What is love?

Paul wrote these lines to a church that had plenty of gifts and very little peace. The Corinthians spoke in tongues and prophesied, and they argued about who was greatest. So Paul stopped to show them “the most excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31). Without love, he said, the most dazzling gift is only “a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). Then he described love in fifteen short lines: seven things it does, and eight things it does not do.

When John Chrysostom preached on these verses, he saw one portrait, not a list. Paul, he said, was painting love’s “matchless beauty”, and he asked his hearers to notice “the art of the painter”. The lines guard each other. Patience without kindness can become a way to punish. Patience and kindness can turn showy, so Paul adds that love does not boast. The later lines grow out of the earlier ones, in what Chrysostom called “this golden chain”.

None of it is a checklist to pass. Chrysostom noticed that Paul calls even our good deeds gifts, “not meaning us to lose heart, but showing that in every case we need God’s help.” Only One has kept every line. Christ left “the new commandment concerning love, which also Himself fulfilled in deed.” Each page below takes one line: what it means, how Chrysostom read it, and what keeping it looks like in an ordinary week.