Never Fails

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, rebuilt by Rome about a century before Paul got there, full of new money and people trying to establish themselves in a place with no old families. The church there reflected the town. They ranked each other. They took each other to court. They divided over which teacher they had been baptised by, they had a communion service where the rich ate first and the poor got nothing, and they were, by Paul's own admission in chapter one, a church that came behind in no gift.

So when Paul says the gifts will fail, cease and vanish, he is talking to people whose entire social standing inside that room was built on them. This is not a general remark about the transience of things. It is an eviction notice served on a status system. And it lands harder because Paul nowhere says the gifts are bad. He says they are temporary, which is worse for anyone using one as a foundation.

What he sets against it, he has already defined a few verses up, and the definition is unsentimental. Suffereth long. Is kind. Envieth not. Vaunteth not itself. Is not puffed up. Seeketh not her own. Thinketh no evil. Read that list back against a church full of people keeping score, and you can see exactly which line Paul wrote for whom.

Charity never faileth. The word is the one used of a flower that does not fall, or an army line that does not break. In a boom town where everything was new and nothing was settled, that was the only permanent thing on offer, and it was available to the people with no gifts at all.

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