Oft quoted at weddings, preeminent celebrations of romantic love, a poem is read extolling the virtue of love:

Love is patient and kind
Love is not jealous or boastful…
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love never ends.

What many may not realize is that this is a poem from the pen of the apostle Paul. And while this poem is used to paint a picture of young love at weddings, its intent far transcends the romance of the occasion, and a fairly limited understanding of this virtue.

Romantic love was not in the apostle’s mind when he penned this verse. Instead, tremendous conflict in the fledgling Corinthian church caused Paul great grief. There were dissensions and quarrels over all kinds of issues in this community; quarrels over leadership and allegiance, over moral standards, over marriage and singleness, over theology, and quarrels so extreme that lawsuits were being filed!(1)

So after reminding the Corinthian followers of Jesus that they represented his body—a body with many members and unique gifts and functions—Paul lifts up love as the height of what it means to be a mature human being:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing….Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away….but now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love (13:1-3, 8, 13).

Often, as I survey various communities in our world today, I see the same kind of division and derision, as was present in the Corinthian community. More often than not, one encounters a war of information, argumentation based on this book or that claim, this person’s authority or that person’s expertise. Quick to criticize and lambaste, noisy gongs and clanging cymbals abound; but the love that never fails is a rare and fleeting occurrence. How does one make sense of all this, particularly in light of Paul’s proclamation that without love we are nothing?

Perhaps part of the reason why there is so little love is that there is a fear that to love is somehow to compromise. Many feel the strong need to disassociate with the way love is commonly defined; as unthinking acceptance, an anything goes, an “I’m okay you’re okay” easy love as bland and undefined as gelatin. Surely, the Apostle Paul’s understanding goes far beyond this flabby view of love. After all, he spends the majority of his first letter to the Corinthians exhorting their bad behavior by virtue of their lack of love.

Yet, I sometimes worry that a reticence to extend love to others without condition belies a forgetfulness about the conditions of our acceptance by God. Paul writes to the Romans, “But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8). If God loved us while we were yet sinners, why do we find it so hard to love others?

In a world that largely perceives Christians to be in-fighters, hypocritical, argumentative, and judgmental naysayers, would it not demonstrate maturity to reexamine our fear of what it might look like if we tried to take Paul’s words about love to heart?

Would it or could it look like creating seminaries in the prisons, as has been done at Louisiana’s maximum security prison at Angola? Would it or could it look like working with different Christian fellowships towards a vital social goal despite denominational differences or theological disagreements? Would it or could it look like proactive movement to engage the culture rather than reactive retreat? Would it, or should it look like growing into mature human beings? Paul continues,

When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

In Jesus, the full stature and maturity of humanity is on display. He taught that love was the summary of all that had gone before, and fulfillment of the entire law and the message of the prophets—love God and love your neighbor as yourself. If the greatest of the virtues is love, as affirmed by Jesus and the apostle Paul, can all who seek to follow envision becoming a community that seeks to make love their chief responsibility and goal?(2) Now abide faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the Speaking and Writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) See 1 Corinthians 1:10-14; 3:1-10; 4:14-21; 5:1-13; 6:1-11; 7; 8:1-4 as examples.
(2) Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34.

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Dr. Paul Brand was an orthopedic surgeon who chose his patients among the untouchable. With his wife, who was also a physician, he spent a lifetime working with the marred and useless limbs of leprosy victims. In fact, he transformed the way in which medicine approached the painful and often exiled world of the leper. Whereas the disfigurements of leprosy were once treated as irreversible consequences of the disease, Dr. Brand brought new hope to sufferers of leprosy by utilizing the body’s capacity to heal. “I have come to realize that every patient of mine, every newborn baby, in every cell of its body, has a basic knowledge of how to survive and how to heal that exceeds anything that I shall ever know,” wrote Brand. “That knowledge is the gift of God, who has made our bodies more perfectly than we could ever have devised.”(1)

Philip Yancey was a young journalist when he first met this dignified British surgeon in an interview. He recalls a teary-eyed Brand speaking of his patients, describing their disease as if first hand: their unremitting suffering, experimental surgeries, societal rejection. Many memorable conversations later, Yancey would recall the healing presence this physician was to his own crippled and weary belief in God. To Yancey, Brand represented faith and hope in body, amidst nothing less than suffering and death and loss. His belief in Christ caused him to outwardly live in a very particular way. He worked to restore the image of humanity and the image of God in lives marred by disease, and so helped restore the face of God in the doubt-ridden world of a young author. As Yancey later would write of their meeting, “You need only meet one saint to believe, to silence the noisy arguments of the world.”(2)

Brand was for Yancey a physical reminder that Christianity is no mere system or organization, preference or thought process, but a way of life with one concerned as much with broken bodies as marred souls. In a 1990 lecture titled The Wisdom of the Body, Dr. Paul Brand said, “I pray that when my time comes I may not grumble that my body has worn out too soon, but hold on to gratitude that I have been so long at the helm of the most wonderful creation the world has ever known, and look forward to meeting its designer face to face.”(3) In a body like ours, God silences the arguments of a noisy world. Jesus approaches humanity as one of us, coming to make us well entirely—in body, mind, soul, senses.

Of the ten lepers Jesus healed on his way to Jerusalem, there was only one who stopped to recognize the significance of the man behind the miracle. For this one, it was not simply a life-changing moment of being healed of leprosy; it was a life-changing invitation into a kingdom and a community, into life as a new creation. Falling on his face at Jesus’s human feet, he saw the Son of God who made him well. And Jesus said to him: “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”(4)

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, In the Likeness of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 16.
(2) Philip Yancey, “The Leprosy Doctor,” Christianity Today (November 2003), 112.
(3) Paul Brand, “The Wisdom of the Body,” Chicago Sunday Evening Club, Program 3428, April 28, 1990.
(4) Luke 17:11-18.

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Milton! thou shouldest be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again:
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

This was the cry of William Wordsworth early in the nineteenth century as he saw the demise of English culture underway. The Church, the state, the home, the writers and shapers of society were called to task, for the nation had lost its soul and was hurtling headlong towards moral defacement. “Milton!” he cried, “England hath need of thee.” I wonder today who we would cry for to be alive again, to lead us through the wilderness.

But where do we look and to whom shall we go? In America the name of Lincoln looms large as a symbol of honor and courage. In racial strife the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. still echoes in our streets, pleading for the end of hate. Do we cry out, “Lincoln, we have need of thee!”? “King, we have need of thee!”? Yet, as I think of them and of what they stood for, I am struck by the realization that both of them were silenced by assassins. The crimson tide of violence, the best voices notwithstanding, has never been stemmed since Cain drew the blood of his brother Abel.

The thundering question emblazoned in newspaper and on many of our minds is often “WHY?” And yet, as one who stands before audiences all over the world facing hard questions I am sometimes tempted to ask a question of the questioner, “Do you really want a solution or is the constant refrain ‘why’ a way of escaping the responsibility of the answer?” The Bible tells us, “He has showed you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Jesus wept over his own beloved city and said, “If only you knew the things that belonged to your peace, but now they are hid from your eyes” (Luke 19:42). Their problem was not the absence of answers, rather, the suppression of them. Our predicament, I believe, is the same. There are some clues we already have—enough to bring correctives within our reach. But do we really want the truth?

There are issues in our society that we must have the courage to address, though they are not popular and never will be, for they stare at us in the face. Our societal indicators are important because they are pointers to the malady. At the root of our cultural rot is a wanton failure to admit our contradictions, and contradiction is to reason what evil is to life. When our reasoning is contradictory, the argument breaks down. When evil invades a life, life breaks down. When hope dies in a life, life is embodied loneliness awaiting escape. We have given our children contradictory assumptions about life and are then shocked at their evil behavior and the disintegration of their lives. This cultural breakdown did not happen overnight. When moralizing reaches the front page in a society that denounces moral moorings, the aberration occurs not when one lives in keeping with that theory but when one smuggles in values while denying that values exist. In a soul-less culture the real question is not why violence or why injustice, but why do we weep at it?

In his cynical way, Malcolm Muggeridge reminded us that all new news is old news happening to new people. He was right. The parents of the first family in Eden questioned whether God had really spoken. Here autonomy squared off against the revelation of God. A value-free society was introduced. Second, the son in turn questioned whether the altar really had any worth. Secularism evicted the sacred and planted the void within. Denying the place of a moral law and thwarting the legitimacy of worship built the first cemetery at Eden. And so it is that we all agree with Muggeridge’s unhappy reminder that atrocities are not new, only the victims are. We would do well, however, to remember another piece of news, which is equally old. In C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters a senior devil is training a junior devil on how to destroy faith in God from the hearts of people: “Work on their horror of the same old thing. The horror of the same old thing is the greatest passion we have put into the human heart.” How appropriate that warning is. We ask why, while we have an aversion or horror for the same old solution. But the stories in the headlines that jar us, in an extraordinary way, bring to light the power of the same old thing.

The Bible only speaks of one remedy: the transformation of the heart by making Christ the center. He is the one who takes us from paradise lost to paradise regained, calling the Miltons among us who will likewise walk where the hurting walk and embrace as the hurting tremble. The world has need of him; the world has need of them. Those who mock the simplicity of the remedy only make evil more complex and unexplainable. Every heart has the potential for murder. Every heart needs a redeemer. That is the message of Christianity. The world took the child born to save and crucified him. But by his triumph over death he brings life to our dead souls and begins the transformation within. Emmanuel, God is with us.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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