Agape is Patient and Kind

The mystery of agape power is not found in the English word “love.” That is one of the conclusions I’ve reached during my years of looking into what agape meant for Greek-speaking Christians of the First Century. As I’ve mentioned in previous postings below this one, when St. Paul and some of his Greek helpers started their work, they needed to find Greek words to explain what they were bringing from the Jewish culture. I think they had an especially difficult time trying to find a word to express a spiritual gift that was helping them open up to the power of God.

None of the usual words seemed to work to express what was almost inexpressible, so either they had to find a new word, or they had to change the meaning of an old word from the past. It seems like they began using the word “agape” because that word was not in common usage anymore in the Greek cities where they were starting churches. (Even though the verb "agapao" did appear a mere 18 times in the entire Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, it was not in common usage in the few synagogs where that translation was available). So they took the uncommon noun, "agape," and gave it a special role in the spiritual life of their new communities, thus transforming it's meaning.

But over the centuries since then, that all was lost. Only in the early 20th Century did a slight recovery process start for the word "agape." But I think a mistake was made by claiming that “agape” was a common word for “love.” Over the last few decades, when "agape" got confused with "love," we have lost most of the meaning behind what St. Paul was doing.


While I’ve investigated the meaning behind the strange thing St. Paul was doing in 1 Cor. 13, I ran across a couple of scholars who challenged the traditional understanding of the way words were used in those verses. Those old interpretations made it seem like St. Paul was taking a verb and making it a noun. Even though we today have gotten so used to people turning verbs into nouns, that was rarely done in the ancient world. So the strangeness of that chapter extended even to the use of the noun ‘agape’ instead of the usual verb ‘agapao.’

In the Hebrew scriptures or in any other Greek or Hebrew literature, there are actually very few instances of people not using verbs as verbs but instead turning them into nouns. What I’m getting at is the difference between “love” and “loving” (or “to love”). Most of the time in the ancient world people talked about “loving” or called on people “to love” someone. That’s the usual use of love as a verb. But it would have been unusual for a writing to use “love” as a something -- for example, to say that “love is patient and is kind.” Or as it is in the King James version: “Charity suffereth long and is kind.” (vs. 4) You would almost never find such a strange expression; instead, you might see “when you are loving someone, you should be patient with them.” Or an alternative might be, “When you are loving one another, you learn how to be patient.” Such examples correctly use the verb. But who would turn “loving” into a noun and say, “Love is patient”?

It is because of such instances that I began to question how St. Paul would have wanted those sentences in 1 Cor. 13 to be read. I began to see that St. Paul was not turning a verb into a noun. I began to wonder: What if he weren’t talking about love at all; but instead, he was illustrating what the strange noun “agape” meant? I started searching for what agape meant to him. I’m using this blog to report on the results of my searching.

For example, what did he mean by saying, “Agape is patient”? 
What we would like it to mean is: through the gift of agape, God was giving us the way to help us live patiently. But … what a strange way to say that. By just using three words it sounds like he’s saying, “Whatever agape is, it is patient.” Actually, that sounds like he means that there is something about agape that is patient. What did that mean?

Why didn’t he say, “Agape gives us patience” -- or “through agape we become patient”? Was he actually meaning, “Agape [itself] is patient” -- or “Agape is [patience itself]”? Did his next phrase mean “Agape is [kindness itself]”? So what would it mean if he went on to imply, “Agape [itself] is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude”? Was he implying the conclusion that with agape active within us, we are patient and kind and not envious nor boastful nor arrogant nor rude? So was he also implying that if we aren’t patient and kind; therefore, we prove that we have not adequately let agape work in our lives -- or if we are envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, then also we prove that we have not adequately let agape work in our lives?

That would be a hard proof, because we all know how difficult it is in this modern world, with all the pressures and frustrations, to be patient and kind with all people. That seems to be why St. Paul then starts Chapter 14 by calling his readers to aspire to agape. He said that like he knew how extremely difficult it is to let the ‘agape of God’ pour into the center of our being in such a strong, conclusive way that we are transformed until we are patient and kind. I think he was saying that we have to really work at it, spiritually, to aspire to what agape can bring to us.

To be truly, profoundly patient calls for a sense of deep, inner peace and sense of wellbeing. That seems to be what he meant when he wrote the following to the Philippians:

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:4-7 NRSV)

That’s why near the end of Corinthians he concludes that we can let develop within us just such an attitude of peacefulness when we learn to “Let all your things be done with agape.” (1 Cor. 16:14 King James Version) It is that spiritual power of agape that brings to the center of our being the peace that brings patience, the strength that brings kindness, the wisdom that rejoices in the truth, the compassion that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”