Never Fails

Paul wrote today's verse to a church that was very proud of its gifts: "Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away."

Corinth was a port city that Rome had rebuilt about a century before Paul arrived. It was full of new money and of people trying to make a name for themselves in a place with no old families. The church was like the town. Its members ranked one another. They took each other to court. They split into groups over which teacher they followed and who had baptized them. At their communion meal the rich went ahead with their own supper, so that "one is hungry, and another is drunken." Yet in Paul's own words in chapter one, this was a church that came "behind in no gift."

So when Paul says the gifts will fail, cease and vanish, he is speaking to people whose whole standing in that room rested on those gifts. He is not making a general remark about how all things pass away. He is serving an eviction notice on their ranking system. It hits even harder because Paul never says the gifts are bad. He says they are temporary, and that is worse news for anyone using a gift as a foundation.

What he sets against those gifts he has already described a few verses earlier, and the description is not soft: "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Love "seeketh not her own" and "thinketh no evil." Read that list next to a church full of people keeping score, and you can see which line Paul wrote for whom.

Charity is the old English word for love, and "Charity never faileth." The Greek word behind "faileth" is the same one James uses for a flower that falls, so Paul is saying that love is the one flower that never drops. In a boom town where everything was new and nothing was settled, love was the only thing on offer that would last. And it was open to everyone in that church, even the people with no gifts at all, just as it is open to you today.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 45 is In the Procession (2 Corinthians 2:14).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna