On Love and Heroism

1 Corinthians 13           Luke 4: 16-30

Paul to the Corinthian and John’s Epistle have put this word ‘love’ at the centre of Christian faith. It has become our core concept.

What struck me when I read today’s reading from 1 Corinthians 13 was the things that St Paul used to contrast with the way of love… words (impressive words, the tongues of mortals and angels), knowledge (the prophetic powers of understanding mysteries and all knowledge), and faith (to move mountains) even heroic self-sacrifice or philanthropy (giving away all my possession, giving up my body in martyrdom).

In each of these things there is something good, words can be good, knowledge can be good, faith and heroic charity can be good, but what they don’t do is commit me as a person to another person. They might impress other people but they can leave me at a distance from others.

I notice that once St Paul talks about love he gets psychologically complicated … he talks about patience and the dangers of envy and boasting and resentment and so on. He makes me think about the complex business of how what I do and say impacts on what the people around me do and say. He launches into a poem on what it takes to do life together.

For him this is the deepest reality in the world. The rest is just peripheral… the performances and the knowledge are not ultimately what makes the universe go round… even if our fragile egos are easily sucked into thinking that is so.

This summer I read a novel by the celebrated Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkos called Barracuda. It’s about a boy who gets into swimming and loves it. But early on in his life he decides that he wants to be the best in the world, to go to the Olympics for Australia. It’s bound up with getting a scholarship to go from a working class background to an expensive school and his need to fit into that difficult environment. Swimming gives him a place in that strange environment. Swimming is his superpower and he is totally focussed on his dream. And then at the Olympic qualifying meet he loses his race and he snaps. He completely embarrasses himself. He has to be dragged out of the pool kicking and screaming in front of cameras. The rest of the book is about living with that. He spirals into a very antisocial period where he alienates all his old friends and hides away. This really start to change again for him when he goes on a trip with his mother to visit her family home where her dad is dying. It’s all very complicated and his mother had an abusive religious background. But while he’s there he initiates a friendship with a cousin who has a disability due to a serious accident. In short he learns from this friendship that he can become a good person and that is not the same as being the best at anything.

The novel is a powerful lesson on the priority of love over heroism.

We live in a society that promotes heroism over love. It does so with the language of ‘dream’. Everyone is constantly telling us to follow our dream.

It’s important to notice the difference between love and heroism of this kind. One begins in your head, with your ideas. The other begins in the world you are actually in with the people you are thrown up against. In the age of social media that may be a hard distinction to understand right. One (heroism) is simple and seeks to overcome all obstacles with its absolute demands, the other is messy and knows no clear way to an outcome. Love is messy, because, guess what, I am not in control. Not just accidently out of control, but essentially. To pursue love is to abandon control of precisely those things that matter most. Unlike heroism, love is not goal driven, because as St Paul says, love never ends. Love is the end to which all things move. (that’s a variation on John’s epistle – God is love)

What that means is that to redeem us, to heal us, to save us, God moves us into and through the messiness of relationships and anything that wants to bulldoze its way past that in pursuit of some heroic dream is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The thing with having two or more bible readings thrown up for Sunday is that what you see in one influences what you see in the other.

So when I turn to the gospel reading I see Jesus going back home to start his ministry with the people God gave him to start of with – the people of Nazareth. He goes back to the messiness of those childhood relationships, he turns up on the Sabbath. He plays a set role. He reads the reading for the day. There are two things he adds to the event (according to Luke). Firstly, he cuts the reading off mid-way. He reads the announcement of God’s jubilee of liberation… and then he stops with the words ‘the day of the Lord’s favour’ literally mid-sentence and when everyone is expecting him to finish the verse he puts the bible down. Anyone know what the rest of the verse says, ‘the day of vengeance of our God’. So the first thing he adds is good news of a God without vengeance on enemies. The second thing he does is offer almost no commentary at all. He does not speak in the tongues of angels. He does not elaborate on the mysteries of the universe, he gives no secret code. He doesn’t even heroically give his life, although as we will see, he comes a hair’s breadth away of having it taken from him. He gives them one simple sentence of commentary.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This is my anointing he says, this liberation of captives, opening blind eyes, bringing good news to the poor. This is my calling. It’s not just a great idea to reflect on. It starts right now. Today! That’s powerful. I’m guessing there was a stunned silence.

A lot of translations seem to think the people liked his style. But the Greek of Luke is much more ambiguous. Literally it reads they were ‘struck’ by his words of mercy. And you can translate that as being struck in a positive sense or a negative. Maybe it shocked them. Maybe it was a bit unsettling to hear the text cut short like that… to hear of a God of mercy and liberation who is merciful to the political other, the ones who deserve vengeance. As I said the sentence is ambiguous.

I think a more likely translation is to assume that they were struck in the sense of being ‘shocked’ by his words of mercy. I think that makes much better sense than assuming that the mood of the crowd changed so quickly. Immediately they are threatened. Is this not Joseph’s son? Jesus interprets that as a challenge too. He knows they are threatened. He knows he has touched a nerve in his hometown. He knows that in choosing to start off in the messiness of his childhood relationships, he has ended up being a prophet. He also knows that it has to do with the way he stopped short while reading Isaiah. Because he goes on to remind them of all the people from gentile nations, (the widow of Zarephath, Naaman the Syrian) the one’s they believed deserved God’s vengeance. He reminds them that these people, according to their own stories, had been recipients of divine mercy and grace.

So there’s a consistent theme through the whole story. Don’t muck with our need for vengeance. Don’t muck with our sense of self-righteousness. And in the end they cast him out, to a hill, outside the town (see the symbolism). And Jesus simply left without becoming, that day, the scapegoat for their fury. He walked through them and away. He took no vengeance. Offered no defence. Just departed. This is just the beginning.

The love of God comes to town, but isn’t wanted. It touches nerves and fears.

God’s love immerses us in the local… it is always about relationships rather than projects… as the Gospel show us, it never lets us become parochial. God is not a hometown protector. God is the love that always moves from the local towards the universal, towards universal reconciliation.

Let’s finish with at profound sense of here and now – IBPC, 30th Jan 2022, these people, our challenges, a year of opportunities to serve one another and our neighbours, a year with looming periods of self-isolation – with many potentially much more isolated than us.

“Today these scriptures (these promises of good news and liberation) are fulfilled in our hearing.”