I Put The Ways of Childhood Behind Me

To make sense of this verse, it helps to remember who first received it. Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth, a busy port city in Greece, after he had lived and worked among them himself (you can read the story in Acts 18). By the time he sends this letter, sometime in the 50s AD, the church is fracturing. They are arguing over which leader they belong to, taking each other to court, divided at the Lord’s table, and, most of all, jostling over spiritual gifts: who can speak in tongues, who has the showiest gift, who counts as more advanced. That is the setting of this single sentence. Chapters 12 to 14 are Paul’s long answer to people who prized impressive abilities over ordinary love. So although we tend to hear it at weddings, it was first aimed at a congregation that thought maturity meant gifting and knowledge, and Paul is quietly telling them they have it backwards. Once I remember that, the verse stops feeling sentimental and starts to sting a little, which I suspect is closer to how he meant it.

Look at how Paul builds the sentence and you notice he gives three pictures of childhood, not one: I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Words, emotions, reasoning. He is covering the whole inner life, not just outward behaviour, and all three belong to the same stage and are meant to be outgrown together. There is no scolding in his tone, only the plain sense of something laid down once it has done its work. What is easy to miss is the harder claim sitting right beside it. A few lines earlier he has said that prophecy, tongues and knowledge, the very gifts the Corinthians were so proud of, will one day be done away with. The growing-up picture is not only about me as an individual, then. It hints that this whole present age is a kind of childhood compared with what is still to come.

The verse leans straight into the line that follows it, the one the short reflection already touches, about seeing now in a mirror only dimly. Ancient mirrors were polished metal rather than glass, so even at their best they gave back a softened, uncertain image, and that is the picture Paul reaches for to describe our knowledge of God now. Here is where it joins the wider story of scripture. Moses was told that no one could see God’s face and live (Exodus 33:20), and ever since the garden we have been squinting rather than seeing plainly. Yet the promise running through the Bible is that this will not always be so. John’s first letter holds out the day when we will see Christ as he is and be made like him (1 John 3:2), and Paul elsewhere calls Jesus the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). So the dim mirror is not the end of the matter. It has a face it is waiting for, and the face is his.

I would love to tell you I read this verse as a finished adult looking fondly back. I cannot. I catch the toddler in me most days. It surfaces when I want a thing the moment I want it, when a slight from someone lands and I quietly keep the score, when I would rather sound clever in a conversation than actually love the person sitting in front of me. That last one is exactly what Paul is naming. The Corinthians wanted the impressive gift. I want the impressive sentence. What helps me is that he does not tell me to manufacture maturity by gritting my teeth. He treats growth as something God works in slowly, the way a child grows without ever feeling it happen. So I have learned to ask a smaller, kinder question than am I mature yet. I ask whether, in this one exchange and this one disappointment, I can love a little more patiently than I would have a year ago. That is a question I can actually live with, and it keeps me from both smugness and despair.

• Where do I still expect the world, or the people around me, to revolve around what I want?
• When I picture a ‘mature’ Christian, do I think of knowledge and confidence, or of patient love that does not keep score?
• What is one childish thing God might be gently asking me to set down for good, not by force but as I grow?
• Does the promise of one day seeing him face to face make me more patient with how unfinished I still feel?

If you would like to keep growing in this, you might sit with a few more passages over at our topic pages or read on through 1 Corinthians.