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 used to read believes all things and hesitate, because it sounded as if Paul wanted me to switch off my judgement and trust anyone about anything. That is not it. The two middle verbs, believing and hoping, are not gullibility. They are a leaning. When someone I love does a thing that could be read two ways, love reaches first for the kinder reading, and waits before it assumes the worst. It keeps a person on the better side of the doubt for as long as it honestly can. Hoping all things runs alongside it, holding the door open for who they might yet become rather than pinning them to who they were last week. None of this is naive denial. Love is not pretending the trouble is not there. It is choosing, with its eyes wide open, to keep crediting and keep hoping rather than write someone off as a lost cause. That one distinction has rescued more than one of my friendships, because the cynical reading is nearly always available, and it is nearly always the lazier one.

There is a second strand inside that first verb, bears, that I missed for years. To cover, in Paul’s world, was not only to shelter someone from the rain. It was also to keep a thing private. Love that bears all things is love that does not go round telling everyone how it has been let down. It carries the failure quietly rather than putting it on display, the way you would draw a coat over a friend who had fallen rather than stand back and point. That is a costly kind of love, because broadcasting someone’s faults is satisfying in the moment and protecting them is not. And then the last verb gathers the whole thing up. Endures is a soldier’s word, the holding of a position when everything in you wants to fall back. It is built for the long siege, not the quick skirmish. Mere affection burns bright and burns out. This love is built to outlast the things that would exhaust ordinary fondness, which is exactly why it is still on its feet when easier feelings have long since worn out.

I have watched this verse get read in the vestry rather than at the wedding. Somebody has finally worked up the nerve to say the accounts do not add up, or that a leader’s private tone is nothing like the public one, or that a decision was stitched up beforehand and called consensus afterwards. And someone, kindly, sincerely, says love bears all things. The room settles. The person who spoke goes quiet. I have sat in that silence and said nothing myself, and it still bothers me years later. Paul handed all four verbs to everybody in that quarrelsome church at once, and every one of them is a mirror you hold up to your own face. Not a muzzle you fit to somebody else’s. If you are chairing that meeting, this verse is asking about your patience with the person who irritates you, and it has precisely nothing to say about whether they were right to open their mouth. So here is the test I use now, and I would give it to any church leader. If quoting these words makes a person stop talking, they have just been used backwards.

If I had eight minutes on this verse, I would refuse to open with endures. It is the word everyone half knows already, and it drags a congregation into gritted teeth before they have earned the right to say it. Preach Paul’s order instead and trust him with it. Bears is about this afternoon, while the wrong is still warm. Believes is about tonight, lying awake, deciding what sort of person would do that to you. Hopes points a year out. Only then does endures turn up, and it turns up as a verdict rather than an instruction, the sort of thing a congregation can only say looking backwards over years of the other three being quietly practised. Start at endures and you will send people home resolving to grit their teeth and call it love, which is the one thing I am certain Paul is not asking for. One practical note: give bears most of your minutes. It is the verb your people actually have to do on Monday morning, and I have never once heard anyone preach it.

Not the wedding morning, or not without a sentence of warning first. A couple hears four verbs and takes them as a promise they are making under their own steam, and in year nine, when the bearing wears thin, they conclude they have failed at love itself. Say the honest thing before you read it: this is a description of the God marrying you off, not a target you hit by trying harder. Where it genuinely sings is much later. A fiftieth anniversary. The funeral of a foster carer. The funeral of a woman who visited the same difficult brother every Tuesday for twenty years and never once mentioned it to anyone. That is where I have watched it land properly, because the congregation can already see the evidence, and the verse is only naming what they found. Post it to someone in the middle of a hard season, though, and you have handed them your reading of their life to carry on top of everything else. That decision belongs to them and to counsel much closer than a verse arriving on a phone screen.

For years I treated verse 7 as the summit of the chapter, the place all that climbing was for. It is not. Paul is nowhere near finished when the four verbs run out. Read on and the mood changes completely: prophecy, tongues and knowledge are all going to be done away with, because we know in part and prophesy in part (1 Corinthians 13:8 to 9). Then the child putting away childish things, and then the mirror, seen dimly, which in Paul’s day meant a sheet of polished metal, not the glass on my landing (1 Corinthians 13:11 to 12). That is the room verse 7 is standing in. Bearing and believing and hoping and enduring are not the permanent furniture of a finished love. They are what love looks like when it cannot yet see straight: believing the best of someone precisely because you cannot read their heart, hoping because you do not have the whole picture and know you do not.

Paul calls what is coming face to face, knowing as we are known, and on that day none of this strain will be needed, because there will be nothing left to guess at. That is oddly comforting to me at half past eleven at night, when thinking well of somebody feels like deliberate labour rather than something that arrives by itself. It is meant to be labour. Even the phrase in verse 8, that love never fails, is doing something quieter and different from endures in verse 7. Endurance is what love looks like leaning into resistance in the half-light. Never failing is simply what it will be, once there is no resistance left to lean on. So I read the four verbs now as scaffolding. They are up because the building is not finished, and one day the scaffold comes down and what stands underneath will have been love the whole time. The muscle I strain to keep exercised, believing the best when the evidence says otherwise, will not need straining forever.

If you want to watch these four verbs walking about in somebody’s actual life rather than sitting neatly in a list, go and read Hosea. God tells the prophet to marry Gomer, a woman he is told from the outset will be unfaithful to him (Hosea 1:2 to 3). She has three children, and the wording there goes quiet in a way I have never been able to un-notice: the first son is born to him, and the two after that are simply born, with no father named. Then chapter 3, where Hosea is told to go and love a woman loved by another, an adulteress, and he buys her for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley (Hosea 3:1 to 2). Coin and grain, for a wife who had already gone. Whoever was selling her, the book does not say, and it does not name her in that chapter either, so I will not pretend to a certainty the text withholds. I have never once been able to read it as anyone but Gomer. Set those three verses beside 1 Corinthians 13:7 and you get what the four verbs never quite manage on their own: bearing and believing and hoping done with a man’s own money, in public, in front of neighbours who would have told him to be done with her and meant it kindly. Nobody in that scene claps him on the back for a wise decision, and that is rather the point. Endurance that makes obvious financial sense to the onlookers usually is not endurance at all, only self-interest wearing a coat.

What the book never tells us is whether her heart turned. Hosea may have simply kept faith with a woman who never fully came home in more than address, and that silence instructs me rather than frustrating me: enduring all things was never promised a warm reunion at the end of it. I want to be careful, though, because that marriage was a commanded sign given to one prophet, acting out God’s own faithfulness to an unfaithful Israel. It was never a rule that a wronged spouse must go back to the market and pay.

Here is the question this verse leaves wide open, and I think it is dishonest to pretend it does not. What about the person who bore and believed and hoped and endured for years, faithfully, at real cost, and the other one never came back? The parent who kept hoping for a child who died estranged anyway. The husband who kept believing the best long after the evidence had run dry and was still divorced by the spring, without ever hearing the apology he had spent nine years hoping for.

1 Corinthians 13:7 does not promise that this kind of love wins the person back. It tells you the shape and the character of love, not an outcome. Hoping all things is not the same as being owed a happy ending, and real damage gets done when it is preached as though it were, because a grief that is already unbearable then gets a second layer laid over the top: the quiet suspicion that if only your love had been better, they would have turned round. That is a lie, and I would say so in any pulpit that would have me. Love can be entirely genuine, exactly the kind Paul describes here, and still not get the reconciliation it hoped for, for the plain reason that the other person stays free to walk away from it however well you loved them.

Scripture gives us the version that ends well, the father running down the road while his son is still a long way off (Luke 15:20). It does not give us the version where the son never turns round, where the field stays empty and the calf is never killed. I have decided that is not an oversight. Scripture is not in the business of promising us that ending, only of showing us what love is either way. I cannot tidy this up for you and I would rather say plainly that I do not know than hand you a bow to tie round it. What I hold instead is smaller and it has held: the love was not wasted where it did not work, because it was never only aimed at changing the other person. It was also, whether either of you knew it at the time, keeping faith with the love that first got hold of you.

Read this verse in a room with a seven-year-old and a seventy-year-old in it and you have about four seconds to decide whether you are telling the truth or the nice version. The nice version is that love means always being kind. The true version is harder and much better. Bearing, I tell children, looks like staying friends with somebody through the week they are grumpy for no reason anybody can name, the way you would take one end of something heavy so your friend is not carrying it on their own. Hoping looks like refusing to decide somebody is a lost cause because they were unkind on Tuesday. Children get that instantly. They have all been the grumpy one.

Then the part the picture-book version leaves out, and it needs saying in the same breath, not in a nervous rush at the end. If somebody is cruel to you over and over, or somebody at home frightens you, this verse is not telling you to keep it quiet. That is not bearing. That needs a grown-up you trust, today. A child can hold both of those at once if you hand them over plainly, and what they cannot hold is a version of love that only ever asks them to put up with things, because it is not what Paul wrote and it will not serve them at twenty-five. Get it right at seven and they grow up able to tell loyalty from self-erasure, which is a distinction I meet grown adults who have still not managed.

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.