Copious ink has been spilt over the different Greek words for love in the New Testament. There’s eros, which refers to romantic love. Philia describes affection like you might feel for a friend or sibling; in fact, we often translate philia as “brotherly love,” hence Philadelphia is literally “The City of Brotherly Love.” The exceedingly rare storge refers to the love of a parent for a child, and then there’s the undisputed champion of the biblical words for love: agape, unconditional love. Whenever the New Testament authors talk about God’s love for humanity, it’s always agape, a perfect and eternal love.

Because 1 Corinthians 13 is all part of Paul’s plea for the Corinthians to love one another better, I started to second guess myself on which word the apostle uses. “After all,” I reasoned, “the more communal philia makes sense in this context since Paul is talking to siblings in Christ.” But when I looked back at the Greek, there it was staring me in the face: agape.

Think of the implication here:
Paul talks about how we should love one another,
but in doing so, he uses a word which describes God’s infinite love for us,
so Paul is really telling the Corinthians (and, by extension, us)
to have the same sort of love for one another which God has for us.

That’s a pretty tall order,
and I can’t help but feel a little ill-equipped to love like God loves.

I can’t make a world and entrust it to others.
I can’t breathe life into people
or grant them my spirit’s constant presence.
While I may try to love without condition,
I’m still prone to selfishness and anger and frustration.
I still feel a range of other emotions,
some of them justified but many of them not.
Sometimes I need to cut people off as an act of self-care,
and though I do forgive, it sometimes takes me a while.
And here Paul is calling all of us, in spite of our flaws,
to imitate the love of God,
to use these imperfect hearts
to express perfect compassion.
And though we will surely fall short in this
because we are still human and still make mistakes,
we get this assurance:
simply longing to imitate God’s love
is to glimpse it for a moment
and be reshaped to look just a little more like it.

As Thomas Merton once said in prayer,
I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

Through Jesus, we glimpse perfect love,
through Paul’s words, we’re reminded to strive for perfect love,
and yet, though we may fall short in expressing this agape,
we know we have received it,
so let us never stop striving to show it,
knowing it is day by day reshaping us
to love like God loves.