Kenneth Bailey.net

1 Corinthians 13 — Love and the Spiritual Gifts

In our series of studies on major themes in the New Testament from a Middle Eastern perspective, we have looked at one theme which concentrates on theology.  A summary of many of the major themes of our Lord’s teaching as he gives them to us in the prayer which he taught us all to pray,  the Lord’s Prayer. We wish to look now at an ethical theme for indeed our faith involves us in both theology and in ethics, in what we believe and in what we must do. The question of who we are and the question of our life-style. The question of identity and the question of the life style that grows out of that identity. And so, in the next two studies, we will be looking at the great 13th chapter of First Corinthians, to which I urge you now to open.

When we approach this great chapter, again, because we’re hitting high points of major themes in the New Testament, we are dealing with material that is very, very well known. Perhaps you yourself at one point memorized this in your life in the Sunday school. Certainly its phrases have come right into the English language out of the King James version and are a part of the coin of the realm of all of us. And so when we approach a passage as well known as this one, we not only have the task of rescuing truth from familiarity, but we have the additional task of distinguishing between Scripture and tradition.

Now what I mean by that is that in our old heritage of the Reformation, the church of Luther and Calvin and the other great scholars of that Reformation period, affirmed for us and for all those who follow them, that the authority for us as Christians in that tradition is the Scriptures alone. Luther said Scripture alone and grace alone and faith alone. These were his great affirmations, or some of them. But the difficulty is that quite often those of us who affirm that we stand indeed on Scripture and not on Scripture and tradition, other Christians fell that they can include in their faith themes that are not in their scriptures as authoritative because, they say, these come to us in the church traditions. So we’re relying on tradition and we’re relying on the Scripture. And if it’s not in the Scripture, never mind. But our view is No, it must be the Scripture alone is authoritative for that which we affirm is central to our faith.

However, we have our traditional interpretations of Scripture. So it’s kind of like Scripture is a box and then there is drawn around that box another square, if you care to write in it, “our interpretation of the Scriptures.” So, when we pick up the Scriptures and read them, we’re not just reading the text. After all, the text is translated. And it’s translated into a language that we know. And there is a tradition of translation behind it. And you and I have heard all those zillions of sermons interpreting it. And so we’re not just reading the text as though we never saw it before. We’re reading it in the light of everything grandma and mom said about it, and all that my Sunday school teachers said about it and all the sermons that I’ve heard and all the commentaries that I’ve read, and all the thoughts that I’ve thought. And all the translation tradition that is behind it. So I am reading a text embodied in a great receptacle of tradition. The danger is when we allow the line between the text and our traditional interpretation of it to be erased. Then we start banging on the Bible and saying, “The Bible says,” and we’re not ready to listen to anyone and what we really mean is, “My preacher always told me.” And there has to be a difference. There has to be a difference between the text of Scriptures and what I’m telling you. Because what I have to say has to be examined and tested by others and refined by the Scriptures themselves. And so try in your own mind to keep a dialogue between the text and between our interpretation of it that there might always be freedom for a fresh understanding of the word even though it may not be the same as what we have heard before.

Now, take the New Testament, if you will, for just a minute, and let’s look and see how Paul has placed this great chapter in the middle of one of the sections of the book of First Corinthians. Flip through the pages with me, if you will please, and turn back to chapter 11. And you’ll notice in chapter 11, verse 2, that he makes reference to the traditions and then immediately discusses the question of men and women together in Christian worship. And that’s his subject through the rest of chapter 11.

In chapter 12, he talks about the spiritual gifts. And there are some negatives. Somebody thinks by the Spirit of God that they can say “Jesus, be cursed,” in verse 3. And he goes on to say that this isn’t possible. And a part of what we know about Paul’s understanding of the spiritual gifts then occurs in chapter 12. Chapter 13 is the chapter we are now examining which is his great hymn on love. Did you ever notice that right after chapter 13 in the first half of chapter 14, verses 1-25, he goes back to the subject of spiritual gifts and then at the end of chapter 14, verse 26 to the end, he goes back to the question of men and women together in worship. So you see, we’ve got five sections. He starts off talking about men and women in worship. Then he talks about the spiritual gifts. Then he talks about love. He returns to the subject of the spiritual gifts. And then he goes back to the subject of men and women in worship.

Or if you wish to look at it even more precisely, you can find that this use of the inversion principle, you see, 1, 2, 3, and then back to 2 and back to 1 as he goes on. He goes back to subject 2 and back to subject 1. He even does that more precisely. If you include the divisions of chapter 13, you can see him cutting the material even more finely. Men and women in worship. Then he goes to the question of the spiritual gifts. Then in the opening verses of chapter 13, he talks about love and the spiritual gifts. And we learn something about their interrelationship. Then he defines love positively. “Love is kind.” “Love is patient.” These are good things. Then he defines love negatively. Love is not this and it’s not this and it’s not this and it’s not this. So now he has five sections. Then he goes back to defining love positively. “Love endures all.” “Love believes all.” “Love has hope in all.”  Then he goes back to love and the spiritual gifts which are the last verses in chapter 13. Then he returns in chapter 14 to the spiritual gifts themselves and finally back to the question of men and women together in worship. So you can see it as a division of 3 which repeats, or a division of 5 which then repeats backward.

So the whole section is a series of envelopes, one envelope is men and women in worship. And the next envelope is the spiritual gifts. Then we have love and the spiritual gifts. And then love defined positively. And finally, love defined negatively in the beginning. And the reader is supposed to move through these ideas to the climax and then back down the other side. It’s kind of like singing up a scale. You go up and up and then you come back down. Or it’s like climbing a mountain in which there are a series of different layers of different types of rock. And as you climb up the mountain, finally you come to the top. And then as you go back down the other side, you will of course, as you know, pass the same layers of rock. This I prefer to call, inverted parallelism.

And Paul has got this entire unit very carefully constructed with his climax in the middle, which is on the question of love. Why did he put it there? And why do we have these layers of ideas around it? Well, I think the answer is pretty obvious. It seems that the church in Corinth was making a big fuss, shouting, screaming, arguing at one another, about the spiritual gifts, and they were just about to tear each other apart and the fellowship of Christ be broken up because of the big fights they were having over who had what gifts. And I’ve got this one and you should  have it. And I’m better than you and you don’t have mine. And they were all fighting with one another. And they were fighting with one another over the place of the men and the women together in the new fellowship of Christ. And they were yelling and screaming and insulting one another over that topic too. And so Paul talks about these themes. He comes to love in the middle and then he repeats the same themes in a backward fashion.

And so thereby, why does he have the negatives in the very center instead of the positives? I think because when we get to that list of the negative definitions of love in the very center of that great chapter, we’ll find that these are precisely the things that we can imagine were taking place amongst the Corinthians in their big fight over how they together as a human family were supposed to worship God with the men and the women and how they were supposed to use their spiritual gifts for up-building one another instead of tearing one another apart.

All right, keeping that in mind now, look at chapter 13 again and let’s talk about its connectives. There are scholars who have noticed the fact that there is a discussion of spiritual gifts before chapter 13 and another one afterwards. And they’ve said, “Well, it looks like Paul got this chapter in the middle out of place.” Or maybe some editor hacked it out of place. Surely Paul wanted to finish the topic of spiritual gifts and then go to the subject of love. No, that’s the way our Greco-Roman mind works. But that’s not the way the Middle-Eastern mind works. His mind, as an inheritor of the prophets—and many times the prophets wrote in this same fashion, moved to a climax and then repeated himself backward.

But the reason some scholars have felt that perhaps some editor got the pages of Paul’s letter mixed up a bit before he put them together in the letter which we now have, is that there are what has been described as loose connectives or rough connectives. For example, at the end of chapter 12, it says, “Earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way.” All right, more excellent than what? Well, more excellent than the spiritual gifts. If you read it that way, then it means that faith, hope, and love are not a part of the spiritual gifts and he’s pooh-poohing the spiritual gifts and saying, “Put those aside. Let’s go on to things that matter. which are not amongst them, namely, faith, hope, and love.” But then, how does chapter 14 start? It says, “Earnestly desire the spiritual gifts.” Well, didn’t he just say we’re supposed to set them aside because we’re going to do something better? How come he’s telling us they’re important and we have to go after them? And so what appears to be sort of loose connectives has made some people feel, well, you know, if you just lift that whole chapter out, the whole discussion links up beautifully. Perhaps this was originally at the end of chapter 14. But I don’t think so. I think it’s exactly where Paul wants it because it’s right in the climax of this entire section which enunciates these two great problems about which the Corinthians are fighting and over which and for which they so desperately need the love which he describes.

And the way we solve this problem is to look at that sentence, “And I will show you a more excellent way.” You see, our difficulty is that the phrase we’re talking about, “more excellent,” is a little Greek word and the little Greek word is a word that is uJperbolh. Now uJperbolh as an adjective always in Paul and in every other text, means to intensify some quality that’s there. If you’re talking about sin, and sin is bad, and then Paul adds this word, it means “very sinful.” And if he’s talking about grace, and grace is good,  then it means exceedingly abundant grace. You see, whatever quality is there, you intensify the quality by adding this particular word. And for a long time, commentators have said, “Well, the use of uJperbolh in this text is very peculiar because we really don’t find this word attached to a road. A road can be a good road or a bad road. It doesn’t have any necessary quality to it at all. And so how can you intensify a quality when there isn’t one? And so the commentators have said, “Well, this is a bit peculiar, and we’re not quite sure what he means, but we’ll just sort of let it go in the traditional fashion.

There is an alternative. The alternative is on the sheet which I trust you have in your hands that has come with these studies in which you see that I’ve translated this word in a way that is open to us on the basis of the Greek language used in the first century, but is an option that has not ordinarily been chosen. This same word, uJperbolh, also means a pass, a pass through a mountain. And whenever Paul uses the word, oJdon, which is the Greek word for a way, he’s not talking about a road on which we walk, he’s talking about the journey itself, your own physical effort of moving in that journey. It’s a journey, not a road, not a street. And then of course, the word to show means to point the way. And so we can read this, legitimately on the basis of the Greek words in front of us, “I will point out to you a journey over a pass, a high pass road, if you please, a road over a pass. I’ll point you to a road that takes you up to the great heights over a pass.

Now, if we would consider this as a possibility, then we find that he’s not saying, “I’m going to show you something better.” Better than what? Better than the spiritual gifts. Throw them out. Go to this. He’s saying, “I’m going to point you to the highest way of all.” And the highest way is the way of love. And indeed, in the text itself, right before that, we can translate, “Seek the highest spiritual gifts.” Which would then mean that the spiritual gifts are in two lists and there is one list that is more important than the other. And so they’re all important—the tongues, and the knowledge, and the prophecy that will come up three times in this account, are important and they’re good and you should seek them. But there are other spiritual gifts that are higher. They are the highest and these are faith, hope, and love. And I think we will see, by the time we get done, that Paul, in fact, is showing the contrast between these two lists. They’re all spiritual gifts, but one list is more important than the other list. And that’s his point. So there are no rough connectives. There is no passage out of place. With very careful precision of language, Paul is saying exactly what he wants to say and has his material in exactly the order he wants with a precision that is mind-boggling once you see it.

So then we ask, all right, if this word,  uJperbolh, can mean a mountain pass, so we ’re talking about a road over a pass, a mountain path journey, if you please, I’m pointing you to a mountain path journey which is the way I choose to translate this phrase, then we would say, “Well now, if the imagery of the passage starts off with this strong affirmation of a great journey over a high pass, do we have images of mountains or climbing or hikes, or anything of that kind, anywhere else in the passage? Because if Paul is using this particular image, we would expect to find it other places in the page. And sure enough, it’s there. To start off with, the passage is introduced, as we’ve mentioned, by “seek the highest spiritual gifts.” So there’s the first one. Then the phrase, “the journey over the pass.” That’s the second one. And sure enough in the opening verses of this great hymn, we talk about the “faith that can remove mountains.” Our minds have always turned back to the saying of our Lord on this subject, and rightly so. But also you see, if we can substantiate this as a possible alternative for understanding the text, then Paul is also saying , “Look, if you’ve got enough faith to move that mountain so you don’t even have to climb it at all,  if that’s the case, and you don’t have love, then this doesn’t mean anything.”

Then in verse 7, you will notice that he talks about “Love never falls.” Because we’ve missed the mountain climbing image we haven’t noticed that. We’ve translated it, “Love never fails.” But the Greek word says, “Love never falls.” We’ve got bulldozers now and so the roads over the mountains of the Middle East are wide and fairly safe. But in the ancient times, they were narrow tracks, and mountain climbing over the passes was a giddy, frightening experience. And falling  was a real option, a real possibility for anyone who would climb through the mountain passes. And there’s plenty of mountains in Greece that this figure would have been a rich and meaningful figure for any Corinthian reading this particular passage. And Paul is saying, “You climb up and don’t worry about falling if you are ready to take on the strenuous task of the pass of love. with its mountain experience.

And finally, we’re told at the end that love is the highest of them all. We’ve translated it the greatest because we didn’t catch the fact that Paul is talking about mountains and climbing. And finally, in the early verses of chapter 14, which is really the conclusion to chapter 13, he says, “run after love.” A little hard to do when you’re mountain climbing. But again the imagery of motion, and of journey, and of getting down that road. And so with this rich image, we can see that Paul is talking about a very strenuous task for which a high price will be paid, which has behind it the glorious, beautiful, exhilarating heights of the great high mountain passes.

All right, with this in mind, which as an image gives added interest and excitement to the entire passage, let’s look briefly at the literary form of the first section, the first third. And here we are. If you can’s see all the words, ,perhaps you’ll be able to follow them on the sheet in front of you. We’ve talked about this: I will point you to a journey over a pass. Now we’ll see that Paul is talking in what we call step-parallelism. The first line, he says, “If I do this, and if I do this, and if I have no love, then I become this.” All four ideas are there. In the third stanza, we have the form complete: “If I do this, and I do this, but have no love, then I become this. And if I do this, and this, but have no love, I become this.” One of them, there are two lines missing. He merely says, “If I have this and if I have this [and the two lines] but have no love I am nothing” isn’t there. We can’t be sure exactly why those two lines are missing. It may be as simple as the fact that Paul didn’t have room on the page. Or it might be that he has five stanzas altogether and that he has combined two of them because here we have the powers, prophetic powers, mystery, and knowledge. And so prophetic powers may have been one stanza, and mysteries and knowledge may have been another one. And he may have combined them to make the whole thing a bit shorter. Or he may simply not be following the literary form quite that precisely. In any case, there is step parallelism and we’re able to see the flow of ideas in four cases, three of them complete with all four  themes.

We’re going to look now at each of these and try to understand them.

So the first one, Paul has an image of brass-making. Now, it’s been my privilege to be in the Middle East for 27 years, and seven years of my childhood in addition, so actually I’ve been around the Middle East now for 34 years. And I’ve been in most of the old marketplaces of the major cities of the Middle East. And one of them has a very large brass market. Now this is in the city of Aleppo, a great big city in northern Syria. I’ve been in a number of brass markets, but this is the largest.

Corinth was a brass-making town. It was famous in antiquities, in the ancient times, for its making of brass pots for kitchen ware. So if you wanted really good quality brass stuff for your kitchen, you could buy it in Corinth. And even before the city was destroyed, it was famous for this. And then the city was destroyed and before the time of Paul, it was rebuilt. And again, brass-making became the trade of the city. Such a famous trade that they had a statue of Athena standing in the Acropolis looking at herself in a shield that was a great big polished brass mirror. They were so proud of their brass-making.

Now the first time I went to Aleppo, Syria, to visit the brass market, I asked, “How do I get to the brass market?” Their old city is tightly knit together and the streets kind of go every which way. And of course I was walking down these narrow streets, but very soon found out I didn’t need to ask any more because by the time I had gotten a half mile away from the place, I could hear them. Did you ever take a big pot or a big kettle and a hammer and start banging on it hard enough to dent it? That makes a lot of noise. Brass pots are made by a man standing and hammering on the thing hard enough to bend it. That’s how they make them. They don’t pour them. You start off with a flat piece and then you hammer it until finally it becomes a pot. Now imagine 75 to 100 or 200 people all in the same place sitting there banging like crazy on these pots, and you can begin, although you can’t appreciate it fully without being there, the racket.  The racket is absolutely deafening. And Paul is saying, “Look, I know you’re anxious to speak in tongues. And I know this is important to you, but if you’re able to speak in the tongues even of men and even if manage somehow to talk the language of angels, and there is no love, you become self-righteous, you decide you’re better than the next person who hasn’t been given this gift and thereby you put yourself up as spiritually superior to them. If this happens, you’re just like that racket down there in the market place of Corinth.

OK, then he comes to the second one. And he says, “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge.” The word, prophetic powers, in Greek is one word and it means the prophets of the Christian community of the first century. These were the preachers, but they’re more than the preachers. They were the people who were able to stand up and say, as we find people in the book of Acts, later in the book of Acts doing, they’re able to stand up like the prophets of old and say, “Thus says the Lord.”  However, they said, “Thus says the Holy Spirit.” And they were some of them men and some of them women, as we know from the chapters in the book of Acts, chapters 20 - 22. And so Paul says that if I have this unique gift, to be a preacher to the community, and also to speak God’s unique word coming from the Spirit of God for the community, if I am able to do that and have no love, this is worthless.  And he says, if I understand all mysteries, Paul is speaking to a mixed group. Some of them are Greeks and some of them are Jews. For the Greeks, the mysteries meant the mystery religions out of which some of the Greek believers had come. For the Jew, the word mystery meant the secret intentions of God, that God is sitting with his angels planning what he’s going to do and as he discusses things with them, they record the plans as to what God has in mind for his people. And this secret record as to what God plans, this is the mystery. The mysteries which Jesus says are to be revealed and are revealed through the parables to his disciples, those which people long to learn about.

Knowledge, again, it can go two ways. Knowledge for the Greeks meant philosophical knowledge, intellectual knowledge, knowledge of the questions of  being and of concept. But for the Jew, knowledge meant the knowledge of the will and nature of God. What is God like and what does God want me to do? And so Paul is using language that can have a different shade of meaning depending on whether it is a Jew of Greek Christian that is sitting there listening to him. And he is saying, “Look, if I have no love and have achieved all knowledge, and all mysteries, and I have no love, it’s worthless.” I have spent my life trying to acquire knowledge, and so I stand under the judgment of this text.

Without love, all of this is worth nothing.

Dr. Kenneth Bailey