Love Endures All Things

I have to keep reminding myself where these words actually sit, because we mostly meet them on order of service sheets and engagement cards. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to a real and rather messy church in a busy Greek port, and he wrote it while he was away from them and worrying about them. They were not arguing about love. They were arguing about whose spiritual gifts mattered most, which leader they belonged to, who could speak in tongues most impressively. Chapter 12 is all about those gifts. Chapter 14 goes straight back to them. Right in the gap between, Paul stops and says, in effect, that none of it counts for anything without love, and then he tells them what love actually does. So when he writes that love bears, believes, hopes and endures all things, he is not composing poetry for a couple in their best clothes. He is writing to people who were finding each other hard work. That changes how I read it. These four verbs were aimed first at people who were tempted to give up on one another.

There is a pattern in the Greek that is easy to miss in English, and it is worth slowing down for. The word translated all things, panta, opens every one of the four lines: all things it bears, all things it believes, all things it hopes, all things it endures. Paul keeps putting that one word first, like a refrain. He does not say love bears most things, or believes the things that are easy to believe. He keeps saying all, and I find that both lovely and slightly terrifying, because it leaves me nowhere to hide. The first verb, the one we render bears, carries the idea of covering, the way a roof covers a house or you would shelter someone from the rain. The last verb, endures, has a bit of steel in it: the staying-put of someone who holds their ground. So the four together move from covering a person to holding on under pressure. And notice that hoping comes before enduring. Love does not simply grit its teeth in the dark. It keeps a door open.

I cannot read these verbs honestly and pretend they describe me on an ordinary Tuesday. My bearing runs out. My believing the best curdles into suspicion when I am tired. So I keep coming back to the truth that this is a description of God before it is ever a target for me. Every line was lived out by Jesus first. He bore our wrongs and did not drop us. He kept hoping for the people everyone else had written off, the tax collector at his table and the woman he met at the well. And that last verb, the one about holding on under pressure, took him the whole way to a cross, where the easy thing would have been to come down and walk away. Isaiah 53 had already spoken, centuries earlier, of one who would carry our sorrows. Paul tells us elsewhere that nothing can separate us from this love (Romans 8:38-39), and John says the same thing more simply still in 1 John 4:19. The order matters enormously. I do not manufacture this love. I receive it, and then a little of it leaks out of me onto other people.

Here is where I have to be honest rather than tidy. The hardest people to bear and believe and hope for are rarely strangers. They are the ones I share a roof or a pew or a surname with: the teenager who slams the door, the relative who lets me down in exactly the same way for the fifteenth time, the friend whose recovery keeps stalling. Bearing all things, for me, has looked like staying in a difficult conversation thirty seconds longer than I wanted to. Hoping all things has looked like refusing to file someone permanently under disappointing, even when the evidence is stacked up against them. I do want to be careful here, because this verse gets misused. Enduring all things does not mean staying silent under genuine abuse or pretending that harm is fine. The verse just before this one says love takes no pleasure in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth, so a love that quietly lets itself be destroyed is not the love Paul is describing. What it does mean, for me, is choosing the person again in small, unglamorous, repeated ways, long after the warm feeling has gone quiet.

I would not rush these. Maybe take one a day rather than all of them at once.

• Where has my love quietly run out lately, and who is on the receiving end of that?
• Of the four, which do I find easiest, and which do I keep failing at: bearing, believing, hoping, or enduring?
• Have I confused enduring all things with tolerating something that is actually harming me or someone I am meant to protect?
• When I think of being loved like this by God, do I genuinely believe he has not run out on me?

If you want to keep going, you might sit with a few more verses about love, or see where this one falls in the wider letter in 1 Corinthians in the Bible.