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.

• 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.