Homily from Sunday January 30th, 2022: 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The 2nd reading we listened to was written by St. Paul in the year 56, he was writing to the church in Corinth – which is in Greece. This is St. Paul’s very famous passage on Love.
It is the most popular reading used at weddings, but it’s a little distorted from Paul’s original intent. Taken by itself, it sounds like a beautiful piece of poetry and a hymn to the glories of human love.
But what many people fail to realize is that it isn’t about love between a man and a woman – at least not specifically.
It’s about love among Church members, struggling and stumbling through the difficult and painful process of trying to be together as the Body of Christ, to be church.
The Corinthian Christians had been fighting with each other over everything: teachings, power, orthodoxy and places in the church. It is only together that we can be that inclusive community of which Jesus speaks in the Gospel/ that we do it as a church / and that just one or two outspoken, loud and aggressive members would hold back the mission of the Church.
St. Paul wrote this beautiful letter to tell them (grow up) you’re missing the point. That isn’t what it means to be a follower of Christ. That it is love that bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things – it never fails.
The fact is, love is not in the feelings or the glands, although they are important and a marriage without sentiment and sex is a poor one. But the point is, they are not primary. They do not ultimately define love. Love / is in the will, in the decisions we make, and the more difficult the decisions – in spite of the feelings, the greater the love.
The alcoholic lawyer, in the Tale of Two Cities, who heroically takes the place of another at the guillotine, is right when he says. “It is a far, far better thing that I do – than I have ever done”: And St. Maximillian Kolbe who steps forward to die in the place of a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.
Love is in the mind, in the will, in the decisions we make. Feelings are wonderful and necessary and they embellish love and we would be enormously poorer without them: but they are not all that love is, they cannot always be identified with the decision to do what is best for the beloved, which is why parents often have to drag their kids to the dentist. Yes, I think that this kind of Love makes the best marriages. But too often we think of married Love as something else. Something wrapped in white lace, roses and so on.
Probably our culture has forgotten what love truly means. It’s about giving yourself away. But we’ve forgotten that. Maybe we’ve become comfortable and complacent instead we just walk-away. We terminate what is inconvenient or difficult.
We don’t realize what love entails. But every now and then we hear beautiful challenging stories and the message comes through.
So don’t consider Paul’s letter a romantic cliché, something that pops up at weddings or anniversaries, but rather it is for each of us, a real gift, and one we pass on to others and it especially begins here in Church.
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