Readings:
1 Corinthians 12: 31-13:13
Luke 7:31-35
Reflection:
There is a temptation in faith to want clarity too quickly. To name what is right, what is wrong, who is faithful and who is not. Our dualistic thinking feeds into this. We want the lines to be clean, the measures obvious. Yet the scriptures today seem less interested in certainty, and more interested in how we see.
Paul speaks of love not as a feeling, nor even as an action alone, but as a way of being in the world. Patient. Kind. Not self-seeking. Able to endure. This kind of love is not loud or impressive. It does not rush to judgement. It stays. It notices. It refuses to reduce people to their worst moment or their most inconvenient difference.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus names the restlessness of those who cannot be satisfied, those who criticised John for being too austere and Jesus for being too free. Too much fasting. Too much feasting. Too much silence. Too much joy. The problem was not the style, it was the inability to recognise wisdom when it did not arrive in the expected form.
What connects these readings is not behaviour, but posture. Love, as Paul describes it, creates space. It resists the urge to categorise too quickly. It allows complexity. It trusts that God may be at work in ways that do not match our preference or expectations.
We see this tension play out in ordinary life all the time. In communities, workplaces, families, even within ourselves. We can be quick to label, irresponsible, difficult, disengaged, unfaithful, when what we are really encountering is difference. Or pain, or a wisdom that looks unfamiliar.
Love, in this deeper sense, is not passive. It is disciplined. It asks us to stay open when we would rather withdraw. To listen when we would rather explain. To remain curious when judgement feels easier.
Perhaps the invitation today is to notice where you are being asked to soften your gaze. To allow love, patient, enduring, and quietly courageous to shape how you see others, and how you see yourself.
Not because it is easy.
But because in the end, love is what remains.
Sr Karen Englebretsen CP, Cross and Passion Sisters. blessed to be a spiritual care worker in the homeless sector in Melbourne.