Sermon for Quinquagesima
“For now we see in a glass darkly.”
Love without truth is empty sentimentality while truth without love is simply death. Love is not simply an emotion or a feeling. In Paul’s great hymn of love we enter into a tradition of reflection about love which reaches back to Plato and ahead to the theology of amor which shapes Christian culture in its medieval and modern expressions. In a way, Paul’s 13th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians is the Christian manifesto about love as the foundational principle of the Christian religion. What he identifies here are the great theological virtues of faith, hope and charity or love. These three, the greatest of which, he says, is love.
They are the trinity of virtues, you might say, that signal God’s grace as the moving force and principle that seeks our good. They are the virtues which belong to the spiritual perfection of our humanity, the virtues that are about our life in Christ. Why is love the greatest of these? Because love joins faith and hope, uniting what is known with what is hoped for.
In a way, love is about our participation now, however imperfectly, in the realities of God’s life of love, the community of the Trinity. That is the truth of our fellowship. Without it we are nothing. “If I have not love,” Paul says, “I am nothing.” The Collect reminds us that this is Jesus’ teaching. “All our doings without charity are nothing worth,” and that charity or love is “the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee.” There is such a thing as being dead right; in other words, right but dead, because love is missing.
For “we see in a glass darkly,” meaning imperfectly and unclearly. Our vision and our understanding is limited; human love, too, on its own terms, is limited and incomplete. Where there is no clarity, there is no charity, too. The challenge of our lives is to see more clearly and to love more dearly. It takes a journey. It is the journey of our souls into the heart of God.
