The Fourth Sunday of the Year, C

            “The greatest of these is love” – love, greater than faith, greater than hope.  Well, then, how great love must be!  How great, indeed, love must be!  Let us look at how this is…

            St. Paul, from whose letter to the Christians at Corinth we just read, writes in another place that we Christians walk by faith, not by sight.  “We walk by faith, not by sight.”  Now, we have to be careful about what is meant by this.  Recently, I read in the news that one of the so-called theologians/Bible scholars who had been so stridently opposing Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, criticized him a lot for his seemingly overweening certainty about the accuracy of the Gospels.  This so-called Catholic scholar – in a different venue – went on to say something to the effect that faith and certainty have little to do with each other, so little in fact that the two words, “certitude” and “faith,” should not even appear on the same page.  After all, “we walk by faith, not by sight.”  We could expect, perhaps, so serious and silly an error from a child, but hardly from an adult Catholic with a number of degrees after his or her name.  Here’s how the Catechism of the Catholic Church would answer, speaking as it does from the great sense of Holy Scripture and the Tradition of the Church:  “Faith is certain.  It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie.  To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but ‘the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives’” (157). 

            So what does St. Paul mean by “we walk by faith, not by sight”?  The word “sight” here does not mean, cannot mean, reason or rationality.  The word “sight” is referring to the vision of God – beatitude – granted in eternity to those who attain to heaven, and there behold that for which we were created:  to see God “face-to-face” as it were, the vision that satisfies all human yearning and desire, perfect, complete, and timeless fulfillment and contentment.  Faith, a faculty of knowing, is our God-granted means of knowing Him in this life, being certain about the way God is through His self-revelation in Jesus Christ.  And so we walk by that knowledge, knowing that anytime, anywhere, we ask ourselves what God is like, we look at Christ to find the answer, to Him who said of Himself to His disciples, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”  And so faith is our foretaste of that vision of God that is heaven; faith is our present, right now, participation in the vision of God as we make our pilgrimage through life toward God and the eternal life He promises to those who follow Him.

            So faith is a marvel – the means of knowing God and tasting on earth the glories yet to come.  But love is greater.  Love is greater. 

            And then there is also hope.  “So faith, hope, and love remain, these three,” wrote St. Paul in today’s second reading, “but the greatest of these is love.”  And how great love must if it is greater than hope, for listen to how the Catechism describes hope:  “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness… The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of everyone; it takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude.  Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity” (1817-18). 

            O how the heart withers without hope!  How the mind aches without hope!  But Christian hope, planted in us at our baptism, lays hold of the faltering will, reminds us of the glories to be attained, and fills us with a spiritual vitality and élan that makes the whole world and all that’s in it interesting as the reality it is – a place of pilgrimage toward that which is unspeakably glorious.  Hope is the greatest antidote to that affliction now so prevalent in American society – depression.  It vanquishes that cowardly hesitancy, fills the heart with wonder, and puts iron in the will.

            If hope is so very necessary to true human living (as well as the supernatural life that is in us), then how great love must be, for it is greater than hope, greater than faith, the greatest of all.  And here my words must be few, since this love – and we are speaking of God’s love – is beyond full description.  Love, this love, is greatest because it is what all else aims for.  Did not St. John say so confidently, as one who was so very close to the heart of Jesus, that “God is Love”?  Love is greatest, because for the one who is to be saved, as he nears his eternal destination, faith dissolves into splendorous sight; hope, like a pleasant dream in the morning, fades into a massive reality far better than the hints given during sleep.  And there at the end of an earthly life transformed through living by faith, by hope and by love – there as the curtain of time lifts and eternity dawns upon a holy soul – there is God, who is Love Himself, only hinted at in our best earthly loves, those great graces of friendship, family affection, romance and the joy of the married life – the best of those then are mere shadows of that vision of God most lovely.  By faith we know this God; by hope we aspire to see Him as He is.  But it is Love, the greatest, by which we know, in eternity, that we really, truly are finally and forever at Home.