What is Life Without Love? (Part One)

What is Life Without Love? (Part One)

A discourse on 1 Corinthians 13

Khen Lim




Jack Lemmon and Robby Benson in The Tribute, 1980 (Image source: cinema.de)

All but his son

In December 1980, playwright Bernard Slade launched a theatrical play and later a motion picture by the name ‘Tribute,’ which earned the brilliant Jack Lemmon an Oscar nomination as the leading actor. Lemmon played the role of Scottie Templeton, a shallow Broadway press agent who learns he is dying of cancer just as his twenty-year-old son Jud arrives for a visit. 

The outgoing Scottie finds that he could charm everyone he meets except his son. The movie teaches us how it was sadly obvious that Scottie forgot to get his priorities straight – his own family – and his devil-may-care lifestyle has naturally alienated his tightly-wound son who doesn’t share his father’s sense of humour and love for everyone else.

Scottie realises he has amends to make for the thirteen years of ignoring his son but he goes about in all the wrong ways. He sets him up with a date with a floozy. Then he dresses up in a chicken suit to try to recapture his son’s laughter of years gone by. None of them worked and instead, Jud lashes out at his father, calling him nothing more than “a glorified pimp and court jester.”

But then everyone else seems to adore Scottie. His boss loved him despite his character flaws. A callgirl whom he befriends feels he is her only friend. His own doctor holds a warm place in her heart for him. But the one person he has not been able to get so close to is his own son. For all the love and attention he has given to the people in his life, his son missed out on most of it. Scottie might be the life of the party but Jud, his son was largely forgotten in all the thirteen years of his past.

In an early scene, Dr Petrelli asks Scottie to step into a quiet hospital lounge for a dose of uncomfortable reality. From the glass panel separating the lounge from the rest, we see his face change. He’s no longer smiling and he is wearing that familiar “why me?” expression common to many patients who have been told their fate with cancer. Scottie then attempts escapism. He runs away from the hospital, picks up a friend along the way and hides in his home.

But reality keeps knocking on his door. Seeing that his long-estranged son is intent on spending his summer with him, he decides that what is needed is to pass to his son his own zest for life. Not surprisingly, he misses the point. Jud’s problem is his love and hate relationship with his father. He has long resented his father for walking out on his mother and he doesn’t exactly hide that from him.

Scottie portrays the kind of person some of us are familiar with, one who builds emotional moats around his castle of humanity. His is a character committed to having no commitments. He’s so busy loving the world that he is blind to totally loving those who are closest to him.

In one scene towards the end, Scottie slowly walks on to the stage. After a ruthless battle with cancer and possible death, he searches the audience looking for his son. In one of the most touching moments of the movie, Scottie yells out his son’s name and then he says this wonderful line, “Give me a kiss… right here!” and he taps his cheek slowly.

Jud appears and approaches his father. He kisses his cheek and as he does so, Scottie quickly turns and it becomes a kiss on the lips. The moment is so lovely that it is hard to put into words the feelings the audience has. Yet this is a great and powerful example of a desired love in action.

It’s easy yet it’s difficult

Loving the world in general doesn’t take much. Look around us and marvel at the many things we see, smell, listen and experience. A garden enthusiast revels at the beautiful flowers and lush shrubs. An online game lover can’t stop playing with Pokémon Go. A Facebook addict can’t put down her smartphone and all her 2,000 friends. A food lover travels around the world tasting everything he can. A motoring fan goes dizzy if someone offers him a drive in his Lambo. A movie fanatic indulges in his library collection of movies by the thousands.

But loving the people around us, particularly those who are just right under our noses, can be a major challenge. It seems we get so caught up with our surroundings but not those who love us unreservedly. If you have a teen child so engrossed in her virtual world of friends, getting her to pay some attention at her own family might be a far tougher ask than you bargain for. It’s just that in our world today, there are so many things to love that in the end, our priorities might not include those in whom we find true love.

Cover design to Noel Paul Stookey's 'There Is Love', 1969 (Image source: 45worlds.com)

In 1 Corinthians, we find in Chapter 13 one of the most beautiful and meaningful verses in the Bible. Most of us are familiar with it and that includes non-believers and this is because much of the time, we connect this chapter to weddings and anniversary celebrations. At this point, it’s a good time to have a listen to a beautiful song entitled, ‘There Is Love’ known also as the Wedding Song, written and sung by Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary fame for his good friend and fellow singer Peter Yarrow at his wedding to Mary Beth McCarthy in October 1969 at the St Mary’s Catholic Church in Willmar, Minnesota. 

YouTube has a version of it at this link and for the song sheet, download it here. In the lyrics, Paul sings of Christ’s true love in every way throughout our lives.

Although 1 Corinthians 13 is prevalently linked to such celebrations, that was never the original intent. Paul wrote this as part of his letter to the church in Corinth as a rebuke to a dysfunctional congregation because of the manner in which they have been abusing the spiritual gifts given to them. Not surprisingly then, many ignore this reasoning or understanding and as a result, many Christians might just be wondering about the real meaning behind it all.

Perhaps many of us have heard it so often that we mightn’t have spent enough deep reflection on the words and their significance. If that’s the case, we are certainly in danger of missing Paul’s true point. It is true that this chapter can be considered on its own but its full impact can only be appreciated if we interpret it in its biblical context.

Action, not emotion

In this chapter, Paul highlights the importance in distinguishing love as an action from that being an emotion. It is the kind of love that we see with our eyes, experience with our hearts and display in its fullest with all our best intentions. This is diametrically different from the emotive perspective that our culture compels us to understand in which we talk incessantly about how we feel personally. This aspect of love is so pervasive. It is everywhere and we are all shaped to believe that we only do what we want when we want only because we feel like it. Therefore if we don’t feel like it, we just don’t do it.

In fact we have taken this to such an extreme that feelings are what a liberal world uses to dispel the need for morality. Therefore rather than follow God’s commands, we are to stick to what we feel is right or wrong and then act on those feelings. What this then means is that it is possible that on a particular day, we might feel differently and change our mind about certain things. While God’s commandments are straightforward and unchanging through the ages, our feelings aren’t.

Hence if we follow Paul and accept that love must be taken as an action and not an emotion, we must then need to know what love really is, what it looks like in form when we live it out in the church. In the thirteen verses of this chapter, Paul offers to us three distinctive glimpses of which in Part One of the article series, we shall look at the first three (verses).

None greater the gifts

In verses 1 to 3, Paul says love is greater than any spiritual gift and he takes aim at the Corinthians but then he might as well be taking aim at all of us today also:

¹ If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I had the gift of prophecy and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge and if I had such faith that I could move mountains but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. ³ 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.

Here are three verses that are rich in what they reveals to us. Paul mentions here six spiritual gifts, which are (1) speaking in tongues, (2) ability to prophesy, (3) possessing of great expanse of knowledge, (4) having enormous mountain-moving faith, (5) giving charitably to those in need and even (6) giving of one’s life (as in martyrdom). 

Paul had already spoken much about the first four in the previous chapter (1 Cor 12:8-10). As for the fifth, he has mentioned it in his letter to the Romans (Rom 12:8). Although the sixth – martyrdom – isn’t quite expressively a spiritual gift, it is by association with the other five, an inclusive gift that God gives to His church.

Surprisingly, many already fail to grasp Paul’s point in verse one. Here they think the apostle is talking about his lack of eloquence or that he’s simply an inelegant speaker. Instead he is alluding to the gift of tongues. Look back at the previous chapter 12 in the same letter where Paul’s mention of the last gifts as those pertaining to tongues and their interpretation. Those same gifts are highlighted in Chapter 14 also. It makes a lot of sense therefore that he would talk about the same topic. 

Here in 13:1, Paul is referring to the gift of speaking a different language in private prayer, which varies subtly to the gift of tongues expressed in Acts 2 but that’s a topic for another article. In this case, Paul makes it very clear that no amount of speaking in tongues will ever be more important than the ability to truly love. Otherwise, we’ll all be as useful as making a lot of noise.

In the next two verses (vv2-3), Paul talks about the other five spiritual gifts. Of these, the first three – prophecy, knowledge and faith – are gifts of the Holy Spirit and yet without love, a person with any of them is nothing. In verse 3 on the other hand, Paul talks about the act of carrying out tasks that are noble. “If I gave everything I have to the poor” is an example of material sacrifice. It means we have no attachment to the things of the world but instead we do everything we can to bring comfort to those who are not as fortunate in life. 

The other defines the ultimate of all sacrifices in which we die for our faith in Christ. Martyrdom is something none others are comparable to. Simply put, we give up our lives for Christ is not something we do every day. Yet, as remarkable as all of these are, they do not hold a wick to the power of love. To Paul, without love, they do us no good because to him, the single greatest expression of spirituality is none other than love.

For the first three verses of 1 Corinthians 13, we can surmise by saying, ‘no love, no nothing.’ We can have much to say but in the end, we say nothing at all. With our knowledge, we might be somebody but in the end, we are nothing at all. We can have everything in the world and we can give all of that away yet we gain nothing in the end at all.

Love before all else

Jack Lemmon and Robby Benson in Tribute, 1980 (Image source: cineplex.com)

Spiritual gifts are important because they are from God. We are given them for a purpose. We are to use them to advance the Kingdom of God but if we do not use them by putting love in action as we conduct our gifts, then we have ultimately failed. For that reason, let us back off a bit and stop to think about how we utilise our gifts. Let us ask ourselves if we’re practising the gifts out of real love for the people or we’re dragging our feet in great reluctance. Do we feel good doing what we do and gaining pleasure from it or is it an obligation because we’re asked to do it?

Scottie had so much trouble trying to win his son back after a thirteen-year hiatus. While he could turn on the charm on his friends effortlessly, his son was a different matter. He tried so many different approaches, feeling the need to prove his love for him. But the more he did the wrong things, the greater his son’s resentment became.

Paul says love is not something you feel but an action we must carry out instead. It needs to be done sincerely. It needs to be from deep within our heart.

Charlie Brown and Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip (Image source: centralchristiandenver.org)

In one of the Peanuts cartoon strips, Lucy had her arms folded as she stood with a stern facial expression. To her side, good old Charlie Brown pled, “Lucy, you must be more loving. This world really needs love. You have to let yourself love to make this world a better place.”

Furious at what she heard, she turned around and knocked him to the ground. She screams at him, “Look, you blockhead, the world I love. It’s people I can’t stand.”