if we will turn to him for help. Often it is when we are feeling the emptiest that God is able to pour his love into us in a way that he can’t do when we’re feeling in control and on top of things. Instead of being discouraged about angry, or depressed or unloving feelings, invite God into those dark places. Let his love and his light into those places in your life where you need him the most.
We need to make love our goal—love of God and love of others. We need to ask God to help us stay focused on this goal. Making love our goal will bring us into God’s eternal presence, even now. Because God is love; his love is eternal and will not pass away.Why not spend time with God today, and let him speak his love poetry to you?