Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the presence of these witnesses, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony…. Wait a minute… that can’t be right. I guess I heard Connie reading from 1 Corinthians 13 and I just got a little carried away. We hardly ever read that text at a regular church service, but it seems like whenever there is a wedding, this is the text that they choose. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful…. Love never ends.” It sounds so romantic, doesn’t it? Just reading through it I can almost hear Pachelbel’s Canon in D playing in my head, which, by the way, is not actually a canon at all — it’s a ground bass — but that is another story. 1 Corinthians 13, like Pachelbel’s Canon, is just one of the those things that we expect to hear at weddings.

Now, I hate to burst anyone’s bubble here, but despite all of the wonderful language about love, and despite the fact that it get’s read at virtually every wedding, and despite the fact that we’ve all heard several wedding sermons about it, this text has virtually nothing to do with marriage or with romantic love.

In fact, marriage was the last thing on Paul’s mind when he wrote this particular passage. Paul, you see, is not really a fan of marriage. If you don’t believe me, just turn back a few pages in your bible to 1 Corinthians 7. Paul basically says, “It’s alright to get married if you think that have to, if you’re too weak to be able to handle being celibate, but everyone would really be better of if they were single.” Here are a few of the highlights:

“If you marry, you do not sin…. [but] those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that… I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided…. So then, he who marries his fiancée does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.”

That’s what Paul actually thinks about marriage. Not quite as romantic as 1 Corinthians 13, though, is it? I suppose that’s why we don’t read that bit at weddings.

As you may already know, while in English we really just have one word for love, the Greeks have several different words to describe what they think of as different types of love. The word that refers to romantic love is ἔρος, and it is never once used in the New Testament. That’s right, the New Testament never mentions romantic love. Another Greek word for love is στοργή. It usually refers to the love between parents and children, sometimes to the love between husband and wife. Again, this word is never mentioned in the New Testament. One word for love that we do find in the New Testament is φίλος. This is most often translated as the love between friends. It’s the kind of love Jesus has for his disciples. It is a deep and personal affection. Another related word is φιλαδελφία, that is, brotherly love. This is the kind of love that members of the church are supposed to have for one another.

But none of those is the type of love that Paul is talking about. Paul is talking about ἀγάπη. Ἀγάπη is the kind of love that God has for humanity or the kind of love that humanity has for God. It is also the kind of love that we humans might have for other humans on the basis of our love for God. That is to say that it is not a love that is based on affection, but a love that is based on principles. I love my wife because I like and respect her and enjoy spending time with her; that is not ἀγάπη. I love the people of Haiti not because I have any particular affection for Haiti or because I know any Haitians, but because my principles tell me that I should love all of my human brothers and sisters, especially those who are suffering; that is ἀπάπη.

As one commentator puts it, ἀγάπη is “the kind of love we have for someone or something upon which we are willing to base our principles for determining right and wrong; it includes the intention to act upon those principles regardless of what the consequences may be. This kind of love is the deep and abiding respect that we have for another. It is the kind of love that commands our intentions and directs our daily decisions.”1 In other words, ἀγάπη is the kind of love that defines our morality and our ethics and has very little to do with whether we like or dislike a person or a thing.

And Paul tells the Corinthians, “You don’t have anything if you don’t have ἀγάπη.” You see the Corinthian Christians were rather caught up with the idea of spiritual gifts — healing, prophesy, speaking in tongues, wisdom — that sort of thing. And many of them were quite proud of themselves for the types of spiritual gifts they possessed.

Paul wants to say to them, “Get over yourselves. There are more important things than those spiritual gifts. So you have the power to heal people, what does that matter? So you can speak in tongues, big deal. So what if you have so much faith that you can perform miracles. It all amounts to absolutely nothing if you don’t have ἀγάπη.

If you don’t care for your fellow human beings, then your faith is worthless. If you don’t offer aid and comfort to those who are hurting and in trouble, then I could care less if you are smartest person in the world. If you can’t figure out how to live with one another without sniping and jockeying for position, then it doesn’t matter a bit how spiritual a person you might be. You have got to have ἀγάπη.

I was watching the President the other night as he met with Republican Congressional leaders and answered their questions. It was quite a spirited discussion, as you might imagine. At one point, he said, “...We've got to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes, because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together, because our constituents start believing us.  They don't know sometimes this is just politics what you guys -- or folks on my side do sometimes… That's why I say if we're going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can't start off by figuring out, A, who's to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side.  And unfortunately, that's how our politics works right now.”2

That’s not only the way our politics works, it’s also the way our theology works a lot of the time. We expend a lot of energy trying to demonize and discredit the people we disagree with. Now, if I say to you, “You know, I really disagree with you on this point, and here are the reasons why,” then that is something we can have a discussion about. But if I say, “You are absolutely immoral for believing what you believe,” well then, that shuts down the conversation right there, and it kills our relationship, and that is not what God wants for us.

You see it doesn’t matter how well I might be able to articulate my point or how definitively I can shut down my rival, or even how right and correct I might be on any particular subject… if I don’t have ἀγάπη, I am nothing. If I don’t love even my enemy, then it’s worthless.

Ἀγάπη is not about liking someone, it is not about agreeing with someone, it is not even about respecting someone. Ἀγάπη is about loving even the persons we most dislike; it’s about loving even the people we hate. Why? Because God first loved us. And in loving us, God taught us the meaning of love. That’s why we love one another, because God loves us, and we love God, and God loves everyone. “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”