Wednesday of the
Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
(I Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 7:31-35)
A preacher once described the difficulty in preaching about
love. He said something like, “The only
place where we are sure what love means
is in tennis. And there it means ‘nothing
at all.’” St. Paul has some difficulty
in speaking about love. In his famous “ode
to love” making up the first reading today he makes no attempt to define it. Rather he gives a phenomenological
description telling us first the importance of love, then its similarities and
dissimilarities, and finally its uniqueness.
St. Thomas Aquinas affirmed that love animates the other
virtues. This means, as Paul illustrates
in the text, that faith and generosity will come to nothing if love does not
shape their ends. Love saves faith from
being ideology and makes it the way to eternal life. Similarly, it rescues generosity from wastefulness
and allows us to resemble God, our Father.
Paul never equates God with love like the First Letter of
John, but he seems on the verge of this conclusion when he writes that of the
three enduring virtues, love is the greatest.
Evidently, even in the Beatific Vision there will be need of faith,
probably because God is an incomprehensible mystery, always beyond our
understanding. We may wonder about the
need for hope if in everlasting life the human person has fulfilled her or his
goal. In any case, love is certainly the
greatest theological virtue because it alone participates in God’s supreme
activity.
