The Side of Love--September 6, 2022

The Side of Love--September 6, 2022

"Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that 'all of us possess knowledge.' Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." [1 Corinthians 8:1]

In the end, having the "right" answers will matter less than having loved in the ways Jesus has enabled us to love.

That may seem a simple and straightforward sentence, but it has powerful and far-reaching implications, especially when we are faced with choosing between embracing the Gospel in all its radical impact or staying comfortable in Respectable Religion.  There are folks who are always going to be more interested in rattling off a little of Bible verses to prove the "rightness" of their theology and their morals than in taking Jesus seriously that all people will know we are his disciples by our love for others.  And when a line is drawn and we are forced to pick a side to stand on, between "knowing the most" and "loving well," Paul the apostle here throws his chips down on the side of love, too... where he is convinced that Jesus is standing, too.

This verse marks a change of topic for Paul, and we'll get into the nitty-gritty of it in the coming days as we explore the question of food sacrificed to idols more in depth.  And, not to get ahead of ourselves, Paul is [unsurprisingly] going to have his own strong opinions on what the "right" answer is regarding eating meat that had been bought from a market that got its inventory from the local pagan temples.  But what will turn out to be even more surprising by the end of this conversation is that Paul doesn't insist that everyone has to agree with him, or think he has to demolish his opponents with his "rightness."  He is undermining the whole idea that the point of an argument is to "win" with head knowledge, and instead he is trying to show an alternative way of dealing with difference.  The followers of Jesus are learning to love--to seek the good of others, even when we do not see eye to eye--rather than to weaponize Bible verses or outgun opponents with facts we have memorized.

Now just to be clear, Paul isn't saying we are free to be sloppy in our theology or rigorous in our critical thinking.  Paul is a sharp theologian, he knows his Bible, and he is willing to be fierce in his logical argumentation.  But in a way that a lot of contemporary American Christianity has forgotten, Paul never confuses head knowledge with actual Christ-like-ness.  And Paul is convinced that God's goal in us is to make us more fully like Jesus--which is to say, to make us more fully shaped by his love--than just to get us to know certain facts or to have learned a set of answers from a catechism.  So as much as we continue to wrestle with the Scriptures, to think through our faith, and to get better at "giving an account of the hope that is within us," as another New Testament writer will say it, Paul never sees those as end-products separable from growing in love.

And maybe that points to the difference Paul describes here in this verse. On the surface, growing in love and growing in knowledge can both look similar; but the difference between them is the same difference between building something solid and inflating something with hot air.  You can fill a balloon in a matter of seconds with your own breath, while it would take all day to build a sturdy structure with wooden beams or bricks.  But the balloon can be popped with a pin in an instant, and was never really solid, while anybody who knows The Three Little Pigs will know that bricks will overcome hot air any day.

When we see Christianity as a matter solely of having "the right answers" [and then kicking out or splitting off from the people who don't have those same "right answers"] it makes us look like jerks rather than like Jesus. The folks I see shouting about their knowledge on social media, often armed with lists of Bible verses to prove their rightness on whatever issue has gotten them riled up, actually make me less interested in listening to them, exactly because they don't seem to realize how un-Christ-like their posture is.  And all too tragically and predictably, folks will say, "The world is rejecting us because we are standing for the truth," when in fact it's because their attitude reveals they don't know Jesus as well as they think they do.  Jesus himself insists that love is the hallmark we should strive to be known for; overpowering others with our knowledge and dogma turns out only to be so much hot air.

Today, the challenge in front of us is to dedicate our lives to love--in particular, to loving like Jesus.  That will mean showing kindness to folks we don't agree with, being willing to go out of our way for the benefit of others even when it is costly, and refusing to turn our relationships into arguments or contests of knowledge.  As Paul will model for us, it's good and right and fine to have our own convictions about things, and to insist on good theology and faithful wrestling with the Scriptures--and yet we can never think that our "rightness" is the endpoint of our faith.  Faith in Jesus always pushes toward Christ-like-ness, which is always going to look like deeper and greater love.  That's the goal--keep on pushing toward love.