1 Corinthians 13:3

1 Corinthians 13:3. And though I bestow [1] all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give (‘deliver up') my body to be burned [2] a practice not unknown even to heathenism, as witness Sutteeism in India, happily now abolished. In the early Church, martyrdom was held in such honour as at length to be fanatically coveted. Yet without love, this will avail me nothing.

[1] The word primarily means to ‘feed by little morsels,' as one does children; and Stanley, in illustration of this, quotes from Coleridge a striking MS. note on the passage as follows: “The true and most significant sense is, ‘Though I dole away in morsels all my property or estates.' Who that has witnessed the almsgiving in a Catholic monastery or the court of a Sicilian bishop's or archbishop's palace, where immense revenues are syringed away in farthings to herds of beggars, but must feel the force of the apostle's half satirical word ψωμίσω ?” But since the same word is used in Romans 12:20, where no such idea can be intended, we must not put into the translation of it more than the word “bestow” conveys.

[2] The true reading here is obviously that of the received text. But there is another reading differing from it only by a single letter, for which there is much stronger external evidence, but the sense of which is intolerable “though I give my body that I may glory.” And we note it here as one example of a class of readings in which common sense ought to outweigh the strongest external evidence. We may not be able to explain how such readings came to receive such support as they have; but we are not on that account to be forced into the acceptance of violent readings. Tischendort and Meyer justly regard it as a copyist's blunder, repeated by successive copyists in moments of haste or weariness.

But what is the love meant here? Certainly, not mere natural benevolence, even in its most disinterested form. Fundamentally, it can only be what Israel was familiar with even from the days of their wilderness journeyings: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself.” Of this which in itself was matter of obligation, as the all-comprehensive law of every reasonable creature God promised that under the new covenant He would put it in their inward ports and write it in their heart (Jeremiah 31:33). Essentially it must have dwelt in all who were “circumcised in heart;” but in its peculiarly evangelical sense it was not under the ancient economy the characteristic term for saintship, which “the fear of the Lord” was. It was reserved for the lips of Love Incarnate to introduce and inaugurate this term, when in His interview with Nicodemus He told the astonished ruler that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever beheveth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life;” and he who drank the deepest of his Master's spirit echoes this in the inspiring words, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” This love takes possession of our hearts by being shed abroad in them by the Holy Ghost “given unto us” (Romans 5:5), whereupon “we love Him because He first loved us;” and from Him this love flows down upon our fellow-men; for “this commandment we have from Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God: he that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).

Such then, is the love here opened up in its varied outgoings towards our fellow-men, and held forth as indispensable, incomparable, eternal.