The Essence of God
In his letter to the Christians of Corinth 2000 years ago, St. Paul had to manage all sorts of issues ranging from people favoring this preacher or that, Paul or Apollos . . . reducing the community to a collection of fan clubs. Or it was an issue as to whether women should or should not wear veils in church. Or whether a Christian should sue another Christian. Or whether a young fellow should be living with his stepmother!! Or whether one should bother to get married considering that the world might end next month. Or whether a Gentile Christian should with a clear conscience eat meat sacrificed at pagan temples and thereby scandalize Jewish Christians who saw such meat as spiritually contaminated. Paul in such a context of discord could hardly have time to preach the Gospel, the essential Good News of God’s grace which implied Christians rising beyond such divisions and petty interests and becoming like God, mutually gracious themselves. Despite his preaching, ordinary Christians remained as antagonistic toward each other as the non-Christians among whom they lived.
Possibly exhausted by having to come up with answers to so many often petty disputes – in chapter 13 Paul takes a deep breath and says in effect, “Look, there is a better way to deal with all this controversy.” And he launches into that beautiful soliloquy: “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I am nothing.” Paul then speaks of love as patient, kind, not jealous, not pompous, not rude, not brooding over injury . . . He says love never fails, never wearies, outlasts all other gifts of the Spirit combined. And so Paul hopes that if only such a love can prevail, all the issues that divide the community of Corinth will be resolved.
But this being Trinity Sunday, the festival of God, I think there is something hidden in Paul’s homily that reveals something radical, essential about God. I mean if God inspired Paul to utter those words, maybe he was trying to reveal in those very words something about himself. Take the opening lines. May not God be saying there: “If I am conversant in human and angelic tongues (voluble in infinite ways) but do not have love, look upon me as a lot of noise, a loud mouth, a clashing of cymbals – pay no attention to me. And if I can prophesy and know all things, am omnipotent, supreme in all such ways, can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing, nobody, am simply not there and you can go on living in what is in effect an empty universe. In other words, if love is not of my essence as God, a love that is patient, kind, not pompous, not inflated, not rude, not quick tempered, does not brood . . . a love that never fails, then don’t call me God.”
And God continues in Paul’s words, “True, when the human race was like a child in its development, I myself as God was envisioned in childish ways, like a spook in the night, like the Good Witch of the North one minute and Wicked Witch of the West the next. In other words, mankind had me talking like a child (all tantrum), thinking as a child, reasoning as a child, but with the arrival of Jesus and his Gospel of grace, I have put aside all these childish fantasies. Indeed back then you only saw me indistinctly as in a distorted mirror. Now you can see me face to face – in the face, the gestures, the self-giving of Christ – as absolute and irreversible Love! — without which I am not God.”