In previous postings when I explored 1 Corinthians and Romans, I discovered that Paul was saying that agape is not only a gift from God to help us, but it is also a witness. Agape witnesses that true spiritual power is on the side of patience, kindness, justice and truth -- and that it helps people overcome envy, conceit, self-righteousness, judgmentalness, and all other results of ego-centric behavior.
So when we put those two together, we see that the spiritual gift of agape is God’s way of helping us turn away from selfish, ego-centric actions. Paul was showing a new way for Christians to develop spiritually. When we read how Paul explained agape in 1 Corinthians 13, then we know we are dealing with the basis for a new faith discipline that motivates us to look for a spiritual training that will help us live fully through the power of God.
I think Paul was comparing selfish, ego-centric behavior with childishness. That's what he meant when he said, “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, reason like a child, think like a child. But now that I have become a man, I’ve put an end to childish things.” (1 Cor. 13:11 Common English Bible) So in our struggle to get beyond being controlled by our egos, we need agape to help us become fully mature in our faith development; otherwise, we remain childishly stunted in our growth in faith. That’s why I concluded my last posting by realizing that a follower of Jesus needs to stop identifying with her or his ego; and instead, we need to do as Jesus did by building our identity from the eternal essence we find within.
If we don’t do that, then we are challenged by Paul’s warning that we remain childishly stunted. So the first step in faith growth is to admit that we have to get beyond all forms of envy, conceit, self-righteousness and behavior that is judgmental toward all other people. Otherwise, we get stuck in a faith that is childishly stunted as long as we wrongly think that it's good to feel self-righteous and judgmental toward anyone. That’s why the attitudes that Jesus criticized the most were self-righteousness and judgmentalness.
Of course, those attitudes persist as such a major problem among people claiming to be Christian because it's so easy to deny being self-righteous and judgmental. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking religion is suppose to make people feel self-righteous and give them the right to be judgmental. We fool ourselves when we suffer under the illusion that our opinions have to be right and anyone who disagrees with us has to be completely wrong (maybe even evil). That's the great temptation that Jesus was trying to get people to overcome.
But unfortunately, we see that happening all over America during these sad days when Christianity is so strongly divided. So as long as Christians keep thinking they have to protect Christianity by struggling against Christians with different opinions, then we will continue to function with childishly stunted faith. Especially when these struggles get dragged into politics, all of that is terribly destructive.
Paul’s point was faith development must help us be patient, kind, just, and truthful. That is why we need to let agape open us up and work in our life. He was also pointing out that the reverse is just as true: people prove they are not open to agape working in their life -- if they remain so controlled by ego identity as to be self-righteous, judgmental, mean-spirited, and bigoted.
That realization is why I went back to the Gospel of John and looked anew at the teachings of Jesus about agape in chapters 13-17. There I found Jesus instructing his disciples to share the power of agape with each other, just as he had showed them what that spiritual power could do in human life and in relationships. To give the strongest meaning possible to this sharing, he told them that everyone will know they are his disciples because they live by the power of agape (John 13:35). That is why he even put it in the form of a new commandment (13:34). He identified so strongly with the spiritual presence of agape that he could refer to it as “my agape” -- as when he said, “Remain in my agape. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my agape, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his agape. … No one has greater agape than to give up one’s life for one’s friends.” (15:9-13)
(The meaning is so much clearer when “agape” is not translated into some weak English word, but is left “agape” in the original Greek, as it was meant to be.) Then we see that Jesus was talking about a special spiritual power that he was making sure they could receive as a gift from God to help them.
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