Five-minute study · Day 154 · 1 Corinthians 13
1 Corinthians 13:4
A word worth stopping on: suffers long μακροθυμέω makrothymeo
Paul is writing to a church addicted to spiritual fireworks. The Corinthians are obsessed with tongues, prophecy, and knowledge. They rank each other by gifting. Paul responds with a chapter that strips every spiritual gift down to one question: does it produce love? Then he defines love with fifteen verbs. The first is makrothymeo. The King James translates it 'suffereth long.' The word literally means 'long-tempered.' It is the exact opposite of short-tempered. And Paul puts it first in the list because everything else he says about love depends on this one capacity.
Word study: suffers long
- Greek
- μακροθυμέω
- Pronounced
- makrothymeo
- Strong's
- G3114
- Definition
- To be long-tempered, to have patience, to bear with, to endure patiently. From makros (long, far) and thymos (passion, anger, wrath). To have a long fuse. To be slow to boil.
Makrothymeo is a compound verb: makros (long) plus thymos (passion, wrath, heat). The word describes a person whose emotional fuse is long, who takes a long time to reach the ignition point. Its antonym in Greek literature is oxythymia, from oxys (sharp, quick) and thymos: short-tempered, quick to anger, easily detonated.
Richard Trench's 'Synonyms of the New Testament' draws a critical distinction between makrothymia (longsuffering) and hypomonē (patience/endurance). Hypomonē is patience with circumstances, with suffering, with difficult situations. Makrothymia is patience with difficult people. The distinction matters for 1 Corinthians 13. Paul is writing to a community tearing itself apart over spiritual gifts. The patience he prescribes is relational. It is aimed at the person in the next pew who irritates you, who speaks in tongues louder than necessary, who claims a higher gift than yours.
The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) traces makrothymia through the Septuagint, where it translates the Hebrew erek appayim ('long of nostrils,' the Hebrew idiom for patience; cf. Exodus 34:6, where God describes himself as 'longsuffering'). The image is visceral: anger rises through the nostrils (Hebrew af, 'nose,' also means 'anger'). A person with long nostrils takes a long time for the anger to travel from chest to expression. God's nostrils are very long.
Paul places makrothymeo first in his list of love's characteristics for a reason. In a community where people are jockeying for position, evaluating each other's spiritual performance, and dividing into factions (1 Corinthians 1:12), the first requirement of love is the capacity to endure the other person without detonating. Every other quality on the list, kindness, humility, selflessness, requires the fuse to be long enough for those qualities to activate. Short-tempered love is a contradiction. The fuse has to hold.
Historical context · Mid-50s AD, Corinth
A Church on Fire with the Wrong Things
Corinth in the mid-first century was a Roman colony rebuilt by Julius Caesar in 44 BC after lying in ruins for a century following its destruction by Lucius Mummius in 146 BC. The new Corinth was a commercial center populated by Roman freedmen, Greek merchants, and a transient population drawn by the city's two ports. The Isthmian Games, held every two years near Corinth, brought athletes and spectators from across the Mediterranean. The city was competitive, status-conscious, and economically stratified.
The Corinthian church reflected its city. The problems Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians include divisions over leadership (chapters 1-4), sexual immorality (chapter 5), lawsuits between believers (chapter 6), disputes about marriage, food, and worship practices (chapters 7-11), and a chaotic worship assembly where everyone spoke at once (chapter 14). The community was gifted and dysfunctional simultaneously.
1 Corinthians 12-14 forms a single argument. Chapter 12 establishes that spiritual gifts are diverse and distributed by the same Spirit. Chapter 14 provides practical instructions for orderly worship. Chapter 13 sits between them, and its placement is deliberate. Paul interrupts his discussion of gifts to define the one thing without which all gifts are worthless. Prophecy without love is noise. Tongues without love are clanging metal. Knowledge without love inflates.
Archaeological excavations at Corinth, conducted by the American School of Classical Studies since 1896, have uncovered the bema (judgment seat) where Paul appeared before Gallio (Acts 18:12-17), the Erastus inscription confirming a city official by that name (Romans 16:23), and the remains of shops, temples, and public buildings that reveal the city's commercial character. The agora (marketplace) sat at the heart of the city, and the metaphors of competition and status that run through Paul's letter make sense in a city where economic rank determined social standing. Makrothymia, the capacity to endure people without boiling over, was a counter-cultural demand in a city built on asserting yourself.
For reflection
Makrothymia is patience with people, specifically. Hypomonē handles difficult circumstances. Makrothymia handles difficult humans. Paul puts it first because a community that cannot endure its own members will never get to kindness, humility, or selflessness. Those qualities require time, and time requires a long fuse. Think about the person who irritates you most consistently. The coworker. The family member. The person at church. Makrothymia is the space between their provocation and your reaction. How long is that space right now? Five seconds? Five milliseconds?
God describes himself as erek appayim, 'long of nostrils.' The anger takes a long time to travel. The image is not that God never gets angry. The image is that the distance between cause and eruption is vast. That distance is where mercy lives.
Sources: Trench, 'Synonyms of the NT'; TDNT