Faith Hope Love

It helps me to remember why Paul wrote this in the first place. The famous love chapter was not composed in a quiet study as a poem about weddings. It sits inside a long letter to the church at Corinth, written by Paul to a congregation he had helped to found and then left. From the opening chapters onwards he is dealing with a community that was fracturing: people forming rival factions around favourite teachers, suing one another, behaving badly at the Lord’s Supper, and quarrelling over which spiritual gifts made you more important. Chapters 12 to 14 are all about those gifts, tongues and prophecy and the rest. And right in the middle of that argument, almost like a held breath, Paul stops and writes chapter 13. So the line about faith, hope and love is not floating free. It lands on people who were proud of being gifted and were using their gifts to score points. To them Paul says, in effect, none of that is the thing that lasts. I find that context sharpens the verse considerably. It was first read aloud to show-offs, not to newlyweds.

The weight of 1 Corinthians 13:13 sits on one verb. “But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three.” To feel the force of “remain” you have to read the verses just before it, where Paul lists the things that stop. Prophecies will be done away with. Tongues will cease. Knowledge will pass. He even uses the picture of growing up and putting away childish things, and of now seeing in a mirror dimly but one day face to face. So “remain” is the contrast word. Almost everything the Corinthians were prizing belongs to the temporary scaffolding of this age, and three things outlast the scaffolding. There is also a small puzzle here that honest readers have noticed for centuries: if one day faith becomes sight and hope becomes possession, in what sense do all three “remain”? Paul does not spell it out, and I would rather sit with the tension than tidy it away. What is plain is the ranking he does give. Of the three, love is named the greatest, and he says so without hedging.

When I trace love back through the wider story, it does not begin with us. Scripture roots it in God himself; 1 John 4:16 says plainly that God is love. So the love Paul calls greatest is not first a human achievement we manage to produce. It is the character of God, poured out before we existed and long before we deserved it. That changes how I read the verse. Faith and hope are largely our responses, our reaching towards God. Love is also where God reaches towards us. Jesus made love the new commandment and the mark of his people in John 13:34 to 35, and Colossians 3:14 calls it the bond that holds every other virtue together. Most movingly, the cross is love made visible. Paul could write a whole chapter on patient, unenvying, enduring love because he had seen it embodied in Christ, who bore all things and endured all things on our behalf. Love is the greatest partly because it is the most God-like, the one thing carried unbroken from now into the life to come.

Here is where it gets uncomfortably practical for me. It is easy to admire this verse and hard to live the version of love Paul describes, because the love he commends is mostly patience and kindness in ordinary rooms. I think of the conversation I keep avoiding, the apology I have rehearsed but not yet given, the relative whose phone calls I let ring out. None of that is dramatic. It is the small daily friction where love is either practised or quietly abandoned. What helps me is that Paul puts love above faith and hope without dismissing either. He does not say believe less or hope less. He says, of the three, let love be the one you measure your life by. So I have started asking a blunt question at the end of a day: not did I feel loving, but did anyone actually receive love from me. Often the honest answer is no, and that is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to ask God, who is love, to grow in me the thing that will still be standing when my cleverness and my reputation have long gone.

I keep coming back to why love wins out over the other two, and the clearest answer is in the small matter of what each one is for. Faith and hope both lean towards something not yet in hand. Faith trusts a God I cannot see; hope waits on a future that has not arrived. They are bridges, and a bridge exists to be crossed. Paul hints at this a few verses earlier, telling the Corinthians that love never comes to an end while the gifts they prized will (1 Corinthians 13:8). On the day he describes as seeing face to face instead of peering into a dim mirror (1 Corinthians 13:12), faith will have nothing left to reach for, because the God it trusted is right there, and hope will have nothing left to wait for, because the promise will be kept. Love is different. It was never a way of getting somewhere; it is the place itself. The other two carry us home. Love is what home is made of.

There is a quiet picture in holding all three together now, before any of them gives way. Faith mostly looks back and up: back to what God has already done in Christ, and up to the God I am trusting today. Hope looks forward, leaning into a future I cannot yet see but have been promised. Love runs in every direction at once, towards God and towards the people beside me, binding the other two into something a person can live. Take love out and faith curdles into bare opinion, hope shrinks to wishful thinking. Keep love in and the three hold. Perhaps that is why love sits at the centre of what lasts and not merely at the end of the list. It is the nearest of the three to God’s own nature, because Scripture does not only say that God loves, it says that God is love (1 John 4:16). The other two are how I lay hold of him. Love is what he is.

I have heard “the greatest of these is love” used to close down a conversation that badly needed to stay open. A safeguarding worry, a complaint about how a leader speaks to people, a question nobody in the room wants asked, and back comes the verse like a full stop: surely love means not making a fuss. It sounds pious, which is exactly why it does damage. But Paul was not writing to people who needed permission to stop confronting one another. This is the same letter in which he tells the church to put a man out of fellowship (1 Corinthians 5), and he writes that long before he arrives at “love is patient, love is kind”. Chapter 13 is not an escape hatch from chapter 5. It is the temper he wanted the correction carried out in. So when verse 13 is used to mean “stop disagreeing and just love each other”, it is being turned against the letter it comes from. Love here is not the absence of hard conversations. It is patience and kindness while you are having them, and that costs a great deal more than silence ever does.

If I were sketching this for a Sunday talk, I would resist opening with “love wins” and preach the sentence in the order Paul actually wrote it. He does two things in one breath. First he counts: faith, hope, and love remain, these three. That is a whole point on its own, and it credits faith and hope as survivors rather than also-rans waiting to be overtaken. Only once the three are standing together does the second move land. The greatest of these is love: a ranking inside a family, not the result of a race Paul never staged. Two movements, then, rather than three. What stands, and what stands tallest. Preach it the other way round and you get twenty minutes on love that never explains why faith and hope were worth naming at all, and people quietly file them as the two that lost. Here is a blunt test for the outline. Cross out the words “these three” and see whether anything in your talk changes. If nothing does, you are preaching half the verse, and it is the half everybody already has on a card.

Because of where it was first read aloud, the room this suits in a modern church is the one you would rather not book: the members’ meeting that has gone tense, the away day where two people both believe they should be leading the same ministry, the rota conversation in which one person’s contribution is being quietly weighed against another’s. That is Corinth’s argument in different clothes. I should be honest that this is my inference from the setting rather than something Paul states outright, though it is a short step, since he closes chapter 12 by promising them a more excellent way and then shows them what it looks like. The verse earns its place at a commissioning too, when someone is being sent into a role, because it tells them plainly that the work ahead will matter less than the love they carry into it. What I would avoid is reading it over a gathering while one person is meant to feel the point. Paul addressed a whole congregation about its shared priorities. Chapter 13 was for everyone in the room, or it was for nobody.

I knew for years that the Corinthians had behaved badly at the Lord’s Supper. I had never stopped long enough to ask what “badly” meant. Then I read it slowly: at their shared meal each one takes his own supper first, so that one is hungry and another is drunken (1 Corinthians 11:21). That is not a doctrinal complaint. It is a complaint about food. A house church met in somebody’s actual home, and there was a man in that home who ate his fill while other members of his own congregation sat there with nothing.

How it happened, I can only reconstruct, and I want to say plainly that it is a reconstruction rather than something Paul spells out. The likeliest account is that the meal simply ran on the ordinary social rules of the day, where a host’s nearest guests got the better portions and the better wine, and whoever arrived later took whatever was left. Slaves and labourers do not choose when their work finishes. So the poor came in late to scraps, and nobody thought it strange, because that was how meals worked everywhere else in the city.

Now carry that dining room into chapter 13, and the lines about love not bragging, not being proud, not seeking its own way, keeping no account of evil (1 Corinthians 13:4 to 5) stop sounding like calligraphy. They sound like a man being named without being named. Paul is describing, item by item, the exact behaviour of the host. And the sentence about what remains was first read aloud in a room where some of the listeners had eaten an hour ago and some had not eaten at all, and every person present knew which they were. That is not background colour. That is the pressure that squeezed the verse out of him.

Here is the version of this verse I find hardest, and I am not going to pretend I have solved it. Paul says love remains. I believe him. But I have known love that did not appear to survive anything at all.

I will not put a real name to any of this, and what follows are pictures rather than particular people, but you will recognise them. A woman patient and kind for a decade towards a husband whose drinking never once slowed. A father ringing a son who never rings back, every Sunday, for years, into a voicemail greeting he now knows by heart. A daughter visiting a mother with dementia long after her mother stopped knowing her name, holding a hand that no longer recognised hers as belonging to anyone in particular. Chapter 13 says love bears all things and endures all things. In those rooms it endured, and then the person it was aimed at was gone, and nothing on the outside looked one bit redeemed.

I have heard people handle that by suggesting such love was somehow not the real article, some lesser imitation that failed Paul’s test. I think that is cruel and I think it is wrong. The honest reading is that verse 13 is not a guarantee about outcomes in this life. It says love remains. It does not say love fixes what it touches. Faith and hope are openly about things not yet in hand, and I suspect love is more like them than we admit: also aimed at a country we have not arrived in.

What I hold on to, and I will call it a hope rather than a proof, is that love poured out and never visibly received has not evaporated, because it has gone into the one thing Paul insists does not run out. I cannot demonstrate that. I have decided, on the strength of this verse and not much else, to believe it anyway.

Set this verse beside Romans 5:1 to 5 and the same three words come at you back to front. Paul says there that we rejoice in our sufferings, because suffering works perseverance, perseverance works character, character works hope, and hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Watch the running order. In Corinth, love comes last: the one thing still on its feet after faith has turned into sight and hope has turned into having. In Rome, love comes first: the reason hope can be trusted at all while you are still waiting and nothing whatever has arrived. Same trio, opposite ends.

Put them together and love is not only the finishing line. It is also the ground under the other two while they are still doing their work. That matters to me on the days when hope feels like whistling in the dark, a habit I keep up rather than a conviction I actually hold. Romans will not let me think the confidence is something I manufacture by gritting my teeth through a hard year. It is poured in. It was there before the suffering started. Love arrives ahead of the hope and makes it strong enough to survive the wait.

So the order in 1 Corinthians 13:13, with love named greatest at the end, is not the whole account of how these three sit together. Love is at both ends of the sentence. It stands underneath faith and hope on the wet Tuesday, keeping hope from curdling into wishful thinking, and it is still standing when the other two have finished and gone quiet.

There is a hymn made almost entirely out of this chapter, “The Gift of Love”, the one beginning “Though I may speak with bravest fire”. It is set to the old folk tune generally called O Waly Waly, and that is the same melody that carries “The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er”, a song in which love grows old and waxes cold and cannot be trusted an inch. I have not chased this to a scholarly source and would not want to overstate it, but the pairing is well enough known that I would be surprised to be wrong.

What moves me is the nerve of it. Somebody took a tune saturated in love failing and set it under a chapter insisting love never fails. It gets sung at weddings, which is fair enough given where the words come from. I think it belongs more at the harder services. The funeral. The leaving do for a family emigrating. The last Sunday of a church that is closing. Those are the rooms where “faith, hope and love remain” has to be true rather than merely look well on a printed order of service, and where the tune’s ache does half the theological work before anyone has sung a word.

I do not know who first thought to marry them. Whoever it was understood something a cheerful wedding setting can miss entirely. Paul wrote this to people who were being told, flatly against the evidence in front of their eyes, that there was one thing they were not going to lose. A melody about losing love is exactly the right vehicle for that claim, because it does not pretend the losing is not happening.

Give this verse to a mixed-age group and a child will ask the obvious thing: if love is the best one, why bother with the other two? That one is easy. The question underneath it is not, and no child has ever asked me straight out, because children do not ask that sort of thing straight out. It runs roughly: what if nobody loves me? If love is the greatest and the thing that lasts, and love is the one commodity I have never had much of, then this verse is a lit room I am standing outside.

I will not lie to a child about that. I would rather not lie to the adults either. Some of the children on that carpet are going home to a house where they are tolerated on a good day. Telling them love wins can sound, from where they are sitting, like telling a hungry child about a magnificent dinner being served somewhere else.

So I say the only thing I can say honestly. This verse is not a promise that your childhood will be loving. It is a promise about what is left standing afterwards. The love Paul says remains is not first the love you get from whoever happens to be in your kitchen tonight. It was there before them, it will be there after them, and it is not theirs to withhold from you. Faith and hope are how you keep hold of the rope until you can feel that for yourself.

That is a smaller comfort than I would like to hand anybody. It has the single advantage of being true, and I have never found that a child minds being told the truth as much as adults assume.

• Of faith, hope and love, which one do I lean on most, and which do I quietly neglect?
• Where this week did someone actually feel loved by me, and where did I withhold it?
• The Corinthians used their gifts to compete. Is there a place I am doing something similar, dressing up pride as zeal?
• If love is the one thing I carry into eternity, what would change today if I lived as though that were true?

If you would like to keep going, you can read the rest of this letter at 1 Corinthians or follow love, faith and hope across Scripture in our verses by topic.