Ordered love.

A Sermon for Quinquagesima

March 2, 2025 at Holy Communion

1 Corinthians 13

“Love is not irritable or resentful” (1 Corinthians 13:5). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

The first autobiography of the spiritual life—and perhaps still the greatest—was written by a North African clergyman with a a checkered past. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine tells the story of his youthful lawlessness: gang involvement, and promiscuity, and generally breaking his poor Christian mother’s heart.

Before he did ultimately become a Christian himself, he thought he knew everything there was to know about love. He opens the third chapter of his memoir by saying, “To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I didn’t really love yet, but I was in love with love. I had a profound need, but I hated myself for needing. I sought what I might love, because I was in love with loving.” He felt a spiritual hunger, and seeking to satisfy it in all the wrong places, he devoured everything the world had to give him, both experiences and other people.

Here we have a problem, as Christians. We know that the quintessential Christian virtue is love. We’ve heard all about it in our Epistle reading. Love is the “more excellent way,” the path only criterion by which anyone will ultimately be judged, the only gift that will endure for eternity. But young, unruly Saint Augustine loved. He loved everyone and everything—but for him, that meant using them and throwing them away.

“Well, that’s not really love,” we’ll say. You’re right. It’s not. Augustine himself says it. But Augustine’s unruly behaviour had something to do with love. He was overcome with passionate desire, and passionate desire is usually considered one aspect of love. So we respond, “He must not have been loving rightly, then.” And that’s exactly it.

In fact, in his maturity, and as his memoir turned in a philosophical direction, he reflected that all actions and thoughts, every motion of the human soul, is motivated by love. He said that “my weight is my love; my love carries me wherever I go.” What makes the difference is not whether we love—because everything everyone does is in some way motivated by love—but how and what we love. He explained this as an issue of “ordering” our loves correctly. Do we love the highest things—above all, God—more than lower things? We get ourselves into trouble when we love less important things more that more important things, or when we love things wrongly by using them to satisfy desires they were not meant to satisfy.

For example, you’ve probably heard someone say at some point, “Food doesn’t fix feelings.” That insight is about disordered way we try to love ourselves. We love having emotional stability, which is a genuine good, but we mix it up with our love for food and end up harming ourselves instead of helping. We have a disordered relationship to our love for food and for self.

This is just an example. The point is that just because we are motivated by love does not mean that everything is as it should be.

So when Saint Paul tells us all about love, he doesn’t just tell us to love one another and move on, as if love were self-explanatory. His concern is for genuine, well-ordered love, and so he describes its characteristics, so that we can distinguish it from all the other attitudes we call “love” because they have a seed of love in them. “Love is patient,” he says (1 Corinthians 13:4). “Love is kind” (v 4). Love “bears all things”, “hopes”, and ”endures” (v 7). Love delights in truth (v 6). He also describes what love is not. It is not arrogant (v 4). It is not rude (v 5). It is not irritable (v 5). It is not resentful (v 5).

He’s telling us that, so long as there is irritability mixed in with our love, it’s not real, genuine, or complete. It’s not love in the highest sense. So long as resentment cankers our relationship with someone, we cannot fully and correctly claim to love that person. Of course we get irritable and resentful with people we “love” all the time, knowing that there is an undercurrent of love that remains. But still St Paul’s point stands: this is a contradiction of the love we claim to have. The fact that we have an underlying “love” does not justify or excuse the failure to be kind.

In fact, we are in great danger when we presume that the “love” we have for our families and friends is so untouchable that treating them badly becomes excusable, “just a momentary blip.” Friendships and marriages can and often do crumble under the accumulated weight of conflicts unresolved, harsh words unapologized for, habitual fibs unconfessed, and old wrongs dredged up too many times.

So Paul’s “chapter on love” is not just a celebration of love that belongs, for example, at a wedding, but a challenge to purify our love which belongs on this Sunday before Lent. If what Saint Paul says about love makes us smile, there’s a certain reasonableness in that, much the same way that we might smile to hear a story of heroism and virtue—but if we take it seriously for ourselves, the reaction should rather be beating our breast and crying out for mercy. There is a direct through-line from today’s Epistle to what we will hear on Ash Wednesday: “Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber. Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, Spare your people, O Lord, and make not your heritage a reproach” (Joel 2:15–17).

We fast, we undertake disciplines of prayer and charity, because our love is not yet what it is supposed to be. Our love is there, but it’s a disorderly mess so much of the time. As Paul also said, the day will come when everything partial about our love will pass away, but we will not be blessed until that day arrives, so we seek it with all the zeal we can muster.