Sunday 28th January 2007EPIPHANY 4

Fr Julian Browning

Jeremiah  1  :  4 – 5 &  17 – 19 ; I  Corinthians  13  :  1 – 13; Luke  4  :  21 - 30. 

“Charity never faileth”.  I Cor. 13 : 8

Jesus Christ has shown us what that love looks like, and what love, love alone, can achieve. Love's redeeming work is done.8th

Love never ends. That's a bold claim. There are some passages of Scripture which have got through, somehow and in spite of everything, to the national consciousness, like bits of music on what used to be Your 100 Best Tunes. St.Paul's hymn to love (although it isn't a hymn) in 1 Corinthians 13 is one of them. It's the good old standby for weddings or any occasion when love is in the air. Like a piece of music, you don't need to understand it fully to feel the benefit. That's good, because we're not always feeling bright, and a passage like 1 Corinthians 13, when read in the rhythm of the old translation, speaks, on its own, of a faith so life-giving, so God-given, that if we could only latch on to it again somehow, it would be like having the blood back in our bodies. Charity never faileth. These are words from another world indeed.

At one time they were words in the present, our world, sent to Corinth, as if to ourselves to tell us that our spiritual lives are a dead letter without love. “I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”. Maybe the modern equivalent is I am become as an Ipod on the tube, unable to communicate anything of myself to other people, cut off from the world. There's an affliction called translation distraction, from which I suffer. All prayer and study stops as I compare the different translations of the Bible. So the RSV talks about noisy gongs, as if we're going into lunch in a Victorian boarding house, but my point is that the Corinthians were known for their tasteful brassware or bronzeware, so St.Paul talks to them in terms they can understand. The second interesting thing about the Corinthians is that they were very keen on knowledge, knowing things, knowing more, getting to the truth that way. St.Paul demolishes that way, says it doesn't work. What they hold dear, their special gifts of prophecy, speech, knowledge, are worthless without love. And so his letter, which you can read for yourselves, rolls on, devastating, uncompromising, and brave.

Love's redeeming work is done. Love lasts for ever. Nothing else does. This is why love is so important to the Christian. Not because we can't manage without it. We do manage without love a lot of the time, either we have to, or we've put up barriers to it, or we're just not the sort of people to go around in a haze of goodwill and heartfelt charm. So why and how is love so fundamental to the Christian faith? Other religions don't zoom in on love with the same intensity. But we do. We make a big claim for love. All the time, drives us mad, but it is what St.Paul proclaims. Everything else is temporary, partial, known in part. Now we see through a glass darkly. Are we good all the time? Of course not. Are we good at anything, at helping, at being kind, at healing, all the time? No. All our Christian virtues, like the Corinthians' gifts of prophecy and knowledge, are temporary qualities on which we dare not rely. We know nothing. What we say and do will appear very childish from the perspective of eternity. But one thing we have been given, the gift of love. Our own reflection in the mirror is dark, we don't see clearly. God's reflection is clear and bright, because God's reflection in this world is love. Jesus Christ has shown us what that love looks like, and what love, love alone, can achieve. Love's redeeming work is done.

In this world, our world, Love gets locked out. Today's Gospel tells us what happens when love gets locked out. To make any sense to us it has to be read with last week's Gospel. Jesus tells the people who he is, just as he tells you and me about himself in the Gospels. They like what they hear, but only in their own terms of the cosy God and Israel relationship from which they will beneft. Just like us. Our misunderstanding of Jesus, our locking out of love, is similar. We don't like the challenge which this divine love is going to make to our own lives and way of living. They threw him out of the city, literally locked love out. We do the same because we know that love will change us. And what happens then? Jesus passes through in the midst of them and goes away. There are times when Jesus is invisible to us. He just isn't there. We've locked him out. St.Luke's particular phrase about Jesus going on his way is code for Jesus being still on course, still eternal love out to win the world back to God. Just because we reject Christ does not mean that Christ rejects us.

Charity never faileth. Love lasts for ever. Love endures to the end, endureth all things. It is through his love, through his total commitment to us, that God keeps his promise to welcome us back into his kingdom, however ropy our virtues, however inadequate our knowledge. And it is love as endurance that we see on the Cross, drawing us to Him for ever.