Canter Bridge

In this most famous of biblical passages, it seems on an early morning like this one that a reader could almost substitute the word ‘God’ for the apostle’s ‘love’ and that the poem would still turn out right. This is no accident.

Paul’s relection upon love’s preeminence casts love nearly in the role of an omnipotent—even omnipresent in its capacity for outlasting all other virtues—presence. The Bible’s reflexes for assigning love a place very near to the deity are well established, so this should not surprise us. John throws both caveat and nuance to the wind when he gives into this reflex heart and soul in penning the most powerful two-word sentence every spoken: ‘God (is) love’.

It is well to immerse onself in this biblical affirmation, for God’s holy love lies at the core of almost everything else that the biblical anthology cares about saying. That ‘God is love’ is a statement patient enough of a thousand familiar sentimentalities so as to be rushed over by a reader of our time without actually taking stock of its deeply radical description.

Paul, of course, does not say that God is love. He merely elevates the virtue to a stratosphere where only the deity appears capable of breathing the thin air. It amounts to the same thing.

We do not know whether Paul authored this time-honored celebration of love, or merely relied upon it to impress upon dueling Corinthians the poverty of Christian practice that does not subject all else to holy love. It does not matter.

The reading of it makes it almost plausible to label twenty centuries of Christian faith with the words first draft and then to start all over with love at the center.

This is not the tawdry, neon veneer of love that allows the sentimentalist in us to escape all other obligation. It is rather the proper location of every word and deed in subjection to the principle of self-sacrificial generosity. This love is, as they say, a tough love:

Love hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. At no time does love fail.

The love of which Paul speaks is determined, wily, and aware. It knows human failing, yet overcomes it. This kind of love refuses to abandon hope that the divine presence makes every human being redeemable. It renounces the cheap luxury of viewing any depressing cirumstance as final. This love penetrates. This love stubbornly creates a future for lapsed human beings who by their brokenness and capacity to disappoint have long since made themselves disposable by any other logic.

Love hopes. Love believes. Love endures.

If these words began with Paul, it is not difficult to see how his experience on the Damascus Road should stand behind them. At points he alludes to that conversion—the word fits—by way of an enduring conviction of his own undeserved status in its wake. He knows that love—come to the apostle in that moment as a blinding light and a heavenly voice—had hoped, had believed beyond measure. Paul’s lines reveal his comprehension that, even now, love endures in him and with him, else all is lost.

It is so even with us, who live, breathe, and yet are not consumed. By Christ’s love.