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		<td align=right valign=top width=20%><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=+1><p align=right>The Sacred Liturgy & Revisiting Father Michael's Number Five Rule for the Interior Life.<br><br><small>Lessons from cycle II of the feria, according to the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite:<br><br>I Corinthians 12: 31—13: 13.<br>Psalm 33: 2-5, 12, 22.<br>Luke 7: 31-35.</small><br><br>The Twenty-Fourth Wednesday of Ordinary Time.<br><br><small>The Memorial of Saint Robert Bellarmine, Bishop & Doctor of the Church.</small></font><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=-1><p align=right>Return to <a href="index.htm">ByzantineCatholicPriest.com</a>.</font></td>		

		<td align=right valign=top width-80%><font face="Maiandra GD"><p align=justify><img src="bellarmine.jpg" align=right hspace=15 vspace=5>10:27 AM 9/17/2014 — Today we come, in our journey through First Corinthians, to one of the most important, most popular and probably the most misunderstood passage in the entire Bible.  You hear it quite often read at weddings, in spite of the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Sacrament of Matrimony.  It's chosen so often for weddings because it repeatedly uses the word “love”; but, as so often is the case with St. Paul, things are rarely what they seem to us at first glance.  It's a glaring example of what a colossal mistake it is to allow people to choose their own readings for things when they really have no background in the exegesis of Holy Scripture.  We are not Protestants, after all; the Bible is not “what it means to me”; its truths are singular and unchanging, and if what we think it means is not what it really means, then we're wrong.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;If you were with us last Saturday, you may remember that we did a little recap of where we were at that point, and we noticed that the Epistle is divided into four main sections, and the third of these is where the Apostle is done addressing the questions the Corinthians had sent him—and we saw how ridiculous some of these were—and begins something of a <i>motu proprio,</i> if you will, lowering the boom on them about things he had heard from other sources, most notably about the many liturgical abuses that had infested the Church in Corinth; so, this whole section the Missal presents to us this week is this part of the letter in which the Apostle is laying down the regulations for liturgical assemblies, and he addresses primarily three: the proper dress of women, which for some reason the Missal neglects to present to us at Holy Mass; the proper celebration of the Eucharist, a part of which was presented in the Apostolic lesson for Monday; and in today's lesson the Apostle focuses on the value and nature of the various liturgical ministries that people are often called upon to perform during the liturgy.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;What throws everyone off, of course, is Paul's use of the word <font face="System">ἀγάπην,</font> from the root word <font face="System">ἀγάπη,</font> which does not—I'll repeat that for emphasis—does not mean “love”, in spite of the fact that we suffered through a lot of bad music at Mass in the '60s and '70s that told us it did.  It opens old wounds for me, recalling my failed attempt, in my younger years, to convince everyone that it was a bad idea to ever translate the Bible into English, and that if someone wants to read the Scriptures he should be required to learn Hebrew and Greek.  You'll be relieved to know the idea never gained any traction.  I think what really discredited me was when I ventured that it may have been reckless and unnecessary to even allow St. Jerome to translate it into Latin.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;In any case, the problem with the word <font face="System">ἀγάπη</font> is that there is no English word for it, nor a Latin word for it, for that matter.  The Vulgate translates it as <i>caritas</i>—<font face="System">ἀγάπην</font> in this passage then becomes <i>caritatem</i>—which Msgr. Knox translates as “charity,” and which every Bible you can buy today translates as “love.”  The word appears in the writings of Plutarch and Aristotle in the form of a verb, and this is what is so confusing.  We noticed last week how St. Paul's Greek is not that good, and here he takes an obscure verb and uses it as a noun, which is what makes it so hard to translate—to be fair, he's not doing it himself; he's borrowing it from the Song of Solomon, but it's equally mysterious there.  As a verb it means to choose or to prefer something, but there's no emotion or feeling involved.  Do I want to wear the striped tie or the poke-a-dot tie today?  I'll wear the striped tie because the poke-a-dot tie makes me look like a circus clown.  I've just made a choice, but there's no feeling in it, unless I'm particularly attached to that poke-a-dot tie.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;A lot of people over the years have speculated what St. Paul meant by using this word as a noun, and most of them end up assigning a meaning to it based on it's context: he lists it along with faith and hope, and there's only one theological virtue left, and that's charity or love, so they say that's what it must mean.  More thoughtful people have said that, since the verb means to prefer, the noun as used by the Apostle probably refers to that which is preferred; and, if you look at the way the word is used when it appears in the Bible for the first time, in the Song of Solomon, more specifically it seems to mean what God prefers.  And what throws everyone off is that when you use the word love to translate it, you've injected a connotation of feeling or emotion into a word that has none.  <font face="System">Άγάπη</font> is an act of the intellect, not an act of the will.  It has nothing to do with love as we understand it.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Now, before you fall out of your pew in an irreversible coma, let's fast-forward to the point.  The situation in Corinth with regard to the liturgy was very similar to the situation today in many places: you have all these people with all their little jobs, and everyone thinks that what they do is more important than what someone else is doing; so, the childrens' liturgy people think they're the most important people on the planet, and the musicians think the world revolves around them and their needs, and the “Eucharistic ministers” think that somebody made them all pope.  In the previous chapter leading up to today's lesson, the Apostle mentions the people to whom <i>he's</i> directing <i>his</i> remarks: apostles, prophets, teachers, healers, those who speak in tongues, those who distribute to the poor; the titles are different but the problem is the same.  What he's telling them is that none of them are important.  What's important is <font face="System">ἀγάπη;</font> what's important is what <i>God</i> wants; that's all that matters.  We don't celebrate the liturgy—we don't worship God at all—in order to get something out of it for ourselves; we worship God because he's God and deserves our worship.  If we get something emotional and purely human out of our worship of God, hooray for us, but it's not essential, and is certainly not the reason we worship.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;We know, because we've seen it a couple of times now, how St. Paul tends to get himself all worked up when he writes these things, even resorting to name-calling like he did in one of the readings last week.  He's a little more behaved here—probably because of the solemnity of the subject matter—but still quite forceful, and reminds the Corinthians that all the great spiritual gifts they think they have are temporary; they'll all pass away, and all that will be left in the end is what God wants.  He lapses into a little bit of an insult at the very end, when he says, “…when I was a child, I talked like a child, I had the intelligence, the thoughts of a child; since I became a man, I have outgrown childish ways” (13: 11 Knox); and, you know what he's saying there: You're all acting like children; grow up like me.  But he manages to end on an inspiring note, reminding them—and us—that, no matter how important we believe ourselves to be, it's all just a shadow of reality.  The only real liturgy is the heavenly liturgy; what we do here is just a projection of the heavenly liturgy into our world.  The Eucharist is real, make no mistake: the Blessed Sacrament is Jesus, but we can't see him as he really is; we can only see him in disguise, “a confused reflection in a mirror” (v. 12 Knox), as the Apostle puts it.  In the meantime, there are only three things, he tells us, that have any lasting meaning for us: faith, hope and … what God wants.  It's discerning and pursuing what <i>God</i> wants that allows anything else we may do to have any value at all.

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