The More Excellent, but Not Necessarily Least Troublesome Way.

This morning, chasing something else, I came across an essay on 1 Corinthians 13, "The More Excellent Way". It's in one of my older books on Paul, Early Christian Experience by Gunther Bornkamm, which I bought in 1970. Goodness it's good!

 

So, if someone has a go at us, and there's the risk of becoming distant and bitter, here is the more excellent way:

 

"Even if unbelief, lies, evil and scorn could provoke one to anger and provide sufficient reason 'to reckon evil' to the other, the evil is left standing as an unresolved matter, an uncancelled guilt between us. Where one retains evil toward the other person, there one abandons him; but love abandons evil and retains the other person; it is the power of fellowship, because it remits guilt and does not let the brother or sister go." (page 183)

 

The whole essay is a combination of exegetical rigour of an older German school, psychological shrewdness aided by a Lutheran allergy to virtue and any suggestion love is a discipline or law, and a pastoral realism that 1 Corinthians 13 could ever be other than an exposition of the love of God in Christ. And that love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit in the renewing of the moral centre's capacities and motives; it is emphatically not virtue to be cultivated, something we do -but gift to be received and grace bestowed by God who is love, and whose love is precisely that which remits guilt and holds on to the sinner in mercy and forgiveness.

 

Over the years I have wrestled with this brilliant and luminous text, and I come back to something of Bornkamm's take on it. We can read it as love at its most perfect in human relationships, something we aspire to. But if we are honest that's likely to remain aspiration, and those descriptors of love - patient, kind not resentful and all the rest - most likely to be frustrated by the sheer in your face realities of conflict, relationship breakdown, and yes, even intentional hostility from others.

 

That's why Bornkamm insists the more excellent way is only possible by the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, the making of each person in Christ a new creation, in which faith and hope and love become expressions of the Gospel of reconciliation, wrought in Christian experience by the God of all grace. Here's how Bornkamm says it:

 

"In the coordination of faith and hope (not as a 'value' in itself), love also remains. If faith is based on what God has done and hope directs itself to what God will do, then love-- from God, to God and thus simultaneously love toward the brother or sister (cf 1John 4.7ff),-- is the permanent presence of salvation, 'the bond of perfection' (Col 3.14). As such it is the greatest." (page 187)

 

I know. Sometimes you need to read Bornkamm at least twice - but he's worth it. And when all of the above has been said, that such love is made possible only by the renewing and sustaining power of the Holy Spirit in mind, heart and conscience, there is more to be said.

 

"And yet it would be wrong to understand love here only as the distant ideal, derived in contrast -- only as the antithesis to impatience, evil, boasting etc. , an unreachable, radiant idea of enticing and yet deathly brightness in the pure and starry heaven of values.  No -- Paul can speak of love so extollingly, movingly, completely, because it is a reality so living, concrete and variedly effective in detail, as it is described in 4-7, and at the same time it is the all-embracing power of God, put into force in the midst of this world as the love of God in Jesus Christ." (page 188)

 

Goodness I told you he was good. And yes you sometimes have to read him twice. But he's worth the time, and the thought. Now perhaps, we should all go and read 1 Corinthians 13 again.