A More Excellent Way

Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Epiphany 4
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
1 Corinthians 13:1-13

1 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. 2And 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. 3If 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. 4Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Confession time again. If you are keeping track, this is, I think, the fourth time I stand in front of you and reveal another frailty. What? So few, you may ask? Don’t worry. There’s more where this came from. (smile) I have to measure them out … I plan on retiring here, so we’ve got a while to cover them all.

The confession is that, more than usual, I am keenly aware of my inadequacy in approaching the subject matter this morning. We are talking about agapē love. For those of us here who have heard it before, no in-depth explanation is necessary, except for the purpose of refreshing the memory. For the rest of us, here’s the shorthand version of the forms of love:

In English, we have one word for the multiple variations of the emotion we call love; and that word is LOVE. We would just as soon love an omelet for breakfast as we would love to hear from a friend whom we haven’t heard from for years. We love the smell of bacon frying and we love the way that dress looks on you. We love you more than anything in this world, and we love the taste of chocolate syrup on vanilla ice cream. We love our country, we love our president, and we love our town. We love our pets, we love the way the new window treatment looks, and we would love to have the opportunity to tell you about the love of God in Christ.

Who said English is a complicated language?

In Greek, the Greek of the New Testament, there are FOUR words that we translate as love. The first is Erōs. You probably can make the connection as to what type of love that refers to – it is the love of deep desire, passionate aspiration, and sensuous longing. It often has a sexual or physical connotation. Neither the noun form of the word nor the verb form of it – eran – ever appears in the New Testament.

The next is storgē and the verb stergein – they concern the kind of affection we find in a family. Plato writes that a child stergein his parents and his parents love him. THESE words for love never appear in the New Testament, although the adjective philostorgos, brotherly affection, appears in Romans 12:10, which brings us to the third form of love found in the Greek language and, unlike the first two, also in the New Testament: The noun is philia and the verb is philein. They are used to describe different kinds of love throughout the New Testament – philein, the verb form, is used 33 times and Philos, the noun form, is used 29 times. They are the most common words used for love in Greek culture and literature.

The fourth one is the first one I mentioned earlier – agapē. What is interesting about this word is that it is used only rarely in Greek literature of the period, but it is the most widely used word for “love” in the New Testament and in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures that the Hellenistic Jews – those Jews of the diaspora – who moved out and away from the land of Palestine – and may not have been able to speak, much less read Hebrew – the Septuagint was their translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

In that, the verb form of the word – agapan – occurs approximately 200 times. The noun agapē is used there 19 times. The verb agapan is used 130 times in the New Testament, and the noun agapē is used almost 120 times.

What is it about this word that eliminates it from common use in the Greek language? Why are the other forms of love so much more visible in the context of normal, regular, secular Greek life?

I think we could find a similar situation if we went over the uses of the word ‘love’ in our own culture and literature as well. After all, in that paragraph I read to you earlier, listing some of the ways in which we use the word ‘love’, you caught a glimpse of how the word can be used to express a whole range of feelings.

It would be an interesting exercise to try and come up with different words in English for the different kinds of emotion we now generally call love to be expressed. We do try to qualify the emotion with words such as ‘like’ and ‘esteem’ and ‘appreciate’, and to a certain degree, they serve the purpose, but it’s not always the case.

But this morning we are characterizing the love of God for humanity as defined in the person of Jesus Christ. Let me say that again: the love of God for humanity as defined in the person of Jesus Christ. What the seventy scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek and what Paul had an opportunity to do in using the word agapē to describe the love they were talking about was to frame the use of the word into a context that would communicate as clearly as they could make it communicate what that love was like. There is an element to that love that is distinct from the others in this particular passage. The form of the word calls for the adjectives that Paul is using to describe it to be put into tenses that speak to the essence of the emotion – to the essence of the love – they are not simply nice things being said about love – let me read it to you this way:

4Love is BEING patient; love is BEING kind; love is not BEING envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It is not insisting on its own way; it is not BEING irritable or resentful; 6it IS not REJOICING in wrongdoing, but REJOICING in the truth. 7It IS BEARING all things, BELIEVING all things, HOPING all things, ENDURING all things.

Can you see the difference in the reading? This form in which the words are written are a description not simply of an emotion, but of a way of living, a way of acting, a way of BEING that goes beyond simply SAYING you believe something.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

We can say we believe in the love of God. We can sing about it, pray for it, read about it, teach about it, and even preach about it. But, as Paul himself said, if we don’t HAVE what it is we are talking about, we’re nothing. Clanging bells, noisy gongs, so much hot air. The catch is, what he goes on to say is even more than that – we can put it into action – you’ve heard me preach about how the love we profess is not simply an emotion, but it is a word that denotes action – we can go through the motions – feed the poor with the food off our tables, clothe them with the clothes off our backs, we can be the final arbiter in matters of faith and practice for the Rappahannock Baptist Association or even the Baptist General Association of Virginia, and have people lined up at our doorstep to get an answer to their up-until-now unanswerable questions … all that and more … but if we don’t have the love of God in our hearts, it’s not worth another first-century Greek term: piddly-squat.

Agapē is used to express the spontaneous, creative, caring love that is expressive of God’s nature and that extended to undeserving humanity in Christ. People who accept God’s love are empowered by the Spirit of God to live thankfully and obediently in response to God’s love and thereby live by the love that redeems them in Jesus Christ. It becomes their love, but it is the gift of God’s love. It is not their … OUR work, but God’s gift. We do not gain it, we receive it. It comes not through self-assertion, but through self-surrender. Love evokes faith and faith evokes love. Love is the aim of Christians because they have died and been raised with Christ, and because love is given those who give themselves to the Spirit.

Love is centered in concern for others. Love is the principle that controls the exercise of all gifts: love creates unity, not division. To follow the way of love – the more excellent way – is to follow the very nature of God God’s self. Agapē is the most excellent way because it is grounded in God. Love is God in humanity.
(Raymond Bryan Brown, The Broadman Bible Commentary Vol 10, 1 Corinthians, Broadman Press, Nashville, 1970)

Let’s pray.