Love is patient, love is kind. The passage is read at weddings, printed on invitations, and cross-stitched. Paul wrote it to a congregation that was suing its own members in court, going hungry while the people next to them got drunk at the Lord’s table, and ranking each other by which gift they had.
What sits on each side of it
The chapter does not begin anywhere. Paul is in the middle of an argument about spiritual gifts, and he breaks off.
Now eagerly desire the greater gifts. And yet I will show you the most excellent way.
1 Corinthians 12:31 (NIV)
Then comes the chapter everybody knows, and the moment it finishes he goes straight back to where he was.
Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy.
1 Corinthians 14:1 (NIV)
Eagerly desire, on both sides. Chapter 13 is not a poem Paul slipped into his mail. He set it in the middle of an argument about what the people in that room were doing to each other over who had the better gift.
It opens by pricing their gifts at nothing
Paul had just ranked the gifts himself, in 12:28, apostles first, then prophets, then teachers, with tongues at the bottom. Tongues is the one they argued about hardest, and the whole of chapter 14 is Paul trying to get the practice back under control.
So look at what the famous chapter does with its first three verses. Tongues of men and of angels, without love, is a gong. Prophecy, and understanding every mystery, and all knowledge, without love, is nothing. Faith enough to move a mountain, everything you own given to the poor, and then a phrase the manuscripts split on, the body given to the flames in some and given up so that I may boast in others. Either way, without love it gains nothing.
Tongues, prophecy, knowledge and faith are all on the list of gifts in 12:8-10, and he zeroes their whole scoreboard before he says a word about patience.
What was going on in the room
Somebody from Chloe’s household had told him. There were quarrels, in 1:11. There was envy and strife and division, in 3:3. Members were taking each other to court, and in 6:7 Paul asks why they would not rather be wronged. Their Lord’s Supper had become a meal where one went hungry and another was drunk, in 11:21. By the end of chapter 14 he is telling them that everything should be done decently and in order, a thing you write to people for whom it is not. Matthew 18 gets read the same way, as a warm line about small gatherings, when it was written as a procedure for a wrong nobody had settled.
That is the congregation the love chapter was posted to.
A mirror turned around
I married again in 2023, and two families that had not chosen one another became one.
The chapter was read at that wedding, the way it is read at every wedding, and I heard it the way everybody hears it, as a picture of how things were going to be. I have used it another way since, more than once, and read it as a standard for the people around me. Patient, no. Keeps no record of wrongs, certainly not. I had turned a mirror around and used it as a window, and it works badly as a window, and I was slow to notice because the reading is so familiar that it stops sounding like it is aimed at anybody.
The list is their own faults, turned over
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
1 Corinthians 13:4-5 (NIV)
Beside the letter, the items stop being general virtues. Not self-seeking answers 10:24, where Paul had told them nobody should seek his own good. Does not envy is the thing he named in 3:3. And is not proud carries the clearest fingerprint of all.
The Greek behind it is physioo, which means to be inflated. Paul uses that verb six times in this letter. Five of them are accusations: no one of you should be puffed up, some are puffed up as though he were not coming, he will test the puffed-up talk when he arrives, you are puffed up over the man nobody has dealt with, and knowledge puffs up. The sixth is this verse, where love is the thing that is not.
He is not handing them a general description of love. He is handing them a mirror with their own behavior in it, written as a list of things love does not do.
Charity, before it meant donations
The King James does not say love here. It says charity, right the way through, which is why older readers still call it the charity chapter, and why our own page for the greatest of these prints the modern word.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up
1 Corinthians 13:4 (KJV)
The Greek word is agape, and charity came into English through the Latin caritas. The change to love is an improvement for a modern reader, and it also costs something. Charity carried an obligation in it, and it was harder to mistake for a feeling about the person beside you at an altar.
What it is for
There is one more thing hiding in the frame. The verb Paul uses for eagerly desire in 12:31 and 14:1 is the same verb he uses in 13:4 for envy. Greek has one word for wanting a gift badly and for resenting the person who has it, and Paul put the chapter in the gap between them.
Which is worth knowing at a wedding, and worth more on an ordinary evening months later, when the people you did not choose are still in the house.