The Most Excellent Way
Today I want to look at 1 Corinthians 13. It is one of the readings for this week in the Anglican Lectionary, which, for you non-Anglicans out there, is a list of readings taken from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the New Testament epistles, and the Gospels designed to help churches work through the entire Bible in a 3 year cycle. It is based on the lectionary that Thomas Cranmer, the founder of the Anglican Communion (Henry VIII aside), developed back in the 16th century. If you’ve ever been to a wedding in a church, then you have probably heard this chapter read before. It is considered the love chapter in the Bible. At least that’s way that most people think about it. The truth is that the whole Bible is about love…as The Jesus Storybook Bible explains it is God’s great love story for the world. An aside, if you want help understanding what the Bible is really about read The Jesus Storybook Bible. It is amazing. You may try to dismiss it as a children’s Bible, but I assure it is not. It is for you and me. It doesn’t cover every passage of Scripture, but it hits the highlights and the author, Sally Lloyd Jones, gives you a spot on interpretation of what this whole thing called Christianity is really all about. I am frequently brought to tears when I read it with my girls. So, order it today and read it. You won’t be sorry.
Back to 1 Corinthians 13…this is the Apostle Paul’s explicit treatment of love. It is his answer to Foreigner’s cry…you remember the 80’s band singing, “I wanna know what love is.” Well, this is it. But before we go any further I want to give you some context for why Paul wrote this chapter. His letter is to the church in Corinth. He was writing to Christians, and he had heard that they had divisions among them…super surprising, right? Corinth was a large port city in the Roman Empire. It was a metropolis with people groups from all over the empire…different cultures and different socio-economic backgrounds, and like any big city there was a lot of ambition and striving to get ahead to make something of yourself. Compare it to New York City where Frank Sinatra famously sang, “If you make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.” Well, Corinth was that kind of town…which meant that there was a lot of competition. And we learn from Paul’s letter that this diverse mix of people and this competitive cultural mind-set characterized the church in Corinth too. They divided into groups behind whichever leader they thought was most impressive: some followed Paul, some followed Apollos, and the spiritual trump card of all spiritual trump cards, some followed Jesus.
A modern day Corinth
They applied social class hierarchy to the way they celebrated communion. Communion in those days consisted of a literal fellowship meal where they would all bring food and gather around a table together to eat. But the Corinthians used it as an opportunity to re-emphasize their social status. It was considered an honor to be near the table, so the more important you were the closer you were, and it went out in expanding circles. The rich or high class were on the inner circles close to the table and the poor and lower class were on the outer circles to the point where they were not even in the same room as the table and often were not even able to get in the house. They were kept out in the courtyard. Not the best picture of a fellowship meal, right?
And the Corinthians even applied their competitive, ambitious ideals to the spiritual gifts. Ironic that we try to take credit for things called gifts – they cannot be merited by definition…they are given, they are not a reflection of our own self-importance. We don’t do anything to earn them. But that’s what the Corinthians were doing. You can imagine it, can’t you? The gift of prophecy or the gift of healing are much more flashy kinds of gifts…they seem more impressive and important than say the gifts of hospitality or administration, right? Well, that’s how the Corinthians thought, and they had a hierarchy of gifts, which directly related to your value within the community.
Now before we get too judgey on the Corinthians, we need to remember that we are just like them. I’ve been in churches and amongst Christians my whole life and this same thing happens. That’s because people are people. We haven’t changed. We still want to be impressive and important, and it infects our spiritual lives too. It can be subtle, but we go there really fast. When we focus on getting better, improving, and climbing some spiritual ladder it is a recipe for comparison. We don’t compare ourselves to God, which is what the Bible does all of the time…we don’t do that because we know we will never match up then. SO, we measure ourselves against each other instead. Much better odds that way. God’s way out of my league, but my neighbor is within range. That’s our unconscious reflexive belief. Even then it doesn’t always work out for us. “Oh man, Jill prayed an awesome prayer at church today. Dang, she is really spiritual. I don’t think I’ll ever be as spiritual as her so I’m never going to pray out loud in church.” Or something like that.
Fact is comparison and competition will only breed resentment and will break fellowship. You’re no longer my brothers and sisters in Christ…you’re my competition. You and I are striving for the same thing, greatness in the eyes of God, and I need to beat you out for that. Remember the disciples fighting amongst themselves and asking Jesus this question? “Who will be the greatest in your kingdom?” Which one of us is gonna be the greatest? They do it twice in Luke’s Gospel, once in ch. 9 and again in ch. 22 literally right before Jesus is arrested. This is the way we operate. This is how we think. “Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you!” And it is all wrongheaded.
What’s the implicit point of view behind this behavior in us? What drives this in us? It’s the belief that I need to improve for God to be more pleased with me…to win his favor…to experience his blessings. I need to become less sinful, be a better Christian so that he will be happier with me. Perform, perform, perform! Improve, improve, improve!
When we focus on our spiritual growth all of the time we will ironically begin to lose sight of Jesus and the Gospel. Without thinking about it we are constantly trying to work him out of a job. We want to get better and improve to the point where we don’t need him any more. Now most of us would never say that, but that is what we are doing when we think we can eradicate sin in our lives by any other means than his cross. That’s what happens when we make Jesus a means to an end – we make him the means by which we finally become “the best of the best of the best, sir!” (Men In Black) He is the secret ingredient that I have been searching for that will finally help me achieve my self-improvement goals. We want him to be a means to an end as opposed to The End. The means by which we accomplish that pipe dream from the Garden of Eden where we can finally be like God without needing God. But Jesus is THE End.
This is what Paul tells the Corinthians, and he does it in his typically masterful way. He actually appeals to their selfish desire to be the best, to be the greatest in the kingdom by saying, “I will show you the most excellent way.” You can almost hear him say it just like Bill and Ted, “Excellent!” This is the greatest way in all of existence, and it is love. And Paul even uses their method of assessment, how they determine the greatest: by comparison. He takes everything that the Corinthians wanted to base their importance on and compares it to love and shows that it all pales in comparison. Essentially, he describes the spiritual superhero we all want to be, pointing to every amazing spiritual work or deed we could think of and saying if we have all of this but not love, then we have nothing. Just listen: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, and if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, if I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I am nothing, I gain nothing” (v. 1-3). Love is all that matters.
Now it’s easy to read this and then say, “Ok, I just gotta be more loving. I need to work harder at being more loving.” But then we’d just be back in the same game of trying to perform for God, trying to improve for God…trying to please him. But isn’t that what Paul is telling the Corinthians? Isn’t he admonishing them to be more loving? Not exactly. Paul is bringing them back to Jesus. He is not simply talking about love as some kind of philosophical ideal, some abstraction. Rather he is bringing them back to the personification of love, Jesus himself. Remember what John said in his first letter later in the New Testament? “God is love.” Remember, Jesus is not a means to an end. He is the end; the beginning and the end to be exact…the Alpha and the Omega. Paul said he will show us the most excellent way, and that is Jesus. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He is the one that will endure forever. He is the one that is greater than even faith and hope.
“He is patient and kind; he does not envy or boast; he is not arrogant or rude. He does not insist on his own way; He is not irritable or resentful; He does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. He bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. He never ends.” Jesus Christ is the love, the way, that we so desperately need.
Paul is refocusing the Corinthians and us on Jesus himself. He is the point of God’s great love story for us. By default we fall into thinking that the point of life is to improve, to get better, to be all that we can be…and worse, we think that’s what God wants too. As we said, we view Jesus as the shot of spiritual steroids to give us the power we need to get to the next level…or maybe he’s your double shot of espresso to get through your day. Whatever metaphor you relate to more…knowing most of you it’s probably the steroids;) But ultimately we think it is about us…and God’s approval or disapproval, or his pleasure or displeasure with us is determined by how good we are…and we just kind of wedge Jesus into that system to make it work. Oh yeah, it’s clear Jesus is important so we need to fit him in somehow. But that is not true!
He is the point. It is all about Jesus. Hear this. God is fully pleased with you right now because of Jesus. God fully approves of you right now because of Jesus. He fully accepts you because of Jesus. He is God’s unconditional love for you made manifest. You do not have to improve for God to love you more. You do not have to be a better Christian for God to be pleased with you, or for him to bless you. He loves you completely right now because of Jesus Christ. It seems impossible because nothing else in the world works this way. Everything else is conditional, but not this. That’s why it is the good news. Jesus is the end of all of our striving, and he is the beginning of our peace. This makes more sense if you remember the fact that the Bible paints us as dead in our sins. Dead. When you think of the fact that you were a dead person when Jesus came to save you, when Jesus came to bring you to new life, then it is pretty darn clear that you brought nothing to the table. None of us do other than our death. He didn’t do it in response to anything you did or will do. He did it because of one reason: he is love. He is the most excellent way. That’s who He is.
And what that does for the Corinthians and for us is that it destroys any hierarchy we might set up. It brings an end to the competition and comparison. Even though we are always bent that way, we always try to return there…we simply won’t be able to stay there when our focus is on Jesus Christ and his love for us. When he is our focus, our definition of honor and importance all get turned upside down, as Tim Keller loved to say. Honor in light of Jesus’ unconditional love for us comes from lowering yourself in service to others and helping others as opposed to elevating yourself for personal gain and glory. The Gospel of Jesus Christ destroys hierarchy and division and unifies us together as sinners saved by grace, totally dependent on Him. He is love, and he is the most excellent way. He is our end. As the famous hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind says, “Drop Thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of Thy peace.” Amen.
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