FIRST CORINTHIANS 13 is probably one of the best-known chapters in the New Testament. I suspect that many Christians, if you asked them what the Bible says about love, would point to that chapter, even if they couldn’t tell you what it says. Go into a Christian bookstore (assuming you can still find one of those!) and you’ll find various keepsakes with Paul’s words printed on them, to set on a shelf or mantel or hang on a wall. And it’s a common text for weddings, lending some biblical weight to the romantic event.

But do we understand what Paul was trying to say? Surely, he didn’t just pause in the middle of a letter to a fractious church and write a sonnet to his girlfriend. He wrote those words for a reason, and to understand that reason, we have to pay attention to the context.

Last time, I suggested a little experiment: read First Corinthians 12 and 14, skipping chapter 13. Except for a few words in the middle, it reads as one continuous answer to a question the Corinthians asked about spiritual gifts. Paul could have just written chapter 14 as his answer: What’s the most important spiritual gift? Prophecy is, and let me tell you why.

He already knew, though, how contentious the issue of spiritual gifts was in that church, which was why he had to write chapter 12 first. His metaphor of the church as one body in Christ, a body that has and needs many parts, was meant to promote unity in their diversity, mutual respect instead of the implicit competitive values that allowed some people to feel superior but left others feeling inferior. Without the qualification given in chapter 12, the hierarchy of spiritual superiority in Corinth wouldn’t go away; it would just shift directions, putting people with the gift of prophecy at the top of the heap instead of those who spoke in tongues.

Even better: just to make sure he got his point across, Paul wrote a whole chapter on the supremacy of love. Indeed, I would argue that the way he arranges chapters 12, 13, and 14 highlights the unloving behavior of the Corinthians toward each other.

OFTEN, BIBLICAL TEXTS don’t just convey meaning through the words chosen; the way the words are structured and arranged in relationship to each other is meaningful too. Visualize someone ascending a mountain, reaching the peak, then descending down the other side. In a sense, Bible passages can do that too. They can begin with a series of ideas or themes; let’s label them A, B, and C. These themes climb one side of the mountain until they reach a peak at a central idea which we can call D. Then the themes come down the other side in reverse order: C, then B, then A. The structure, thematically, is A-B-C-D-C-B-A. And typically, the point of such a structure is to draw attention to D, to whatever theme was at the peak.

We can see this in First Corinthians. Theme A, at the base of the mountain, is spiritual gifts. That’s the subject of chapters 12 and 14. Theme B is the superiority of love, the primacy of love over spiritual gifts. We see Paul transitioning into and out of that theme with the final words of chapter 12 and the opening words of chapter 14. Listen to how he says it:

Now eagerly desire the greater gifts. And yet I will show you the most excellent way. … Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy. (12:31, 14:1)

Did you hear the transition from A to B and then from B back to A, using similar wording? It’s in that context that chapter 13 begins and ends with the theme of the superiority of love in verses 1 to 3 and 8 to 12, culminating with these well-known words at the end of the chapter: “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). “The greatest of these is love” is theme B in a nutshell.

That leaves themes C and D. They are contained in the part of chapter 13 that gets quoted on mugs and posters. It’s Paul’s description of love:

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. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Cor 13:4-7)

It’s possible to read this as all one theme, not two: Let me tell you what love is all about. But I think of it as two closely related themes instead. Theme C is what love does, and the peak theme, D, is what love doesn’t do. I say “what love does” instead of “what love is” because all of Paul’s descriptors here are actually verbs, some of which don’t translate well into English. Thus, when he says at the outset that love is “patient” and “kind,” those are verbs in the Greek, not adjectives, and we don’t have equivalent verbs in English.

Why does it matter to separate these famous words into dos and don’ts? I would read it this way: when Paul describes what love doesn’t do, he’s also describing what the Corinthians, in fact, were doing. He wrote chapter 13 in a way that highlighted the unloving way they were treating each other.

He then embedded that central theme in what they should do instead, which was in turn embedded in a presentation of the superiority of love over spiritual gifts. Metaphorically, to focus only on the question of gifts is to stay at the ground level. If the Corinthians really wanted to scale the heights spiritually, they would need to learn love, and begin with recognizing their own unloving behavior.

SO IT IS with anyone who wants to learn from what Paul writes about love. It’s not just for the bride and groom, but for all believers. Whatever values we bring with us into the church whereby people are ranked as more spiritual or less, our top priority is love. And to learn the true meaning of love, we need to own up to the ways we have not been loving. Let’s see what Paul has to say.