Without Love, I Am Nothing

Most of us keep a private ledger of what we can do. I teach well. I run the parish fish fry. I’ve read more theology than the people in the pew next to me. The Corinthians kept the same ledger and ranked one another by it: tongues at the top, then prophecy, then the rest. Paul lets them finish adding up the column and then tells them the total can be zero. Every gift on the list, without love, comes to nothing. And it stings because the gifts are real. God gave them. The trouble is what they become when they use a heart to measure itself against a neighbor.

Today’s Gospel shows what that heart looks like from the outside. Jesus describes a generation that will neither dance when the flute plays nor weep when the dirge is sung. John fasts and they call him possessed. Jesus eats, and they call him a drunk. They have decided in advance that nothing God sends will move them. Today the Church remembers Saint Cornelius, a pope who had to hold the Church together between people who wanted no mercy for sinners and people who wanted no penance, and who chose the more excellent way. So the question for you and me is simple. When the ledger of my gifts is finally read, will it show love?

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13

But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Gospel: Luke 7:31-35

“To what then shall I compare the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the market place and calling to one another, ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.’ For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of man has come eating and drinking; and you say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by all her children.”

Scriptural Analysis

The More Excellent Way

Yesterday’s reading ended with Paul ranking the gifts, apostles first and tongues last, where the Corinthians would never have put it. Today picks up at the hinge. “Earnestly desire the higher gifts,” he says, and then, almost mid-thought, “I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31). The Greek behind “still more excellent” means something like “beyond all measure.” In this chapter, love is never called a charism. The Spirit distributes the gifts as he wills (1 Corinthians 12:11), but every Christian is called to love, and every gift is meant to be used in love. Montague puts it well: the charisms are the servants, love is the master.^[1] Aquinas reads the chapter as a three-part argument. Charity is necessary, because without it the gifts are not enough. Charity is useful, because through it every evil is avoided and every good is done. And charity is permanent, because it alone outlasts this life.^[2]

Nothing

Paul makes the first point in the first person, and he means himself. He speaks in tongues more than all of them (1 Corinthians 14:18); he has seen the mysteries; he has worked miracles (2 Corinthians 12:12). When we read “if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels,” we are to envision Paul with every gift turned up to its limit. If he does that without love, then he is nothing more than a noisy gong.^[3]

The image was sharper in Corinth than it is for us. Corinth made and traded bronze, and Roman theaters placed bronze echo chambers around the seating to throw the actors’ voices. A loveless speaker is one of those: he makes sound, he even makes it louder, but no music is in him.^[4] Aquinas presses further. Bronze and cymbal are dead things, and speech without charity is the same: eloquent, perhaps, but earning nothing toward eternal life. Then he adds a line every preacher should tape to the ambo. The flat gong gives a simple sound; the concave cymbal multiplies it. So the gong is the man who states the truth plainly without love, and the cymbal is the man who piles on reasons and comparisons and connections, all of it dead for want of charity.^[5]

Then Paul escalates. Prophecy, all mysteries, faith that moves mountains (Matthew 17:20): without love, “I am nothing.” Aquinas notes that strong faith can still work wonders in a man with no charity; Christ says the same of those who cast out demons in his name and are told, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22-23).^[6] Nothing here means nothing in the order of grace. The man may be famous and effective, but before God, he is empty.

The third step is the hardest. Give away everything, hand the body over to be burned, and still gain nothing. The better Greek manuscripts read “that I may boast” rather than “that I may be burned,” and the two words differ by a single letter; either way, Paul imagines the most heroic self-gift a man can make, done for some motive other than love.^[7] Aquinas’s example is Lawrence on the gridiron, and he warns that even martyrdom, done for vainglory, is profitless.^[8] The ego can feed on anything, including its own sacrifice.

What Love Does

Verses 4 through 7 are the center of the chapter: two positive traits, eight things love does not do, then four things love does with “all.” In Greek, every trait is a verb. Paul does not say love is patient; he says love patiences, love kindnesses. Love acts, and the Fathers noticed long ago that the portrait is a portrait of Jesus.^[9]

“Patient” translates makrothymei (mah-kro-thoo-MAY), the biblical word for suffering injustice without returning injury, the patience Christ showed in his Passion.^[10] Aquinas divides every virtue into bearing evil well and doing good well, and says charity is patient for the first and kind for the second. Kindness he compares to fire: as fire makes metal flow, charity makes a man’s goods flow out to others instead of pooling inside him.^[11]

The eight negatives read like a diagnosis of Corinth, and of most parishes. Jealousy was the root of the Corinthian cliques, and Montague offers a homely test: what mother envies her children’s gifts? She counts them as her own, because love makes the beloved’s good yours.^[12] “Arrogant” is physioutai (foo-see-OO-tie), a word that hisses like air pumped into a tire.^[13] “Resentful” hides the verb logizomai (lo-GHID-zo-my), an accounting term. Love does not keep books. It does not file the offense away where it can be taken out and reread for twenty years.^[14] Aquinas reads the same phrase as “thinks no evil” and applies it to rash judgment: charity refuses to build a case against a neighbor out of suspicions.^[15]

Then the turn. Love “rejoices in the right,” and with that word Paul brings justice into a hymn about affection. Love that ignores a wrong done to itself is highly sensitive to wrong done to others.^[16] Benedict XVI, commenting on this verse, wrote that in God and with God “I love even the person whom I do not like or even know.”^[17] Finally, the four “all things.” The verb translated “bears” can mean to cover, and an older reading takes it that love throws a cloak of silence over what displeases another person.^[18] Aquinas takes “believes” and “hopes” toward God: love believes everything God has revealed, hopes everything God has promised, and endures the delay without giving up.^[19]

What Lasts

“Love never ends.” Aquinas pauses to clear away a misreading. Some concluded that charity, once possessed, can never be lost, and he answers flatly that this is false: a man can throw charity away by mortal sin (Revelation 2:4). Paul’s point is different. He is contrasting the gifts that belong to this life with the one thing that crosses into glory. Prophecy will end because there will be nothing left to foretell. Tongues will end because everyone will understand everyone. Charity will be the same love, with increase.^[20]

A first-century mirror was a polished bronze disk, usually a little concave or convex, so the reflection was always somewhat distorted.^[21] Aquinas says all creation is that mirror: from the order and goodness of created things we come to know God, but only by reflection, and often as a riddle. “Face to face” is the beatific vision, God himself seen “as he is” (1 John 3:2).^[22] What changes between now and then is the manner of knowing, with the same love running through both.^[23]

So Paul lands on the triad. To the Thessalonians, grieving their dead, he had put hope last. To the Corinthians, torn by faction and contempt, he ends on love.^[24] The Church calls these the theological virtues because they alone have God for their immediate object.^[25] Paul’s next line, which the Lectionary saves for another day, is the whole chapter in two words: “Strive for love” (1 Corinthians 14:1).

The Children In The Marketplace

Luke has just told us the crowd is split. The people and the tax collectors, baptized by John, “justified God,” while the Pharisees and lawyers “rejected the purpose of God for themselves” (Luke 7:29-30). The verb is dikaioo (dih-kye-OH-oh), to declare righteous, and it returns at the end of today’s passage.^[26] “This generation” in Luke is almost always a hard phrase, the same generation that rejected God in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 32:5).^[27]

The children are playing at grown-up life. Flutes mean a wedding round dance; wailing means the hired mourners at a funeral. One group proposes a wedding, then a funeral, and the other sulks through both.^[28] John came fasting, like a dirge, and they said he had a demon. Jesus came eating and drinking, like a bridegroom (Luke 5:34), and they said glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.^[29] Fitzmyer’s summary is exact: in their sulking they missed the decisive hour.^[30]

The Fathers gathered in the Catena Aurea read it the same way. Augustine assigns the parts: the wailing is John, whose fasting signified penitential sorrow, and the piping is the Lord, who by eating and drinking as other men did “represented the joy of his kingdom.” Titus of Bostra adds that Christ would not refuse ordinary food, lest anyone later say God’s creatures are bad. And Cyril of Alexandria answers the slur about sinners with an image worth memorizing: the sun is not polluted by shining on unclean things, and neither is the Sun of Righteousness hurt by keeping company with the bad.^[31]

“Wisdom is justified by all her children.” Ambrose says the Son of God is Wisdom by nature, and Chrysostom says her children are simply the wise. Luke’s “all” widens the family to every tax collector who listened.^[32] Wisdom in the Old Testament sets her table and calls, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed” (Proverbs 9:5). Jesus comes eating and drinking because he is issuing that invitation in person.^[33] The people who sat in the marketplace and refused both the dirge and the dance are the living picture of everything Paul says love is not: irritable, resentful, unable to rejoice with anyone, keeping a running record of grievances against God’s own messengers.

Daily Application

Put the two readings side by side, and you get a single examination of conscience. Paul tells you what love does. Jesus shows you a heart that has already decided it will not be moved. The question is which one describes you when God sends something you didn’t order.

Start with your ledger, because that is where the Corinthians went wrong and where I go wrong. Aquinas’s cymbal is aimed at people like me: deacons, catechists, anyone who posts about the faith or argues for it at Thanksgiving. You can be right, articulate, thorough, and dead. The test is whether the person across from you is loved while you make your case. If your correction of a neighbor leaves him smaller and you larger, it was brass. Charity, Aquinas says, would rather forgive an offense than pursue it beyond measure.^[34] Ask yourself plainly whether your gifts have become the way you measure yourself against the parish, the family, the diocese. If they have, Paul’s arithmetic applies, and the total is zero.

Then go to the word logizomai. Most of us keep a record of wrongs. We know exactly what was said, and when, and by whom, and we take it out on bad days and read it again. Paul’s word for love is that it does not do the accounting. This is the interior movement today’s readings ask of you: close the book on someone. The wrong may have been real. Love simply stops charging interest on it. That is what the children in the marketplace could not do. Every message God sent them landed on a ledger already full, so they had one complaint ready for John and another ready for Jesus.

Saint Cornelius shows what this looks like when the stakes are highest. He became pope in 251 after fourteen months in which persecution left the see of Rome empty, and his whole pontificate was consumed by one question: what to do with Christians who had denied the faith under torture and now wanted to come home. Novatian had himself consecrated a rival bishop and taught that the Church had no power to reconcile them at all. Others wanted them back with no penance. Cornelius held a synod and ordered the lapsed restored “with the usual medicines of repentance,” with the support of Cyprian of Carthage, whose friendship with him was strained by a false accusation and then repaired. He died of the hardships of exile in what is now Civitavecchia. That is love bearing all things and hoping all things in a Church that wanted either a dirge with no dancing or a dance with no dirge. The Church still names him beside Cyprian in the Roman Canon, two friends who disagreed, forgave, and held.

Today, do the one thing the sulking children would not. Let God’s message move you. If today asks you to weep, weep: go to confession, name the sin you have kept quiet, and do the penance. If today asks you to dance, dance: accept the forgiveness, eat at the table Wisdom has set, and stop treating the Eucharist as a reward for the already clean. And before the day ends, pick one entry in your record of wrongs and tear it out. You will see God face to face someday, and he will know you fully. Make sure that when he does, there is love in the ledger. Strive for love.

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Notes

1. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 219-220. ↩
2. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, trans. Fabian R. Larcher, ed. John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute, 2012), 1 Cor. 13, lect. 1, no. 759. ↩
3. Montague, First Corinthians, 222; Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 472-473. ↩
4. Collins, First Corinthians, 473, 475. ↩
5. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 1, nos. 760-761. ↩
6. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 1, nos. 766-767. ↩
7. Montague, First Corinthians, 224; Collins, First Corinthians, 476-477. ↩
8. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 1, nos. 769-770. ↩
9. Montague, First Corinthians, 225; Collins, First Corinthians, 478-479. ↩
10. Montague, First Corinthians, 226. ↩
11. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 2, nos. 772-773. ↩
12. Montague, First Corinthians, 226. ↩
13. Montague, First Corinthians, 227; Collins, First Corinthians, 480. ↩
14. Montague, First Corinthians, 228. ↩
15. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 2, no. 781. ↩
16. Montague, First Corinthians, 228-229; Collins, First Corinthians, 481. ↩
17. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005), no. 18, quoted in Montague, First Corinthians, 229. ↩
18. Montague, First Corinthians, 229. ↩
19. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 2, no. 785. ↩
20. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 3, nos. 787-789. ↩
21. Montague, First Corinthians, 232-233. ↩
22. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 4, nos. 800-802. ↩
23. Montague, First Corinthians, 233. ↩
24. Collins, First Corinthians, 484-485, 487-488. ↩
25. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 4, no. 805; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1813. ↩
26. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 123, 125. ↩
27. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 148; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 679. ↩
28. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 678-680. ↩
29. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, 148; Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, 123-124. ↩
30. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 680. ↩
31. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke, trans. John Henry Newman (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 7:31-35. ↩
32. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 7:31-35; Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 679, 681. ↩
33. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, 148. ↩
34. Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 13, lect. 2, no. 780. ↩

Books Cited

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• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, Latin-English Opera Omnia vol. 38 (The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)