The Far Better Way

Paul was in the city of Ephesus,
writing a letter
to the church across the sea in Corinth.
He had just told them they were one body,
hands and feet and ears together,
and he knew they were still arguing.

The argument was about gifts.
God had given some of them the power
to speak in languages nobody had ever taught them,
and those people liked to do it loudly,
all at once.
"Whose gift is the best?" everyone wanted to know.

So Paul dipped his pen and wrote,
"Now I will show you a far better way."

"If I speak in every language of people and of angels
but have no love,
I am only a noisy gong,
a clanging cymbal."
(CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
Try saying your prayers
next to that.)

"If I know all God's secrets
and have faith enough to move mountains,
but have no love,
I am nothing.
If I give away everything I own,
or hand over my body to be burned,
but have no love,
I gain nothing."

Then Paul wrote down what love looks like.

"Love is patient. Love is kind.
Love is not jealous.
It does not brag, and it is not proud.
It is not rude.
It does not demand its own way.
It is not quick to get angry,
and it keeps no list of wrongs."
(A list of wrongs is the kind you keep on a brother:
took my crayon on Tuesday,
hid my shoe on Friday.
Love throws the list away.)

"Love is not glad when something wrong happens.
It is glad about the truth.
Love carries everything,
trusts through everything,
hopes through everything,
and keeps going through everything.
Love never ends."

"One day the new languages will stop," he wrote.
"Messages from God's prophets will not be needed.
What we know now is only part of the picture.
When I was a child, I talked like a child.
When I grew up, I put childish ways behind me.
Now we see as if in a mirror, dimly.
Then we will see face to face."
(Mirrors in Corinth were made of polished bronze.
You could tell there was a face in there,
but not much more.)

"Now I know in part," Paul wrote.
"Then I will know fully,
the way God already knows me.
So three things last: faith, hope, and love.
And the greatest of these is love."

The Corinthians read that list
and must have squirmed.
Not one of them fit it.
Paul did not fit it either.
He had once argued with his friend Barnabas so sharply that the two of them split up.
Try a name where Paul wrote "love," your own, or your brother's, or Paul's,
and somewhere around "not rude"
it stops being true.

Only one name fits every line.
He did not demand his own way.
When a village shut him out and his friends wanted fire from the sky,
he walked on to the next village.
He kept no list against the friend
who said three times that he never knew him.
He carried everything, even a cross.

Now his Spirit is growing that same love
in his squabbling people.
And one day they will see him face to face,
and know him the way he has always known them.
Write his name where Paul wrote "love,"
and it stays true all the way to the end.