“And now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
Just as Jesus sums up the teaching of the law and the prophets in the two great commandments to love God wholly and to love our neighbor as ourselves, so the Apostle Paul here summarizes the Christian life as one of faith, hope, and love. These pronouncements help us put first things first, and avoid distractions, however “spiritual” they may be.
In their zeal for a higher spirituality, the Christians in Corinth had become disordered. Wishing to identify with their heroes in the faith, they fell into factionalism. Wishing for higher understanding, they connived at gross immorality and treated with supercilious condescension other believers whose opinions differed from theirs. Wishing for spectacular gifts, they forgot that the purpose of any gift is to build up the body of Christ. Paul must correct their excesses and immaturity, and he does so by redirecting their zeal toward what matters most: faith, hope, and love.
These three “virtues” are consistently linked in Paul’s thinking. For example, he tells the Thessalonians that, as he prays for them, he remembers their “work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope” in the Lord Jesus (I Thess. 1.3). He gives thanks for the Christians in Colossae because of their “faith in Christ Jesus” and their “love ... for the saints,” and because of “the hope laid up in heaven” for them (Col. 1.3-4). He makes similar statements elsewhere, linking these three virtues (Galatians 5.5-6, Romans 5.1-5).
However, even among these three fundamentals of the Christian life, there is a hierarchy to which we must attend. Our faith will ultimately be turned to sight, and our hope will be made reality, but love will never end, and for that reason it is the greatest of the three. Paul can thus conclude his instructions by saying, “Let all that you do be done in love” (I Cor. 16.14).
Charles Swadley