FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
30 JANUARY 2022
When
couples meet with Jeremy Hoy to plan their weddings, many couples choose this
passage from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians as their New Testament
reading. As much as Paul’s words directly
apply to married couples, his intended audience was the Church of Corinth. The members of that Christian community had
embraced the Gospel message given to them by Paul. However, there were deep divisions within the
community that threatened their unity as members of the Body of Christ.
Saint Paul
tells them that solution to their divisions is to love one another. Unlike the word love in English, there are
three different words for love in Greek.
He could have used the Greek word Eros
for love. This is the root word for our
English word erotic. Eros is love
with all the lights on self: my wants,
my desires, my lusts, and my passions.
Eros is not the word Paul uses here.
The second Greek word for love is phileo. We define that word as “brotherly love,” or
love given and received in friendship with others. Phileo
is reciprocal or exchanged love between human beings. But phileo
is not Paul’s word here.
Paul uses
the word agape, which is a self-less
and self-giving love. Agape is the Greek word to describe
God’s selfless gift to us. It is not
self-centered. It is not given with expectation
of receiving anything in return. Paul tells
the community to embrace this still more excellent way of loving. If they learn to love in this way, they move
beyond a focus on their individual wants or needs. They can love one another as God loves them.
We see this
type of loving in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah. He expresses love for his people by telling
them the truth about their behavior. He
knows that he will receive nothing but condemnation in return. He trusts the love God had given him in
forming him as a prophet. Jesus
expresses that same love when he announces to the hometown folks that the
prophecy of Isaiah was finally fulfilled in him. He understands that they will
find him too familiar. They will be
outraged when he announces that his message will extend beyond the limits of
God’s chosen people. They try to throw
him off the cliff. However, it is not
his hour. He will fulfill his agape love when he will be crucified on
another hill outside of Jerusalem.
Like the
Corinthian community, we have our share of divisions. We are divided along political lines. We disagree on how to respond to COVID. These past two years have put unusual
pressures on all of us, affecting the ways we deal with one another. I have
never seen so much bitterness in my years as a priest. Saint Paul speaks to us and encourages us to
put aside childish ways and embrace the wisdom of agape love. He is very
specific about what agape love looks
like. We can be much more patient and
kind with one another, even when we disagree with each other. We can surrender our jealousies about what
others have to accept the different gifts each of us has received. That will keep us from being pompous,
inflated, and rude. Agape love makes us more even tempered so that we do not brood when
we are injured. Instead of rejoicing
over wrongdoing, we can more readily rejoice with the truth. Agape
love will keep us focused on actions on behalf of the other, instead of
focusing on what we want or think we need.
Practicing agape love will not resolve arguments or
put disagreements behind us. But it will
enable us to engage each other with completely different attitudes. All disagreements and divisions will
eventually pass away. But agape love will not. It will enable us to bear all things, believe
all things, hope all things, and endure all things. It worked for Jeremiah. It worked for Jesus Christ in the glory of
the resurrection. It worked for the
Christian community of Corinth. It can work for us, if we have the courage to
embrace it.
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