La Charité Ne Périt Jamais — Love Does Not Seek Its Own

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Where This Chapter Sits

This is the most quoted chapter in the Bible and one of the most misplaced. It is read at weddings. It was written into a quarrel.

Chapter 12 is about spiritual gifts and who has which. Chapter 14 is about a congregation whose worship had become disorderly because everyone wanted a turn. Between them Paul drops this.

Which changes the opening list entirely. Tongues, prophecy, knowledge of all mysteries, mountain-moving faith, giving everything away, martyrdom — every item is a good thing, and several were the exact things the Corinthians were competing over. Paul is not warning them off wickedness. He is telling them that their finest achievements come to nothing without one ingredient.

And a note on the French. Segond does not use amour in this chapter. He uses charité — following the Latin caritas, the same choice the old English Bibles made. A word for love that is chosen rather than felt.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — I Have Become Noise

Read the first verdict precisely. Not I make a noise — I have become sounding brass. The person is not merely doing something useless. He has turned into the useless thing.

And the three verdicts descend. I am noise. I am nothing. It profits me nothing. The last is the most alarming, because verse 3 has reached total self-sacrifice — everything given away, the body surrendered. Paul says even that can be done without love, and if it is, the ledger stays empty.

Which is worth sitting with by anyone who has spent a season giving things away. The furniture that left this apartment went to a family who needed it. Paul's point is that the same act could have been performed for a hundred reasons and only one of them counts.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — They Are Verbs

English gives us a list of qualities: love is patient, love is kind. In Greek almost every item is a verb. Love acts patiently. Love behaves kindly. Paul is not describing a temperament. He is describing conduct.

Which means the chapter cannot be used as a test of feeling. It is a test of behaviour, and behaviour is the one thing a person can bring when the feeling has been used up by a hard week. You can act patiently while feeling nothing of the kind. Paul would call that love, not hypocrisy.

And count the negatives. Of the fifteen descriptions, eight are things love does not do. Does not envy, does not boast, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, keeps no account of evil, does not rejoice in injustice. More than half of love is restraint — the things a person could have said and did not, the reply that was available and was left unsent.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Hinge of the Whole List

One phrase in the middle holds the rest together: does not seek its own. Elle ne cherche point son intérêt.

Nearly every other item is a form of seeking one's own. Envy is wanting what another has. Boasting is seeking one's own reputation. Being puffed up is seeking one's own importance. Rudeness is seeking one's own convenience. Irritability is one's own comfort disturbed. Remove self-seeking and most of the list takes care of itself.

And this is where the chapter joins what Le has been reading all week. Philippians 2: made Himself of no reputation. Lewis: the more we get what we call ourselves out of the way. Paul is describing the mind of Christ in the form of a checklist.

One more detail. Thinks no evil uses an accounting word — logizomai, to reckon up, to enter in a ledger. Love does not keep books. It is not that love forgets; it is that love declines to total the column. And a person who is not keeping score has nothing to be provoked about.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Gifts Have Expiry Dates

Now the argument closes on the Corinthians completely. Everything they were competing over is temporary. Prophecy will finish. Tongues will stop. Knowledge will be superseded. They were fighting for rank in currency that is going out of circulation.

And the verb under never fails is piptei — to fall. Love never falls. Not never disappoints — never collapses, never drops. The image is of something standing that does not come down.

Le said it herself on the first of July, when Augustine and this chapter met in these pages: your love will fail, will change — but God's love never fails, and keeps us alive. That was six weeks ago and it has not needed correcting.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Why Love Is the Greatest

Paul does not say why, but the chapter has already supplied the answer. Faith and hope are both magnificent, and both are temporary.

Faith ends at sight. The moment a thing is seen, believing it is no longer faith. Hope ends at arrival. Paul says it elsewhere: hope that is seen is not hope, for why does one still hope for what he sees? Both are instruments for the journey, and a journey has an end.

Love is the only one of the three that survives arrival. Nothing about seeing God face to face will make loving Him unnecessary. It is the greatest because it is the one thing here that continues without alteration into what comes next.

Which is why this chapter belongs in a season of packing. Almost everything in the flat has been sorted by one question: does it come with us? Paul applied that test to the whole of Christian experience — and of the gifts the Corinthians prized, exactly one item makes the van.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Le's Connection

This morning Le put two things together that belong together: Jesus washing the disciples' feet, and then, in the same room, the commandment to love one another. It goes together.

She is right, and the placement is the proof. The commandment says as I have loved you — and that little word would be nearly empty if He had said it in a lecture hall. He did not. He said it minutes after kneeling on the floor with a basin. The disciples did not have to guess what as meant. They still had wet feet.

And look at the sentence John puts immediately before He rises. Knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands — and then He took the towel. He did not stoop because He had forgotten who He was. He stooped because He knew exactly who He was.

Which is 1 Corinthians 13:5 performed rather than written. Does not seek its own. Elle ne cherche point son intérêt. Paul gives the definition; John gives the photograph. And the feet He washed included the ones that would walk out that night to betray Him. Keeps no account of evil — with the ledger already open and the entry already known.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Behaviour, Then the Assurance

Le has caught the order of the chapter, and the order is the mercy in it.

Verses 4 to 7 are exhausting. Fifteen requirements, and an honest reader fails several of them before breakfast. Suffers long. Is not provoked. Keeps no account of wrongs. Bears all things. A person could finish that list and be flattened by it.

Then verse 8 — and it is not another command. The list is all imperative in force; this is a plain statement of fact. Love never fails. La charité ne périt jamais. Le chose the right word for it: assure.

But ask which love is meant. If it is ours, the sentence is simply untrue — ours fails constantly, and Le said so herself in this journal on the first of July: your love will fail, will change. So the assurance can only be resting on His.

Which means verse 8 is not the summary of the list. It is the supply for it. Verses 4 to 7 describe what love does; verse 8 names what Love is. And nobody performs the first except by drawing on the second.

Which is the arrangement this journal keeps finding, in yet another form. Nearness before blessing. Sight before strength. The mind before the walk. And here: the unfailing love before the behaviour that is asked of us. The demand is real. It was never meant to be met out of our own supply.