Day: February 19, 2023

“Charity never faileth”

“Love bade me welcome”. So begins George Herbert’s poem, “Love (III),” which concludes a wonderful collocation of poems known as The Temple. They are poems that continue to attract across the spectrum of ecclesial identities. As the Puritan theologian, Richard Baxter notes, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his Books.”

Today is Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly known as ‘Love Sunday;’ in part because of Paul’s powerful hymn to love from 1st Corinthians 13, and, in part because of the Gospel story. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. Like Herbert’s poem, it is an invitation to love. The journey is the pilgrimage of love. Love is God.

This challenges many of our assumptions about love as something personal, emotional, sexual, and psychological; in short, our all too human loves are incomplete. What Paul sets before us is Divine Love, the love which seeks the perfection of our human loves by gathering us into the life of God himself. It is very much about a kind of wisdom in love, about the divine knowing and loving which is greater than the partial, fickle and limited forms of our human loves and our human knowing. We “see in a glass darkly.” Even more, we are meant to see ourselves in the “certain blind man” sitting by the way-side near Jericho, itself the image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the image of the heavenly city.

Without charity, we are nothing, and, as the Collect says, all our works without charity are “nothing worth,” drawing upon the language of the Epistle. Charity is the Englishing of one of the several words for love in Latin, namely, caritas, itself the Latinising of one of the several words for love in Greek, namely, agape. Charity means more though not less than the idea of providing for the poor and needy. The point is that through the recognition of the limitations of our human loves we are awakened to the Divine love which seeks our good in the motions of the Goodness of God himself.

In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone. (Sonnet # 141)

(more…)

Print this entry