1 Corinthians 13 in context

1 Corinthians 13 is Paul’s portrait of love, and many people first hear it at a wedding. Paul wrote it, though, for a church full of quarrels, to people who knew a great deal about God and were struggling to love one another. If you have come to this chapter because you want to love someone better, or because you wonder whether your own love is enough, you are much like the people who first heard it read aloud.

The chapter moves in three steps. Verses 1–3 say that nothing counts without love. Verses 4–7 describe what love does. Verses 8–13 promise that love will outlast everything else, even faith and hope.

Who was Paul writing to?

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians from Ephesus (1 Corinthians 16:8), most likely in the mid-50s CE, to a congregation he had founded in Corinth, a busy Roman city in Greece. It is one of the seven letters that scholars agree Paul wrote himself, and one of the most practical, because the Corinthian church had so many troubles.

Paul had heard from “Chloe’s household” that the church was splitting into parties, with members saying “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” “I follow Cephas,” and “I follow Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:11–12). Members were suing one another (1 Corinthians 6:7). Some boasted of their knowledge, and Paul answered them that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Even at the Lord’s Supper, the meal that should have joined them together, “One is hungry, and another is drunken” (1 Corinthians 11:21).

Chapters 12–14 deal with spiritual gifts, such as prophecy and speaking in tongues, which some Corinthians treated as badges of status. In chapter 12 Paul says that every gift comes from the same Spirit “for the profit of all” and that “you are the body of Christ, and members individually” (1 Corinthians 12:7, 27). He ends chapter 12 with “I show a most excellent way to you” (1 Corinthians 12:31) and begins chapter 14 with “Follow after love” (1 Corinthians 14:1). Chapter 13, between them, is that most excellent way. Paul wrote it for people who were hurting one another in church, long before anyone read it at a wedding.

What does 1 Corinthians 13:1–3 mean?

If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:1–3, NRSVUE

Paul begins with the very things the Corinthians prized: tongues, prophecy, knowledge, and faith. Then he adds the most costly acts of devotion he can imagine, giving away everything and handing over his own body. (Some ancient manuscripts read “hand over my body to be burned,” as the NRSVUE footnote notes.) Without love, each of these becomes noise, or nothing, or no gain. Paul still values the gifts, and in chapter 14 he urges the Corinthians to “earnestly desire spiritual gifts” (1 Corinthians 14:1). A gift used without love, though, has lost its purpose.

These verses can be searching to read. Most of us have prayed, served, or given for mixed reasons, wanting to be seen or wanting to be right. Paul tells the truth about that so that he can turn the Corinthians back toward the one thing that gives every gift its worth. And the love he describes comes first from God: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:5).

What does “love is patient, love is kind” mean?

This is the most beloved passage in the chapter:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7, NRSVUE

Paul’s word for love is agape, the Greek word the New Testament uses for the self-giving love God shows in Christ. In Greek, Paul describes love almost entirely with verbs: love waits patiently, acts kindly, does not envy, does not boast. In this passage love is something a person does, day after day, in ordinary moments.

Read beside the rest of the letter, nearly every line answers a Corinthian trouble. “Not envious” answers the “jealousy, strife, and factions” Paul had already named (1 Corinthians 3:3). “Not boastful or arrogant” answers the people “puffed up” with knowledge. “Does not insist on its own way” answers the rich members who ate their own meals while others went hungry. “Keeps no record of wrongs” answers the lawsuits. Paul is painting the church that the Corinthians could become by God’s grace.

One way to pray with these verses is to read them slowly, asking where your own love falls short, and then to read them again as a description of Christ, who has been patient and kind toward every one of us. Both readings belong together, because the love you are asked to give is the love you have already received.

The last line, “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” gives no one a reason to stay with someone who is hurting them. Love also “rejoices in the truth,” and the truth about harm deserves to be told. (In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.) Paul means that love does not give up on people.

What does “now we see in a mirror” mean?

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

1 Corinthians 13:8, NRSVUE

The gifts the Corinthians fought over belong to this life only. Paul compares them to a child’s speech, and then to an ancient mirror, which gave a dim image:

For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:12–13, NRSVUE

The King James Version’s “through a glass, darkly” comes from verse 12. Most interpreters take “face to face” to mean the end of the age, when God’s people will know God directly. There is comfort here for anyone who lives with doubt or unanswered questions: Paul himself says that he knows only in part. Even the best human knowledge of God is partial, which gives every Christian good reason for humility in arguments about faith.

Paul also says that he has been “fully known.” Before anyone understands God, God already knows and loves them. Faith and hope belong to the time of waiting, and love is the greatest because love is what God is: “God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him” (1 John 4:16).

Why is 1 Corinthians 13 read at weddings?

1 Corinthians 13 is one of the readings most often chosen for Christian weddings, and many churches’ marriage services list it among the suggested readings. Paul wrote it for a whole congregation, and its description of love fits marriage well, because a marriage, like a church, lasts where people are patient, keep no record of wrongs, and refuse to give up on each other. Read at a wedding, it sets before the couple a love that no one lives out without God’s grace, and so it also becomes a prayer for that grace.

The King James Version and older Prayer Books say “charity,” a word that comes from the Latin caritas, which the Vulgate uses to translate agape: “Caritas patiens est, benigna est.”

How have Christians used 1 Corinthians 13?

Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century bishop in Cappadocia (in modern Turkey), used verses 8–13 to explain why love outlasts faith and hope. Hope, he wrote, is needed only until a person has what they hoped for, and faith only while they cannot yet see; when God is seen face to face, “love alone remains active, finding nothing to succeed itself.” For Gregory, as for the Orthodox churches after him, the reason is that “the life of the Supreme Being is love.” To be saved is to be drawn into God’s own life, and that life is love (On the Soul and the Resurrection).

Augustine made love the key to reading all of Scripture. Anyone who thinks they understand the Bible, he wrote, but whose reading “does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought” (On Christian Doctrine 1.36.40). In a sermon on 1 John he gave his famous short rule: “Love, and do what you will.” The same sermon makes clear that the rule excuses nothing. Love sometimes corrects and sometimes spares, and it always acts from “the root of love” (Homilies on the First Epistle of John 7.8).

1 Corinthians 13 belongs beside Jesus’ own summary of the law, love of God and neighbor (see What is the greatest commandment?), and beside his new commandment: “Just as I have loved you, you also love one another” (John 13:34). Paul’s portrait of love is finally a portrait of Christ, who was patient and kind and bore all things. For more on that love, see Does God love me?, and for how love shapes the way Christians see others, see What does “judge not” mean in Matthew 7:1?

The church has prayed in the words of this chapter for centuries. An old collect, still printed in the Book of Common Prayer for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany, asks God for the gift Paul describes:

O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Ghost and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Book of Common Prayer (1979), Collect for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany (traditional)