EPIPHANY
4 - 1 February 2004 – Bishop Owen Dowling
I suppose one could feel a kind of warm, fuzzy glow about 1 Corinthians 13 - Paul's great and lyrical passage about love. People have had this passage, or part of it read at their weddings, and very often it is chosen for funerals too. Quite rightly too for it says some great things about love - Christ's kind of love, unselfish and enduring love - the love which is there for us in the beginning, the middle and the end.
Paul wrote his letter to a church that wasn't very loving. There were great gifts of the spirit in the Christian church, yes, and some very enthusiastic Christians there, many fairly new to the faith. There was lots of tongue-speaking, words of prophecy, healing miracles, spectacular deliverances, but there wasn't unity in the church and there wasn't love. They had become very factionalized - one group following Paul, another following Apollos, a gifted preacher, another following Peter, and a superior group who said they followed Christ, as if no one else did.
Significant differences existed in the early Christian community even between Peter and Paul themselves over the policies about admitting non-Jews into the Christian family. Should the Gentiles be circumcised and made to be obedient to the details of the Old Testament law? Should Jews and non-Jews eat together. There were differences over the place of the Holy Spirit in the scheme of things and how baptism was done. There were drunken and disorderly Eucharists and apparently some shameless showing off by the wealthy in the church and very uncaring attitudes to the poor.
After reading about the principle of the body and how this applied to Christ's family in its unity and diversity, and how they all needed one another in the diverse unity of Christ's body, Paul rises to great heights in what we call his 13th chapter. (There were no chapters in the letter - it was just one continuous message - and we do well sometimes to read it as a whole). A continuous reading, for yourself, of 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14, might help you to see what he is saying to them, and no doubt to us.
As well as that, we have the juxtaposition today in the readings of this great passage about love and the very unloving and hostile treatment which Jesus received from his own church and local community.
Why had he stirred them up so much? They had heard of the things he had done - the healings and deliverances - down in Capernaum and they wanted to know why he wasn't doing such things in his own hometown! We know from Mark's gospel that he couldn't do works of healing there - there was so much scepticism surround him. Mark says that he was amazed at their unbelief. They gave him a double message - they didn't believe, but they wanted him to prove his claims about himself by signs and miracles. It reminds us of what the leaders of his nation and their henchmen called out to him on the cross. "Come down from the cross and we will believe in you."
In the synagogue Jesus had read to them as we heard in last week's gospel from the prophet Isaiah. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free." He told them that the scripture was being fulfilled in the ministry he was doing. But he then gave it a strange twist. He talked of God's bias towards outsiders and quoted two cases where Elijah and Elisha brought help and healing to Gentiles and not to their own people. There's more than a hint here of Jesus' wider mission to the world, and his refusal to be bound to the narrow outlook, petty-mindedness and exclusivity of his own people - especially those in his own town and synagogue.
They were furious with him and took him up to a local cliff to toss him down and then no doubt stone him to death. But his time was not yet come. He calmly walked through the midst of them and went on his way.
St Paul had some of the same kind of problems as he bore witness to Jesus in synagogues and religious communities dominated by the narrow exclusive attitude of "God-chosen people", as they called themselves.
In the spirit and tradition of Jesus, Paul stood up for, in fact gave his life for, the wider vision - the mission to the nations and the inclusion of the uncircumcised Gentiles in God's family. They are to be fellow heirs with the Jews of God's promises. A genuinely CATHOLIC vision in the best sense of the word. Catholic means world wide and universal.
So no matter what warm feelings we have towards 1 Corinthians 13, the great passage about love, we need to read it against the background and the controversies and divisions of the time and divisions and tensions not unknown in the church of our own time or even in the way we see ourselves as a 'nation'. Christ was crucified for the wider vision and Paul suffered for it in the name of Christ.
In love and in the Spirit of Christ we are to create community of the open and inclusive kind rather than of the narrow and exclusive kind. We are to create, with God's help, a community of prayer, healing and mutual care. We are to honour difference, but work for a rich and accepting unity. The kind of community we create is to be the seedbed of open loving attitudes, and costly self-giving love and compassion. We are to build local church communities ministering to local community, but not bound by merely local loyalties.
There is community which is liberating and health giving and community that is stifling and confining. Through Jesus' word and ministry and clear body-of-Christ teaching that Paul gave in the spirit of Jesus and the inspiration of such a passage as 1 Corinthians 13 in all its wisdom and love we are to have our vision rekindled of what Christian community is and should be, and be renewed in our determination to live it out.
And our vision is not just for our church and the church and the churches of the world but for our nation and the world community, for we are to be as witnesses of what true costly genuine love is, and catalysts for it wherever we are and whatever we do - to be leaven in the lump of dough as Jesus put it:
IT IS A TRULY CATHOLIC VISION.
By which we need to be grasped time and time again as we worship together, and are challenged by Christ's word to us.