Love that won’t be buried

We tend to file these two chapters in different drawers. First Corinthians 13 is the wedding chapter – love is patient, love is kind – read aloud over couples who will spend the rest of their lives discovering how hard those eight words are. First Corinthians 15 is the funeral chapter – if the dead are not raised, eat and drink, for tomorrow we die; but Christ has indeed been raised, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. One gets read at the start of a marriage. The other at the end of a life.

But Paul wrote them eleven verses apart, to the same fractured church, in one breath of argument. Chapter 14 sits between them, sorting out worship. Pull that practical chapter out and 13 and 15 stand shoulder to shoulder, and you see what Paul was actually building. Chapter 13 tells the Corinthians how to live with each other – love that does not envy, does not boast, keeps no account of wrongs. Chapter 15 tells them why it will hold up: because the body that loves like that is going to be raised.

Day four of a series is where the theory has to get its hands dirty. We have heard that love is the greatest, and that Christ is risen. Today the question is the plain one Paul’s whole letter drives toward: so what do I do on Tuesday? And his answer ties the two chapters into a single knot – love now, with everything it costs, because the resurrection means none of it is wasted.

There was a woman I knew of who spent eleven years caring for her mother through dementia. By the last two years her mother no longer knew her name. She fed her, turned her, sang to her the hymns the older woman had once sung in church, washed her, and was met most mornings by a blank and frightened face that took her for a stranger.

People said the things people say. At least she’s comfortable. You’re a saint. And once, from someone who meant no harm: Does she even know you’re there? The daughter said she’d stopped asking that question, because the answer didn’t change what love asked of her that day. But she admitted, quietly, that there were nights the whole thing felt like pouring water into sand. Eleven years of patience that the one person it was for could not remember by morning. If this is all there is, she said, then I have been very kind to no purpose.

That sentence is exactly the one Paul is answering. If this is all there is – if the perishable stays perishable, if what is sown in weakness simply rots – then love poured into someone who cannot hold it really is water into sand. Kenos. Empty. Paul does not pretend the labor is light. He plants it in the only ground where it cannot drain away.

A former persecutor of the church who met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul founded the Corinthian congregation around AD 50 and wrote 1 Corinthians a few years later to address its divisions, its pride in spiritual gifts, and a creeping denial of bodily resurrection. He had himself buried a great deal of labor that seemed to come to nothing – beatings, imprisonments, churches that broke his heart – which is part of why his insistence that ‘your labor in the Lord is not in vain’ carries the weight it does. He was not theorizing about wasted effort. He was staking his exhausted life on the resurrection making it count.