A sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at
Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, 9 February 2025
Watch the whole service on YouTube
‘And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.’ (13)
Why love? What’s the matter with faith or hope that they only get second and third place behind love?
Here we are in the third of a series of five sermons which respond to some of what the Apostle Paul had to say to Christians living in the Greek city-port of Corinth some two thousand years ago, and today I’m a bit puzzled about why love appears ahead of faith and hope.
Maybe you have never given it a thought. I think I took it for granted until fairly recently. It’s one of those phrases you hear so often – ‘faith, hope and love … and the greatest of these is love’ – that it just seems the natural way of things.
And it is a statement that people do hear a lot. 1 Corinthians 13 – today’s reading, which concludes with Paul’s statement about faith, hope and love –has long been a firm favourite at weddings, and in recent years has become a popular choice at funerals as well. So even those people who do not come to church frequently – and that’s most people these days – are likely to be familiar with this bit of scripture.
Yet Saint Paul did not write 1 Corinthians 13 because he thought it would sound good at a wedding or a funeral. He wrote his letter to address some situations in the life of the Corinthian congregation. This part of his letter, which begins, ‘If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal’ and which concludes, ‘and now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love,’ is part of Paul’s advice to them about their use of spiritual gifts in the context of congregational worship.
That’s not to say that it’s wrong to have the reading at a wedding or a funeral, or to suggest that this has nothing to say about life and love, but if we want to understand what Paul was getting at when he said that, compared to faith and hope, love was greatest, then it helps to know what he was talking about at the time.
What Paul was talking about at the time was the variety of spiritual gifts that God had showered upon the Corinthian Christians, which were to be used for the good of all (12:1-11): words of wisdom and knowledge; outstanding faith; gifts of healing and miracle working; prophecy and the discernment of spirits; gifts of tongues and the interpretation of what was being said.
Paul was also concerned that the Corinthians believers should regard themselves first as part of the congregation, and only then as individuals. They were, Paul wrote, church members, but “members” in the same way that ears, eyes, noses, feet and various limbs are “members” of a human body. All were essential to the life of the body – the congregation – including, perhaps especially those members considered as less significant or honourable. (12:12-31)
And with all of that in mind Paul goes on to advocate a ‘more excellent way’ (12:31) of being a worshipping community; one where love is the driving or animating force: ‘if I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love …’ (31:1) Yet none of this is intended to say that faith or hope are unimportant – far from it.
Faith is what enables us to see the world in a different, better way. Faith, you might say, enables us to see beyond the world we inhabit. Faith in the existence of a loving God who has been made known to us through the life, ministry, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus transforms our view of existence. Take away all belief in such a God and our vision of life becomes bleaker; to quote a particularly bleak play by an Irish playwright that I had to study at school, ‘one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ (From “Waiting For Godot” by Samuel Beckett)
How different is your perspective upon life when you believe that you are living an existence which is enabled and sustained by a loving creator God. That’s not say that having faith in the existence of God, and in God’s love, makes everything clear. As Paul says in this very passage of scripture, ‘we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part … for now we see in a mirror, dimly.’ (9, 12) Faith is good, but we still await a time when faith is not needed because then we know completely and ‘see [God] face to face.’ (10:12)
While we still await the time when faith is no longer required, we have God’s gift of hope. There is much in this world and this era which is at odds with the will and intentions of a God of love. That’s true on the world stage, with its wars, its violence, its oppression, its racism; its mistreatment of those vulnerable ones who are often the ones in greatest need, yet who also experience the worst from others.
Hope, which is grounded in faith, sustains us in this age, and Christian hope puts its faith in the loving God to deliver that which is needed, not in human effort alone. Also Christian hope recognises that what God chooses to deliver is likely to be something humankind has not envisaged, and is yet better.
Hope, though, like faith, is for this age, not the age to come. Faith enables us to see the current situation differently. Hope enables us to look to the future, not just to present circumstances. Just as faith is no longer required when at last we see God face to face, however, so also hope will no longer needed; in heaven there will no longer be a need to look ahead.
And that brings us to why love is greater than either faith or hope. Both faith and hope are gifts from God which enable us to navigate this imperfect present on our way to the future. Once we get there; once we get to God; once we get to heaven, however, faith and hope are no longer needed. Love, on the other hand, being the very essence of God, is what we will continue to know and experience when we get to that point where we are united with God; that point when we are in heaven. As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13:8, ‘love never ends.
Abiding in the here and now are faith, hope and love. Great though they are, though, faith and hope are for the here and now; love, on the other hand, is both for now and for our ultimate future with God. Love – God’s love for us and for the whole of creation – never ends, which makes it even greater than those great things of this time alone: faith and hope: ‘And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.’ Amen.