‘THOUGH I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’
In those words from his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul tells us what the Christian faith is. Unless you have charity, you might as well set fire to yourself: for without charity you are nothing. No, listen, this is not a figure of speech, some delectable metaphor. It is the plain truth.
But what is charity? We must sympathise with the translators of the 1611 King James Biblefor they came across a Greek word that is pretty well untranslatable: it’s agape, pronounced ‘agapay’. The translators opted for ‘charity’ which only makes us think of ‘cold as charity’; of Charles Dickens; of some international do-gooding bureaucracy such as Amnesty International, or of the charity box that comes round at the end of committee meetings. If they had gone for ‘love’, it would have been as bad, if not worse. People fall in and out of love as they fall in and out of bed – and many think it’s the same thing.
So what does agape mean? The nearest I can get to it is ‘self-giving love.’ It’s probably better to avoid attempts at definition altogether and go for practicalities. To have agape is to prefer others before yourself. It should go without saying that this is the living opposite of the modern secular gospel of self-esteem.As esteem yourself, you might as well give yourself over to be burned. Unless you really and truly do prefer the other person before yourself, you’re not just falling a bit short: you are, as St Paul says, nothing at all.
The love that is required of us is not the love which seeks personal salvation. To desire my own salvation is as selfish as desiring my neighbour’s wife. The love which God asks of us is not the love that makes us give our stuff away. Even to give one’s life – that is to be a martyr – is not enough. What is required of me is no less than the giving of my whole self. No one put this requirement more plainly than Soren Kierkegaard when he said: ‘Most people are objective towards other people and subjective towards themselves. My task is to be subjective towards others and objective towards myself.’
That is what St Paul’s word agape is all about. It is complete self-giving and nothing but self-giving. I am not called upon to be merely generous but actually to prefer others. I am not even to care about my own life – not even about my everlasting life. And if you thought St Paul was demanding, just listen to St Luke: ‘Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.’
No one is entitled to make such demands on us. No one has the right to prescribe such an absolute morality – except God.
But do I even believe in God? I need to get this clear: by belief in God, I don’t mean believing thatthere is a God. This is the position of the armchair sceptic: the man who prides himself on having an open mind. Or the woman who surveys all the options and concludes that, perhaps, yes, there is a God. Some of these people actually do research on this subject; these are the academic theologians. I have been one of these is my time and I know the occupation is worthless.
It’s no use believing that God exists. The devils believe that God exists and they tremble at the thought. Isaac Newton and the deists could do as much. You know what deism is: it’s the conclusion – all things considered – that there most probably is a thing, a force or even a being called ‘God’ who kicked off the whole shooting match. Deists will mention William Paley and his book Evidences, and it’s all useless. If you come across an academic theologian who is really clever, you will hear about St Thomas Aquinas and his Five Ways in which Thomas argued with great sophistication that among all the contingent beings, there must be a Necessary Being and this Being they call ‘God’. Worthless, again. What use is it? What’s the point in knowing that?
It is not a matter of believing that God exists but believing in God. You can believe that there is such a city as Nottingham without ever having been there. Believing in God is something like actually going to Nottingham. You might even like Nottingham when you get there: but you won’t like God when you believe in God – when, as it were, you get through to him. For God is reality, existential reality who makes impossible, irksome and offensive demands which are the very opposite of the fashionable virtues imposed upon us by modern secular society. And in that passage from his letter to the church at Corinth, St Paul spells these demands out.
In St Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, Christians are described as those ‘who have turned the world upside down’. That’s what agape is: the revaluation of all values, an ethical earthquake, a revolution. Of course, no one lives up to it – not even the early Christians in the New Testament. Not even St Paul himself who gave us this truth.
And he knew it!
St Paul had taken a hard look at himself, and he knew he was for the burning. I Corinthians 13 is an ecstatic statement of truth and at the same time it is St Paul’s confession. He states the truth more eloquently than anyone. But he knows he doesn’t live up to it. And of any good he might do, he says: ‘Not I, but Christ within me.’
I know that what I have written is the truth and I know that I don’t live up to it. I am religious in Wittgenstein’s sense when he says: ‘The ordinary man thinks of himself as half-decent; the religious man knows he is wretched.’
The only recourse for me – and for everyone who wants to know what Christianity is – is that of the crooked tax collector in St Luke’s Gospel who smites his breast and says: ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’
Me too, mate! Or, as they say in church: Amen.
