The greatest of these

Come to the end of the most famous lines ever written about love, the lines read at half the weddings in the world, and notice what Paul does once the soaring is done. He has said love is patient and kind, that it bears all things and believes all things and never fails. And now, at the close, he sets three survivors on the table like the last three figures standing after everything else has been cleared away. Faith. Hope. Love. Three things that remain. And then he does something almost startling: he ranks them. The greatest of these, he says, is love. Sit with why. Faith will one day become sight, the believing swallowed up in seeing the One believed in. Hope will be swallowed up in having, every longing finally answered. But love does not get retired when the others are fulfilled. Love simply goes on, into the life of the world to come, the one thing that outlasts even faith and hope themselves. Colossians reaches for a different picture, a wardrobe: put on love over everything else, it says, the outer garment that holds the whole outfit together.

After all the rebuilding, the recovered beliefs, the hard-won hope, the slow relearning of how to trust, reorientation comes finally to rest on the one thing that outlasts the rest. Love. Faith will turn to sight; hope will be swallowed up in having; but love simply goes on. Paul ranks it greatest of the three, and Colossians says to pull it on over everything else like a coat. Here is the warning hidden in the comfort. It is dangerously possible to rebuild a faith centered on being right, on having finally sorted out the correct positions, on winning the argument you lost in your old life. A reconstructed certainty can be a hard and loveless thing. Do not let the center of your rebuilt life be rightness. Let it be love. You can be right about a great many things and still have missed the very center, because love is what remains, and love is what was greatest all along, even when you were too busy being correct to notice.