1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, people tend to read 1 Corinthians 12:31 as a lovely metaphor about teamwork, the sort of thing you might cross stitch and hang in a church foyer, it is far more pointed than that, Paul is taking the Corinthians leaderboard and smashing it. The Corinthians had ranked the gifts from impressive down to forgettable and Paul answers the ranking with an image in which ranking is simply absurd. Your liver does not trend, no one has ever complimented a healthy spleen, nobody posts about their kidneys and yet you would die without them quietly and quickly, while the parts you can actually see in the mirror went on collecting all the attention, that is precisely his argument.
The gift you secretly envy in someone else and the gift you are faintly embarrassed to admit is the only one you have are organs in the very same body. The body needs them both and the contest the Corinthians had been running, ranking the members against each other, is not healthy ambition, it is a disease, it is the body attacking itself. And then having built that whole picture of the body, Paul writes a line that the Corinthians would have heard as a sharp challenge and that people have somehow turned into wedding stationery, 1 Corinthians 12:31, but what comes next is the 13th chapter, the love chapter.
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not boast. Love is not arrogant or rude. The lines are printed on greeting cards and engraved on picture frames and recited by people who have never opened the rest of the letter. Beautiful, familiar and almost always lifted clean out of the place where it actually lives, because that chapter is not a freestanding poem about romance that someone later filed in the wrong drawer, it is sitting inside the gift discussion deliberately wedged between the body in chapter 12 and the instructions for orderly worship in chapter 14, of 1 Corinthians.
Paul did not pause his argument to compose something pretty for future weddings, the love chapter is part of the teaching on spiritual gifts. Considering where the love chapter is wedged between, it stops being decoration and becomes the instruction manual, it is Paul telling the gifted, status-hungry Corinthians how the gifts are supposed to be handled and in that spot, the opening lines land like a hammer coming down.
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, Paul says, but have not love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. If I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have faith enough to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing, Paul takes the exact gifts the Corinthians have been ranking at the very top, the showpieces, the abilities that won the loudest admiration in a crowded assembly and he says without love, they come to zero, not reduced, not merely less impressive than they thought, zero, a clanging piece of metal in an empty room, nothing at all.
The gift you secretly envy in someone else and the gift you are faintly embarrassed to admit is the only one you have are organs in the very same body. The body needs them both and the contest the Corinthians had been running, ranking the members against each other, is not healthy ambition, it is a disease, it is the body attacking itself. And then having built that whole picture of the body, Paul writes a line that the Corinthians would have heard as a sharp challenge and that people have somehow turned into wedding stationery, 1 Corinthians 12:31, but what comes next is the 13th chapter, the love chapter.
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not boast. Love is not arrogant or rude. The lines are printed on greeting cards and engraved on picture frames and recited by people who have never opened the rest of the letter. Beautiful, familiar and almost always lifted clean out of the place where it actually lives, because that chapter is not a freestanding poem about romance that someone later filed in the wrong drawer, it is sitting inside the gift discussion deliberately wedged between the body in chapter 12 and the instructions for orderly worship in chapter 14, of 1 Corinthians.
Paul did not pause his argument to compose something pretty for future weddings, the love chapter is part of the teaching on spiritual gifts. Considering where the love chapter is wedged between, it stops being decoration and becomes the instruction manual, it is Paul telling the gifted, status-hungry Corinthians how the gifts are supposed to be handled and in that spot, the opening lines land like a hammer coming down.
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, Paul says, but have not love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. If I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have faith enough to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing, Paul takes the exact gifts the Corinthians have been ranking at the very top, the showpieces, the abilities that won the loudest admiration in a crowded assembly and he says without love, they come to zero, not reduced, not merely less impressive than they thought, zero, a clanging piece of metal in an empty room, nothing at all.