Quniquagesima
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today is the final Sunday in the short season of Septuagesima, a time intent on preparing us for the great and holy fast of Lent, which begins this Wednesday. As a means of preparing us for this season, we are spending this brief season considering the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. Faith, we have said, is the foundation and center of Christianity. It is by faith alone that we receive the benefits of Christ. It is by faith alone that we have hope for the life to come. And it is by faith alone that we come to know the love of Christ. And hope is also a crucial part of the Christian life, for it is hope in Christ which gives us a reason to get up in the morning. Your life struggles are not the end. Christ has overcome all things. He gives you His Word of promise to grant you a living hope in this truth. But now we come to the third of the three great Christian virtues—namely, love. And so, it is fitting that we heard these words of the Apostle this morning:
And now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Yes, the Apostle is clear: Love is greater than faith, as backwards as this may sound to our Lutheran sensibilities. But we must not allow cliché Lutheranism to contradict and overpower sacred Scripture. In fact, our Lutheran confessions are clear on this point of love’s supremacy. In the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, our churches teach that:
Paul, in this passage, properly speaks about love toward one’s neighbor and indicates that love is the greatest, because it has the most fruit. Faith and hope have to do only with God. But love has infinite offices outward toward humanity. Indeed, let us grant to the adversaries that love toward God and our neighbor is the greatest virtue, because the chief commandment is this: “You shall love the Lord your God” (Matthew 22:37). But how will they conclude from this that love justifies? They say, “The greatest virtue justifies.” By no means! For just as the greatest, or first, Law does not justify, so also the Law’s greatest virtue does not justify. But the virtue that justifies receives Christ, which brings to us Christ’s merits, by which we receive grace and peace from God. This virtue is faith (Ap. V 104-106).
If you didn’t follow the intricacies of that argument, I will summarize it now. The Apostle indeed says that love is the greatest virtue because it bears the most fruit and is most beneficial to our neighbor. However, the fact that love is the greatest virtue does not mean that love justifies. Only faith justifies because it alone receives the merits of Christ. Now that we have established the critical point that love does not make us right with God—faith alone can do that—I will now endeavor to show you that: Christ makes love the greatest virtue.
The Apostles writes this of love in today’s Epistle:
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:4-8a).
This passage, and, indeed, the entirety of today’s Epistle reading, has become an exceedingly popular choice for a wedding text. I suspect this has something to do with the trend in modern Bible translations to use the word “love” rather than the old KJV’s use of the word “charity”, which has changed the popular understanding of the passage to a romanticized, idealistic conception of “love” which has little basis in reality. For who among us has a marriage, or any kind of relationship, which is characterized by the perfect love articulated so beautifully by the Apostle? No, the love upon which our marriages are built often looks quite the opposite of this, with much forgiveness and grace needed to counteract the sin and lack of true love. The truth is, we cannot love according to the Apostle’s standards. Whether in our marriages and homes, our places of employment, or anywhere else, our love does not measure up to this great standard.
Therefore, we must be directed to a love outside ourselves—a love which exceeds what we are capable of. Thus, Christ says to His disciples in today’s Gospel:
“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again” (Luke 18:31-33).
This, dear friends in Christ, is perfect love which suffers long and is kind, which does not seek its own, is not provoked, and thinks no evil. This is love which rejoices in the truth, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and which never ends. This is a love which does justify. Therefore, our faith and hope are predicated on love—but not upon our love. Faith and hope are predicated upon Christ’s love for us. His love accomplishes for us what our faith and hope alone never can. On our own, we have nothing more than “a hope and a prayer” (in the common sense of that phrase). Which is to say, our faith and hope are grounded in the love which Christ has for us, and apart from Christ’s love, we have nothing.
For our Lord Jesus Christ looks upon you with the same eyes with which He saw blind Bartimaeus on the roadside of Jericho. He sees you as one who, apart from the Holy Spirit, is blind, dead, and an enemy of God. Your many sins and your failure to truly love has made you hopeless, helpless, and miserable. But Christ has seen your wretched state. His great love for you caused Him to bear your sins unto the cross, to accomplish there what you are unable to accomplish on your own. He has atoned for your sins, appeased the wrath of God, and justified you before the Father. His love alone has accomplished this. And like blind Bartimaeus, He has opened your eyes to truly see His great and perfect love for you. And having been justified by faith in Him, He now grants you to begin to reflect His love to others.
And so it is that Christ’s love is certainly greater than our faith and hope, and so in this sense love is the greatest. But even applied to human love, the Apostles’ words that love is the greatest still are true. For in our love toward others, Christ is at work to sanctify and bless that love. Though you love imperfectly, still Christ is at work to bring good and beautiful things from it. Like the moon, our love will never shine as brightly as the source. For we are not the sun [or Son], and our sins will always prevent us from loving purely like Christ on this side of glory. But still, this fact should not stop us from trying. For the moon’s light always reflects some measure of the sun’s light. Even when it is at its darkest at the new moon, the light of the sun is reflected. So too does Christ shine through you. His love is visible even through your imperfect loving of others. And though your love will never justify another, still Christ’s Spirit is at work through you in real and tangible ways.
Therefore, dear friends in Christ, let us strive to cultivate these virtues of faith, hope, and love, for this is the essence of the Christian life. But let us be clear—these virtues are not cultivated and grown by human effort. For as we have heard these last weeks, it is God who calls men to labor in His vineyard. We receive His gifts by grace through faith alone. It is the Holy Spirit who sows the Word of God into our hearts, cultivating the living hope which He desires to give all men. And it is Christ whose perfect love on Calvary’s cross earns our redemption and sanctifies our lives of love toward others. And so, if we desire to cultivate these virtues of faith, hope, and love, we must not look to ourselves. Rather, we must commit ourselves to spiritual disciplines centered around the Means of Grace. For apart from the Word and Sacraments, the Holy Spirit will not deal with us and work these virtues in us (Smalcald Articles III, VIII, 10).
The upcoming season of Lent will offer ample opportunities in our midweek services for further reflection on the cultivation of virtue through spiritual disciples. But for now, I will simply exhort you that as the coming Lenten season invites us to spiritually join Christ in “going up to Jerusalem” (Luke 18:31), let us use this coming holy season as a time to commit ourselves more deeply to prayer and to hearing and reading God’s Word that we may come to Easter strengthened in faith, hope, and love. For in God’s Word alone we receive the benefits of Christ’s perfect love for us and are strengthened in Christian virtue for life in this world as we await the final Easter of our Lord’s appearing in glory to judge the living and the dead when our faith and hope will give way to sight and the love of Christ will be all in all. God grant it.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
