Christian Maturity: The Sign is Love
by Fr. David M. Knight
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Twenty-Fourth Week of the Year
Lectionary 445
1 Cor 12:31—13:13/Lk 7:31-35
1Corinthians 12:31 to 13:13 is more than a “hymn to love.” It is Paul’s practical description of the “end time.” In this chapter, Paul’s focus is Christian maturity. Paul began his letter saying that he could not speak to the Corinthians as “spiritual people,” but rather as “people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.” The sign of this was the divisions among them: factions, individualism at Eucharist, and competition to excel others in “spiritual gifts.” Paul says this is childish:
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (See 1Corinthians 2:6-16 to 3:1-4; 11:18-34; 12:1-31.)
The sign of maturity is love; and specifically, love that devotes itself to “building up” the Church.
So... since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for building up the church.... When you come together... let all things be done for building up. (See 1Corinthians 3:10; 10:23; 14:4,12,26.)
This is love that looks to the “end time,” when all things in heaven and on earth will be “gathered up” “in Christ. At the end, all mysteries are one mystery, which Paul images as a “holy temple,” or as the human race brought to “maturity in Christ,” or as Christ himself brought to “full stature”:
The gifts he gave were… for building up the body of Christ, until we all become one in faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, and form that perfect man who is Christ come to full stature. (See Ephesians 2:21; 4:1-16; 1Corinthians 3:10-16; 2Corinthians 5:1; Colossians 1:28.)
This is the goal of creation; therefore the love that seeks it is the essential of Christian living. Without it, whatever we have or do is “nothing.”
This love is unbounded: “There is no limit to love’s forbearance, trust, hope, to its power to endure.”
It is the eternal perfection of that “life to the full” that Jesus came to give and that we will enter into at the end: “When the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.... There are in the end three things that last: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.”
The height of Christian growth and maturity is to abandon oneself totally to desiring only the realization of the “end time,” and to striving, as a faithful steward of Christ’s kingship, to advance it by “building up” the whole human race in unity, peace and love. This is what we ask for when we pray: “Give us this day our [future] Bread, and forgive us” in the total, universal, mutual forgiveness of the “wedding banquet of the Lamb.”
Luke 7:31-35: When people reject Christ; or Christianity no matter how it is presented, the bottom line is, they are rejecting love.
Initiative: Strive for “the more excellent way”: live to love.
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
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