NOTES for Co1 13:8

Paul speaks of love as something that alone exists forever and in eternity, surpassing everything else in this respect. The words of Paul here strongly recall other words: the words of Jesus Himself about love as a new commandment.

At first glance, there is nothing new in love: even before the coming of the Messiah, experts in the Torah knew that the whole essence of the Torah comes down to two commandments, the commandment to love God and the commandment to love neighbor. Yet the presence of love did not cancel everything else that could be present in a person's life and in his relationships with God and with other people. Jesus, meanwhile, calls love a new commandment, and Paul, as if continuing the thought of the Teacher, speaks of love as something that surpasses everything imaginable that can be connected with human existence in the Kingdom.

It is clear that with Christ something new connected with love entered the world. Before the coming of the Messiah, love was primarily a relationship joining a person with God and with other people. It was the intention on which such relationships stood. The space of relationships itself remained natural and psychic. In the Kingdom everything is different: there love becomes the space of relationships. It becomes the medium within which all relationships exist: with God, with Christ, and with other people.

The breath of the Kingdom that embraces a person becomes for him a medium of love. And at the end of time, when the whole world again becomes the Kingdom as it was on the first day of creation, this breath will embrace everything and will be the only possible medium in which renewed nature exists. Then love will become the only reality of all human actions, all relationships, and all life in general. This is what the apostle recalls when he says that without love everything else loses its meaning. Then it will remain outside the Kingdom, and therefore outside the world of God.

For Paul, love is undoubtedly the foundation of all the relationships that connect people living in the Kingdom with God and with one another. That is why it remains relevant even when everything else ceases to be so (v. 8). But the apostle is not speaking simply about life in the Kingdom. He clearly has in mind a certain fullness of the Kingdom itself, so to speak, the fullness of fullness. All the spiritual gifts that Paul described so vividly only a short time earlier now disappear, dissolving into love. The apostle gives a completely unambiguous explanation for this: all the gifts we can have today are still far from the fullness of that love with which the Kingdom is permeated, and therefore they are temporary (vv. 9-10). This incompleteness is connected with our own spiritual state: from the point of view of that fullness of life that will become possible in the Kingdom revealed to the end, we are still children, having only the most general ideas about the life of the Kingdom and having taken only our first steps in it (v. 11).

As one can see, for Paul the spiritual path of individual people living in the Kingdom is inseparable from the history of the Kingdom itself. For him the spiritual maturing of Christians is inseparable from the becoming of the Kingdom and its development in our world, which is being transfigured but has not yet been transfigured to the end. The realities of the Kingdom are perceived with difficulty today not only because our eyes have not yet developed enough to see the objects of the spiritual world clearly, but also because these realities themselves have not yet fully taken shape and have not been completely revealed (v. 12). But the full revelation of the Kingdom will happen only at the end of time with the Savior's return. Until then, the love of the Kingdom, which we can experience only in part, is joined with faith that the day will come when it will be revealed to the world in all its fullness, and with hope that we ourselves too will become part of this fullness (v. 13).

It is very difficult to speak about such “abstract” concepts, let alone compare them. With a certain degree of approximation, we might put it this way: in ordinary usage, faith and hope describe our relationship to facts. Faith concerns facts that “already are” (I believe that God exists, that He is good, that He created the world, that He ordered the world in such-and-such a way, that He gave His only-begotten Son...), while hope concerns facts that are “still ahead” (I hope for salvation, resurrection from the dead, eternal life...). But sometimes these words are used to express our relationship with another person: faith as trust in God, hope as reliance upon Him. The word “love” belongs to this same series: it speaks of our relationship with someone else. Yet this word truly is “greater” than faith and hope, because love means the fullness of relationship and, of course, includes both trust and hope.