Some familiar words: If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I
am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy
and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can
move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
I imagine that most of us will have heard
these words before; they’re the opening lines to one of the best loved passages
in all of Scripture. They’re sometimes called the Ode to Love, and they’re by
far the most popular choice of reading at Christian marriage ceremonies—which is
precisely where many of us will have heard them.
However, Paul wasn’t writing about
romantic love, but about caring love. He was actually lambasting the Christians
in Corinth – for their spiritual pride, their selfishness, their festering
internal divisions. The point he was making to the letter’s original recipients
was this: For all your impressive gifts, you’re just empty noise; for all your impressive
faith and understanding you're a waste of space; because you've lost sight of
what it means to love one another.
Some people here will have noticed that I’ve
spent the last two or three minutes talking not about this morning's NT reading
– the second half of 1 Corinthians 12, but about 1 Co 13—the passage immediately following on from
it. And I’ve done so because the two adjacent passages shed light on one
another—they were written to be read at the same sitting. The passage about
different parts of the body was written as a lead-up to the Ode to Love. And in
it we find the reasoning, the justification, for Paul’s conclusion: that caring
love is infinitely more important than all the impressive gifts, the pride and
the factions that you find in every church including our own. In fact, it’s to help us understand why
caring love is essential that Paul asks us to think about a human body in the
first place.
He begins very simply, by pointing out that a body has many
different parts: parts that look very different and perform very different
functions. My hand, I think you’ll agree, looks
nothing like my ear; if you could see my pancreas, which I’m glad you can’t,
and you’re probably equally glad you can’t, I’m sure you would never mistake it
for a kneecap. But as Paul points out (v12), all these many parts form one body,
and the church is similarly one body. However different we may be as
individuals, we’re all part of an overriding oneness, a unity of being, based (Paul says) on the shared gifts of baptism and the Holy Spirit that make us Christians.
This may at first sound a little trite,
but when Paul illustrates his point by referring to Jews and Gentiles, and slaves
and freemen, it stops being trite and becomes radical—even threatening. Because
Jew and Gentile, slave and free were the deepest divisions the Christian church
has ever seen. Beside them, the deepest divisions in the modern church – male
and female, gay and straight, high and low, traditional and modern – are skin-deep
by comparison. And if such divisions as these are meaningless, then a lot of fresh thinking is needed if we’re ever going to be more than ringing gongs and clanging
cymbals.
So Paul’s first point was that the church
is like a body with many different members. And his second point is that all
the different members are needed for the body to thrive. As he says (v17), If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If
the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? And Paul’s conclusion,
which he clearly intends his hearers to apply to the church, is this: God has placed the parts in the body, every
one of them, just as he wanted them to be. Once again, this is radical when applied to our own setting and all
our diverse types: evangelicals and anglo-catholics; those different from us in
gender, sexuality or marital status; our quiet contemplatives and our happy
clappers; our organists and our guitarists, our preachers and our cleaners, our
flower arrangers and coffee makers… In Paul’s words, they are all different,
all needed, all where God wanted them to be.
And finally, Paul warns us that no one member can tell another, you
don’t belong. (v21) The eye cannot say to
the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t
need you!” On the contrary, he
continues, those parts of the body that
seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable
we (have to) treat with special honour. In other words, not a single member of the church is dispensable, and
what we think of them is quite irrelevant. It’s all too easy (Paul is saying) to
honour the gifted and influential members, the people who in a human body would
be brains and tongues and hearts. Paul challenges our value system: the more
humble someone’s position in the church, and the less influence they wield, the
more we should value them.
It should be getting clearer how all this relates to the following
chapter with its famous “ode to love”. We can easily fail to see the
connection, because in our culture we use the word ‘love’ so carelessly: I love
chocolate, I love my best mate, I love my children, I love God – quite a
different meaning in each case. But when Paul wrote of love, he used a Greek word that means something quite specific: namely, the
kind of love that Jesus showed when he died for us on the Cross – in others
words, the kind of love that we show when we make sacrifices for the benefit of
others.
Jesus promises that if we show this kind of love to one another,
everyone will recognise us as his disciples. Paul warns that without this kind
of love we are nothing, no more than noisy gongs and cymbals. And in case there should be any doubt as to
the kind of love he’s writing about, he goes on to describe it in detail, in
those famous words: Love is patient, love
is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not
dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no
record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It
always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Paul’s famous ode reaches its climax with the observation that until
Christ comes again we have to rely on three things: faith, hope and love. And the
greatest of these, he says, is love.
I was going to end on that note, but I can’t finish without mentioning that
today is Holocaust Memorial Day, the day each year when the world remembers the six million Jews and four million others who were massacred by the Nazis (including Romanies,
Homosexuals, Freemasons, people of mixed race, the elderly, the disabled, the
disfigured, and religious dissidents like the famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
One of the most unforgettable experiences of my life was visiting
Auschwitz less than two years ago, and witnessing the horror of what a
Christian society – let me say, considerably more Christian than Britain today – was
capable of doing when adherence to rules and cherished traditions became more
important than love.
The world hasn’t learned from the Holocaust. Genocide and ethnic
cleansing are very much a continuing part of the modern world. Before I finish,
I’d like us to spend a few moments in silent respect for the victims . . . .
Heavenly Father, we’re sorry for all the ways we have failed to show
love to those inside and outside the church. Help us to be more than clanging
gongs and clashing cymbals. In the name of Jesus…..