If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:3 (NLT)
For a good deal of my adult life, I have admired active and activist Christians. I did this first from afar, reading books by and about women and men like Mother Theresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and William Wilberforce. I wondered what it would take to become like Shane Claiborne or Gary Haugen. Then I started admiring up close, watching people in Saint John, NB like my colleagues at Outflow, the community outreach team at RiverCross Church, and the Sisters of Charity. These people give me an example to imitate.
I was also attracted to specific themes in scripture. I enjoyed reading about the least of these in Matthew 25 and Micah’s call that seeking justice was how to obey God. The passages resonated with me every time I read them and always made me want to be more active. I read in them commands to follow and a worthwhileness to belief. It is fair to say that without such passages the crisis of faith of my mid-twenties would have seen the end of religion in my life.
This is all to point out why I find 1 Corinthians 13:3 such an irritant to my belief in God. My mind and heart were always turned off by this verse. How could someone give everything to the poor or sacrifice her body and not have love? In my mind, passages like Matthew 25:31-46 were the very definition of love and they said that love was doing stuff like giving everything to the poor and sacrificing your body. When I read 1 Corinthians 13:3, I thought that the best we could say was that it was a logical contradiction. But…
