“Love is patient” appears in calligraphy on wedding programs, stitched into samplers, painted above a kitchen doorway. Paul first wrote it to a church in Corinth whose members were taking each other to court, meeting for the Lord’s Supper while one went hungry and another got drunk, and comparing their spiritual gifts. It was written to a quarrelling church long before anyone read it to a couple, and Paul set it inside his argument about those gifts as “a most excellent way.”
Before it and after it
The chapter opens right after a sentence about gifts, quoted here, like most of this page, from the World English Bible.
But earnestly desire the best gifts. Moreover, I show a most excellent way to you.
1 Corinthians 12:31 (WEB)
When the chapter is over, Paul picks up exactly where he left off. The first verse of chapter 14 reads, “Follow after love and earnestly desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.” Earnestly desire, on both sides. Chapter 13 sits inside a discussion about who in the church had which gift and what it was worth.
Its first three verses go straight at that discussion. Speaking “with the languages of men and of angels” without love is “sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.” Prophecy, every mystery, all knowledge, and “all faith, so as to remove mountains,” without love, and Paul says, “I am nothing.” Languages, prophecy, knowledge and faith all appear on the list of gifts a chapter earlier, in 12:8-10. Paul takes the most admired things in the congregation and says that the person who has them without love counts for nothing.
Chloe’s report
Paul had heard from people of Chloe’s household, a woman his readers knew, that “there are contentions among you,” in the first chapter. By the third he is naming “jealousy, strife, and factions.” In chapter 6 he writes, “brother goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers!” and asks, “Why not rather be wronged?” In chapter 11, when they gathered for the Lord’s Supper, “one is hungry, and another is drunken,” and Paul tells them flatly that “it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat.”
They were ranking each other too. “The eye can’t tell the hand, ‘I have no need for you,'” Paul writes in 12:21, to a church where some were already putting “them to shame who don’t have enough,” as he said in 11:22. Earlier, in 4:7, he had asked people who thought their gifts set them above the rest, “who makes you different?”
Their faults, turned inside out
Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (WEB)
Read beside the rest of the letter, the list stops sounding general. People suing each other are being told about patience. People full of jealousy hear “doesn’t envy.” The ones who ate their own supper first while others went hungry hear “doesn’t seek its own way,” which is the same thing Paul had already told them in 10:24: “Let no one seek his own, but each one his neighbor’s good.”
The King James, which says charity all the way through the chapter, keeps a phrase that makes the pattern easy to see.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
1 Corinthians 13:4 (KJV)
In that translation the phrase appears six times in this letter, once as “puffeth up.” Five of them are aimed at the Corinthians themselves. “Now some are puffed up, as though I would not come to you,” he writes in 4:18, and in 5:2, “ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned.” In 8:1 it is a warning: “Knowledge puffeth up.” The sixth is 13:4, where love is the thing that is not.
There is one more thread. The verb behind “earnestly desire” in 12:31 and 14:1 is the same Greek verb, zēloō, that stands behind “envy” in 13:4. 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.
With your own name in it
Paul aimed this chapter at a congregation that was failing one another, so it works first as a mirror for the person reading it. Read as a list of what the other person should be doing, it stops working.
That is why it still belongs at a wedding. Paul wrote it for people who were failing to practice love with each other, and a marriage is two people who will need that same patience on ordinary evenings, long after the flowers are gone. Paul himself writes the opening verses in the first person: “If I speak… If I have… If I give.” Jeremiah 29:11 is printed on mugs and graduation cards too, lifted out of a letter written to exiles in Babylon, and both verses read better once you know who first received them.
Try reading 13:4-7 aloud with your own name where it says love, so that your name is patient and your name is kind, and notice the first line that is not true of you yet. That line is the one to “follow after,” the way Paul tells the Corinthians to follow after love, and it is where to start with the people under your own roof.