Sunday of Week 4 of Ordinary Time (C)

Commentary on Jeremiah 1:4-5,17-19; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

THE BEGINNING of today’s Gospel repeats some of last Sunday’s. Jesus, at the beginning of his public life, has delivered what today we would call his “mission statement”, using words of the prophet Isaiah. Today, as he speaks, Jesus says that these words are being fulfilled – in him. The Messiah they have been waiting for is now here in the person of Jesus. His Kingdom has begun to be realised in his works of healing, of reconciliation and liberation from evil powers.

At first the crowd is absolutely amazed at Jesus’ eloquence, amazed at his gracious words. “Is not this Joe the carpenter’s boy?” Jesus, a carpenter and the son of a carpenter, can speak like this? What, then, are their expectations now of Jesus? What do they see in him? Maybe, suggests Jesus, they are thinking: “Doctor, heal yourself.” Not in the sense of Jesus healing his own body but in the sense of doing for his own community in Nazareth some of the things he was reputed to be doing in Capernaum and other parts of Galilee.

The prophet’s lot
But, says Jesus to them, a prophet is not normally accepted in his own place. He then gives two striking examples from the Hebrew Testament, one from Elijah and the other from Elisha, two prophets closely linked with the coming of the Messiah.

Elijah was sent to help a poor Gentile widow in Sidon (a non-Jewish area) during a famine caused by three and a half years of drought. Why did the prophet go to her when there were so many Jewish widows in the same plight? Similarly, there were many lepers in Israel but Elisha was sent to Naaman, a Syrian general. The Syrians were the hated enemies of Israel.

Jesus was being quite provocative in telling these stories. Why so? The answer comes in Mark’s account of this incident and he gives two reasons:

a. Because the people of Nazareth knew Jesus’ family so well, they were not ready to receive him or his message about his own identity and mission. It is a good example of familiarity breeding contempt. Because Jesus had grown up among them, they thought they knew who he was. They were not ready to accept that he was something very much more.

b. Secondly, Mark comments that Jesus was able to do very little healing in Nazareth because they refused to believe in him. They had no faith. It is clear on many occasions that Jesus’ healing power only came to those who had total trust in him. “Go in peace; your faith has made you whole again.” And, of course, the response of the people of Nazareth was only a foretaste of the total rejection of Jesus by many of his own people. Jesus’ words were not really provocative. They were simply a description of what was happening.

Amazement turns to hatred
At first, the crowd was amazed that one of their fellow villagers could speak with such grace and eloquence and with such authority. But it was something altogether different to put themselves in his hands. Who did he really think he was? After hearing Jesus’ words about the poor reception of prophets by their own people, they were worked up into a blind rage and hatred. They wanted to push Jesus off the cliff on which their town was built.

But, says Mark, Jesus passed through their midst and left them. These are terrible words and let us pray that such a thing may never happen to us:
– that Jesus should walk right through us
– that we should fail to recognise his presence among us (usually in the people around us)
– that we even reject him,
so that he goes off without us, leaving us behind. It will not be he who has abandoned us; we will have rejected him. And he will never force himself on us.

Gospel contradictions
As Christians, we have to be ready to face certain contradictions in living a Gospel life. The first part of this contradiction comes in the Second Reading, a famous and much-quoted passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Paul, after speaking about the importance of the gifts of the Spirit which each one has received, says that love is the most important gift of all.

Love indeed is a gift. Loving is an art which has to be received and nurtured. The ancient Greeks had three words for ‘love’: eros, philia and agape (pron. a-ga-pay). Putting it very briefly, eros is passionate, physical love, the love of young lovers. Philia is the love of friendship and implies a very deep intimate and mutual relationship between two people involving total transparency of one to the other. It is really the highest form of love and finds its best – but not its only – expression in a really good marriage. Agape, which is the love Paul is speaking about here, is a unilateral, unconditional reaching out in love to another, even if it is not returned or even rejected. This is the love that God has for every single person and the kind of love which should be the characteristic of the true follower of Christ in his/her relationship with people everywhere. It is agape which makes it possible to pray for those who curse us and bless those who harm us.

Without this agape, as Paul tells us, none of other gifts of the Spirit have any value. I may speak with extraordinary eloquence about the Gospel message but, if I do it without love, I am like a booming gong – all sound and no substance. I may be able to utter prophetic statements in God’s name, be gifted with the deepest insights, knowledge and wisdom. Without love, it is nothing. I may even have a faith that can move mountains but, if there is no love there, it is nothing.

Qualities of agape
Paul then lists some of the qualities of agape. It is kind, not envious, not boastful, not arrogant, not rude, not self-willed, not irritable, not resentful. It is does not rejoice in wrongdoing but in truth, integrity and wholeness. Agape has a high level of tolerance and is endlessly ready to trust. It endlessly hopes and is endlessly able to endure. In spite of all obstacles, it perseveres. With agape, one refuses, even when faced with misunderstanding and abuse, to stoop to any form of retaliation and one accepts the dignity of every single person, including enemies.

Speaking with a prophetic voice, Paul asserts that all forms of knowledge and learning will some day come to an end. But agape, as part of God’s own being, will go on forever. Now, Paul tells us, we know God and truth as in a clouded mirror but one day it will be face to face. Then there will be no need for faith or for hope. Faith will give way to total vision and hope will yield to realisation. But agape will remain. And when God’s agape meets mine the result is an eternal bonding in perfect philia.

Universally loved?
However, we now come to the other side of the contradiction we mentioned earlier. If we do succeed in becoming a totally loving people, then we will be universally loved in return. Right? Wrong!

There are two ways in which pain can come into our lives:

a. One is the result of our sinfulness, our living in disharmony with truth and love. This can produce physical, emotional or mental pain.

b. But there is also the suffering that comes from following the Way of Truth, of Love, of Compassion, of true Freedom. Following this way will often bring us in conflict with those who fear or are threatened by Truth and Love. Today’s Gospel is a perfect example. Like Jesus, the most loving person who ever lived, we may find ourselves rejected, even hated and destroyed precisely because of our goodness and integrity.

This is the contradiction or paradox: the more loving we are, the more people our love embraces as we transcend labels and prejudices dividing people, the more likely we will be rejected, persecuted and hated – even by ‘religious’ people. (There were few people more religious than the Pharisees of Jesus’ time.)

This was the experience of the poor prophet Jeremiah and it was something the Lord clearly warned him about. He was called by God to be a “prophet to the nations”. He was to brace himself for action and stand up to the people, passing on God’s message to them. He was not to be alarmed at their presence. God would give him all the necessary strength to carry out his task. He will be like a “fortified city, a pillar of iron, and a wall of bronze” confronting people from the king to the poorest peasants. But he should have no illusions: “They will fight against you.”

However, “they will not overcome you, for I am with you to deliver you.” This is an experience which prophets of the Gospel have had again and again. On the one hand their message of Truth and Love has been rejected and they have been attacked and abused but they have experienced a special strength to carry on.

One thinks again of Martin Luther King and his civil rights marchers singing “We shall overcome” as they were carted off to jail, were sprayed with fire hoses and had savage dogs attack them. However, underneath this kind of suffering – unlike the pain that comes from sin – there lies an unshakeable inner joy and firm peace that only Jesus can give.

As the life of Jesus clearly indicates, there is a price to be paid for being an agape-filled person but it is a price well worth paying. The price of going along any other road is even greater.

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Wednesday of Week 24 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on 1 Corinthians 12:31—13:13

In today’s First Reading, we have likely one of the most quoted passages from Paul—if not from the whole Bible. We have seen Paul speaking to the Corinthian Christians about the various gifts of the Spirit with which different people are endowed so that they can better serve the needs of the community in many different ways. He had been criticising them for laying too much emphasis on and even desiring to have the more prestigious gifts. Using the analogy of the human body he had said that the overall unity of the community was more important than any one gift, just as the unity of the body depended on its having a full complement of limbs and organs for it to function properly.

However, today he goes further and says that, above and beyond any gifts or ‘charisms’, there is “a still more excellent way”. That way is the over-riding element of love. Love is not on the same level as the other gifts. Rather, it is one of the most evident signs of the presence of the Spirit of Christ in the community and its members.

‘Love’ here, as in many parts of the New Testament, translates the Greek word agape, a word with a very specific meaning. The word ‘love’ can mean many things and CS Lewis has written a book called The Four Loves, each one of which can be found in the Scriptures. Let us just briefly focus on three of these: eros, philia and agape.

Eros describes physical, sensual love, the love of lovers sharing physical intimacies with each other. At its best, it is a genuine and very beautiful form of love which involves the total giving of two people to each through their bodies. Paul is not talking about this.

Philia is really the highest form of love. It is the love of friendship, where friendship implies a total mutuality and sharing between two people in a mutual self-giving to each other. It is the love of lovers at its best, the love of the happily married couple, and of friends who are deeply committed to each other. Sex may or may not be part of it. It implies an enduring relationship which may not be present in an eros situation. Again, Paul is not talking about this type of love in today’s reading.

Agape is reaching out to another person with a deep desire for that person’s total well-being and wholeness. It is the love of compassion and caring. It differs from philia in that it does not expect a return (though that may be given); it is a totally unconditional form of loving. It is the love that God extends to all creatures whether they return that love or not. In the First Letter of John we are told that God IS (agape) love (1 John 4:8). It is a constituent of his very being. Agape is a form of love which desires the good of the other quite independently of that person’s ‘lovable-ness’. It is the love that God extends equally to every single person, irrespective of who they are or how they respond. So it is a love that can be extended even to enemies, criminals and those who want to destroy us. It is the love that Jesus showed for those who who nailed him to the cross. It is the love that Paul is speaking about here. It is a love which desires the good of the other, and hence is then especially offered to those who lack it most.

Parenthetically, it is important to also add that a person cannot survive only on agape, the giving form of love. No one can remain permanently in a totally altruistic mode. At bottom whatever we do must ultimately be for our own good and well-being. What we really need for our wholeness is a true philia relationship. It is interesting how Jesus asked Peter the three questions after the resurrection. Each one is translated:

Simon son of John, do you love me? (John 21:15-17)

But in these verses, Jesus used the verbs for both agape and philia. As well, it may not be possible to show a great deal of agape unless we have a philia experience as part of our lives. We can live without eros, but when joined with philia, eros adds what we might call an incarnated dimension to our lives, although eros is also the form of love most abused.

Paul speaks of the supremacy of agape over everything else we do or achieve. If our actions are not motivated by an agape love, then they are of no real value as far as our Christian life is concerned. Using hyperbolic language, Paul gives four exaggerated examples of some of the gifts to be found in the community:

• eloquence, even to the point of being able to speak not only every earthly language, but the language of angels;
• prophecy (in the sense we described it yesterday), the ability to understand all mysteries and “knowing everything” that can be known;
• faith, strong enough to move mountains (as Jesus said true faith could do);
• generosity, which would give away everything one has, even to offering one’s body in martyrdom.

To have any of these gifts in the highest degree could make one a prominent and highly respected person in the community. But if, at bottom, these things are not motivated by genuine agape, they are rated as nothing.

Speaking both positively and negatively, Paul now lists some of the qualities of this kind of agape-love:

• It is patient and kind. (These virtues were apparently not very conspicuous in the Corinthian community.)
• It is never jealous. (Jealousy seems to be present in those Corinthians who were more ambitious for certain charisms than satisfied with what they had.)
• It is never boastful or conceited. (Paul accuses the Corinthians of a certain arrogance which their overall moral behaviour in no way justifies.)
• It is never rude or selfish. (Paul mentions the divisive factions and also the selfish behaviour of some when celebrating the Lord’s Supper.)
• It does not take offence and is not resentful. (True agape is totally focused on the needs of the other and is not upset by hostility or rejection. Such inner resentment is a sign of an insecurity in oneself. People who love with true agape-love cannot be offended because they are people who totally accept themselves as they are.)
• It takes no pleasure in other’s sins, but delights in the truth. (The reaction to the weaknesses of others is neither delight nor judgement, but rather compassion. True love also is never afraid of the truth, but always wants to see it come to the surface. At the same time, the truly loving person will always speak the truth in love, being sensitive to the weaknesses of those for whom the truth can be very painful. One can speak the truth in a very unloving way.)
• It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. (True love always wants to find the good in everyone. It is biased towards believing that people act in good faith. In spite of outward circumstances, it never loses the certain hope that the truth and the good must ultimately prevail. It is ready in the worst of times to hang in there and to believe in the ultimate goodness of people.)

Love alone, says Paul, outlasts everything else because love is part of God’s very nature; God is love. Loving is not just something God practises—it is a part of his very essence.

On the other hand, many of the church’s most highly prized gifts will eventually pass away. Paul mentions prophecy—there will come a time when it is no longer needed. The gift of speaking languages will not be part of the life to come. Knowledge, however wide, will eventually be shown to be inadequate when we come face to face with the Infinite Source of all knowledge and wisdom:

…when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

‘Complete’ is one translation of the Greek word pleroma, which means ‘fulfilment’, ‘perfection’, ‘maturity’. That ‘completeness’ will be realised when Christ comes at the end to bring all creation to himself to share in his glory.

Right now, says Paul, we are like children, talking like children, acting and arguing like children. We think we are adults, but it is not really the case. We are like a man looking at his reflection in one of those polished metal mirrors of those days. The image can be seen, but is somewhat blurred. But then, when the Lord comes, we will have the extraordinary experience of seeing God clearly face to face. Though now:

I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

That is, I will know the Lord to the fullest extent possible for a human creature, analogous to the unlimited way in which God knows me.

And so, Paul sums up by saying that in the end only three things will perdure: faith, hope and agape-love. We will not need faith when we are face to face with our infinite Creator. We will not need hope because every possible desire of our being will be fulfilled forever. But agape will remain. Face to face with God, we will be eternally bathed in that agape which pours from him and fills us with the happiness for which we were created.

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