“The partial vanishes when wholeness comes”

(1 Corinthians 13:10)

Recently I ran out of second sheets for making carbon copies of my typewritten letters. The clerk at the stationery store where I usually go to purchase paper and refills for my ballpoint pen informed me that the store no longer stocked tissue-thin second sheets. “Most people nowadays,” she said (a bit condescendingly to an out-of-date old fogy, I thought), “most people nowadays use copy machines like Xerox for their duplicating. We don’t have any second sheets for making carbon copies.”

I have a Mississippi friend who is an inveterate coffee drinker. For years he has traveled the whole state extensively. Recently he was bemoaning the fact that so many of the small towns along the highways are drying up, and shops and stores, particularly the restaurants and cafes where he used to stop for a cup of coffee, are all going out of business, and he was having a dickens of a time trying to find a place to get a decent cup of coffee.

No doubt you have been surprised on occasion by how some things that you had come to take for granted would always be there at your beck and call have ceased to be or mysteriously passed away.

Saint Paul, in evaluating with his friends of the Corinthian church some of their most highly prized spiritual gifts, sadly observed that with the passage of time, most of those spiritual gifts would vanish and pass away. He mentions three that would be outmoded, superseded, and supplanted: knowledge, prophecy, and speaking with tongues.

How quickly knowledge of one age fades away. Who knows this better than those of us who received our education before the age of computers engulfed us? Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, taught his pupils this lesson by reminding them that they could never step into the same river twice, for the waters flowed on. So is it with the rapidly flowing stream of knowledge.

Prophecy, the capacity of one person to speak for God in that person’s own age and generation — as crucial and indispensable a function as that can be — is nevertheless to cease, for the predictive elements in prophecy are ultimately all fulfilled, and the declarative elements in prophecy are ultimate­ly unnecessary when history has finally run its course.

Speaking with tongues, either ecstatic speech or oratory, finally ceases. Even the eloquence of a Winston Churchill or a Franklin Roosevelt or a Ronald Reagan, our “great communicator,” finally becomes dated and out­moded, losing its fire and power to persuade.

Man’s disposition to see all things in flux and nothing as permanent or enduring is the most devastating temper of our times.

But Saint Paul says in this same paragraph of his Corinthian letter that there are three things that remain permanent in this world and the next: faith, hope, and love, and that the greatest of these is love. “Love will never come to an end,” says Paul. “Prophecies will cease; tongues of ecstasy will fall silent; knowledge will vanish. For our knowledge and our prophecy alike are partial, and the partial vanishes when wholeness comes” (1 Cor. 13:8-10). So Saint Paul urged his Christian friends in Corinth to hold on to love, time and eternity’s greatest imperishable reality.

However, we need to be sure we understand the terms Saint Paul is using, lest we put our confidence of permanency in a very perishable commodity. Communication with words alone is a tricky business.

I heard an engineer remark that he and others of his profession had sat in a meeting and listened to specifications and directions for a contractual design. He came away from the meeting, made some calculations based on the words he had heard there — or thought he had heard — and then, the very next day, called a fellow engineer in another city who had been at the same meeting. He discovered in a few moments’ conversation that the same words heard by himself and his friend had conveyed entirely different meanings to each of them.

When we listen to Paul’s discussion of love, what does that word mean to us? The Greek word for love in Paul’s day had come to refer almost wholly to sexual passion. That old Greek word for love, eros, lives in the word erotic. The Greeks had done to their word for love very much what TV and X-rated movies and Hugh Hefner and Larry Flint and the Madison Avenue soap salesmen have done to our word love. In our time the word love has become so sexed-up and sentimentalized, so perfumed and debauched, that it doesn’t represent anything permanent. It fades faster than an early spring flower.

First-century Christians had almost to coin a new word for the love — that lasting commodity, the imperishable, perfect reality — Paul describes in 1 Cor. 13. “What was needed was a word that would express the Christian experience of the love of God himself, the love that is outpoured even on the loveless and the unlovable, the love that sent God’s son to suffer and die with us and for us,” Kenneth J. Foreman says in The Layman’s Bible Commentary.

And the Greek word for this love, agape, whatever it may be in theory or story, is unintelligible without the deed of love. Frank Chamberlin Porter, in his remarkable book The Mind of Christ in Paul, says that in 1 Cor. 13 Paul is describing in a spiritual portrait the features of the divine love as revealed in Jesus Christ, though the name of Jesus is never used.

And in the 13th chapter of John’s Gospel the deed of divine love in Jesus Christ is chronicled. Listen:

Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.

And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him;

Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God;

He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself.

After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.

And for us, the permanent and not passing quality, this complete and not partial reality, designated love, the love of God in Christ to be understood and experienced by people today, requires not only their hearing of it, but also seeing, feeling, and witnessing its fresh incarnation.

I took the elevator at the eleventh floor of a hospital. At the eighth floor the elevator stopped, and two young men in shirt sleeves got on. One was tall and talked with a sharp, clear, Midwestern, nasal tone to his shorter com­panion who responded in a mumbled Mississippi or Tennessee accent. I thought the mumbler was saying, “I’m going down.” He was standing right beside me, and there seemed to be no significance in the statement “I’m going down” (if that was what he was saying), for we were all “going down” on that elevator. His companion made no comment. But a heavy, middle-aged woman across the elevator who could see the young man’s face as he spoke later told us, after the accident occurred, that she realized he meant something different when he said, “I’m going down.” For in just a few seconds, after he mumbled, the elevator stopped at the sixth floor, and as the door opened automatically, the young man lurched forward and fell prostrate across the threshold, cutting his mouth and loosening his teeth. It later developed that the two young men had just given blood. The shorter one began to feel faint and knew it. He gave verbal warning to his companion. He was really asking for help. But neither his friend nor any of the others on the crowded elevator grasped his meaning, only the woman who was looking straight into his face and saw his contorted expressions. She understood that his words “I’m going down” meant “I’m going to faint.”

What hope the world is taking now that the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations are beginning to meet face to face, eyeball to eyeball, to exchange, not only words and challenges and bluffs and threats and ideas, but also emotions common to every human heart, emotions like hope and fear, and pride and ambition and anxiety and — is it too much to expect? — love.

Dr. Halford E. Luccock, in his book Preaching Values in the Epistles of Paul, says Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic scientist, urged “`world strugglers’ to love one another as the only hope of the world. All will pass away except love.” Luccock describes Oppenheimer closing an address with these words: “This cannot be an easy life. We shall have a rugged time of it to keep our minds open and to keep them deep, to keep our sense of beauty, and our ability to make it, and our occasional ability to see it, in places remote and strange and unfamiliar. But this is, as I see it, the condition of man; and in this condition we can help, because we can love one another.”

What is needful for every one of us is that we make the conscious choice to live every moment of our lives under the dominant control of the perfect and the permanent rather than under the spell of that which is partial and imperfect. This means that we must make room for the mind of Christ to take over, for the love of God in Christ Jesus to motivate all we say and do.

For let us be well assured that whatever apparent triumphs and successes we may achieve under the spell of the partial, imperfect, and evil motives will soon perish, while the smallest and most insignificant act motivated by the love of God such as Jesus Christ revealed shall remain steadfast forever.