A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous, love is not pompous,
it is not inflated, it is not rude,
it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing
but rejoices with the truth. (1 Cor 13:4-6)
Today’s first reading is St. Paul’s “love is patient; love is kind,” a very popular choice for weddings. I could wax poetic about how love is the backbone in any good relationship, but I will leave that to the priest at the next wedding I attend.
The Greek scholar in me cannot let today pass by without rhapsodizing on the Greek words for “love,” only one of which is used in today’s first reading. Paul, writing his letter in Greek to a Greek-speaking population, knew the connotations of his words, and it is no coincidence that he consistently refers to one form of love over another.
The love mentioned here by St. Paul, the one that is not quick-tempered, is not jealous, rejoices with the truth and never fails, is agapē. The word, which came to mean the love between God and man or between persons in Christ, is a superior form of love than erōs, erotic love; philia, equal or brotherly love; and storgē, unequal or familial love between parent and child. Agapē is unconditional and spiritual, much weightier than the other forms.
In the Vulgate edition of the letter to the Corinthians, translated into Latin by St. Jerome, the word chosen is caritas, where we get our word “charity.” Similar to the Greek, the Latin had separate words for erotic love and familial love, with caritas being esteem and Christian love, just like agapē.
St. Paul is describing not only the love we should have for one another, a love that should be patient, kind, slow to anger—but also the love that God has for us. The verbs are in the simple present indicative tense, not subjunctive, so it is not that love should be patient, or that we should let love be patient, but that love simply is patient. Try as we all might, our love even for our closest family and friends is not always as St. Paul describes.
None of us is God, but we can strive to be more like him every day. By actively choosing to express the spiritual love described by St. Paul, we can gradually turn our types of love from brotherly and familial to the higher spiritual form. This agapē is for everyone, not only married couples, both in our relationships with God and in our relationships with each and every other person.
