1 Corinthians 13 (NRSV)
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
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"[...] St Paul simply takes it for granted that “being known” is what underlies all our knowing, and that we do not yet know properly because our “being known” is still to some extent veiled from us in a world run by rivalry and death. And this “being known” is in fact the reception of a loving regard towards which we, like so many heliotropes, find ourselves empowered to stretch in faith and hope.
"No wonder love is the greatest of these three, because it is the coming towards us of what really and inalterably is, the regard which creates, while faith and hope are the given response from within us to what is; the given response which love calls forth, while we are “on the way.” Faith and hope are a relaxing into our being uncovered, discovered, as someone loved. But they are relaxing into love's discovery of us."
- James Alison, On Being Liked, pg. 133 (after quoting 1 Cor. 13:11-13)
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"It is as we begin to get a sense of what it is like to be loved from that space of God's giving that we begin to be empowered, and impelled, to open it up for others.
"And that, I think is actually the really difficult part of Christian morality: not what we do, but perceiving what has been done for us, becoming attentive to the one who is speaking us into being. This is because it is so much more difficult for us to allow ourselves to undergo something, to appreciate what we are finding ourselves on the inside of, and to allow ourselves to be stretched by it towards others, than it is to say “I haven’t got the time for all that ‘being loved’ stuff - just tell me what to do.”
"Yet this sinking into appreciation of being loved is no merely passive exercise. In fact it is usually through little acts of being stretched out towards others that we find ourselves becoming more aware of being loved, and the two moments, activity and undergoing, then enrich and inform each other.
"In any case, I would like to offer you an exercise to enable you to sit over time in a sense of being on the receiving end of being loved [...] [T]he famous passage from 1 Corinthians about love [...] has acquired very particular associations for us owing to its use in weddings. So it tends to get linked to a particular account of love, and a particular moment of love, neither of which are bad things. But the passage is much richer than that. [...] [R]ead this passage not, if you like, as a piece of abstract moralism defining what love is, but as an invitation to dwell in what it looks like to be undergoing the presence of One who loves you. In other words, everything we've seen about Jesus the forgiving victim coming towards us, and our sitting in his regard."
[...]
"This, all this, language of Paul's, is filling out dimensions of the regard of the Forgiving Victim in our midst. This is the space which Jesus has opened up for us so as to show us how God looks at us. It is as we find ourselves being looked at in this way, as we sink in to allowing this regard to tell us who we are, that we find ourselves impelled from within, contagiously, to do the same for others."
- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pp. 556-57, 561
[Source of the quotes, and for further analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany4c/]
I also highly recommend James Alison's video "Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" which is focused on the Gospel reading (Luke 4:21-30): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLyod15Cik