Tag Archives: Thy kingdom come

Love is Not Jealous

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This icon shows monks climbing the ladder of virtues toward Christ and the saints. Most fall to their doom because they give in to temptations rather than heeding their guardian angels and struggling against sin. The monks reach the top of the ladder when they focus on love and Who it is that they are climbing toward.


Love waits patiently, it is kind; love is not jealous, love is not conceited, nor is it inflated… nor does it seek its own interests… it bears everything, believes everything, hopes everything, endures everything. (1 Cor. 13:4-7)

This chapter which describes love is perhaps the chapter heard most often because it is read at weddings so often. St. Paul describes love in phrases that are short and simple, just as Plato describes love in a series of short sentences although Plato uses eros rather than agape as the word for “love.” Plato’s praise of love is part of an after-dinner speech in the Symposium and other authors who praised love after that usually made it part of an after-dinner speech as well. St. Paul’s praise of love is also in the context of an after-dinner reflection (cf. 1 Cor. 11:17-34).

Much of what St. Paul writes in 1 Cor 13 also appears in Romans 12. Both chapters are describing what love looks like and how people behave who love one another.

“Love is not jealous.” That is especially important in a parish like Corinth that is torn apart by jealousy. The parishioners are jealous of each other’s spiritual gifts and abilities. They refuse to talk together or eat together. “Conceited” people brag about themselves and their gifts and their abilities, just as the Corinthians bragged.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent (a guide to monastic life but with much applicability to Christians who are not monastics) suggests that jealousy is the result of avarice (Step 17) or pride (Step 23). Avarice always wants, wants, want. It wants more. In Corinth, this creates jealousy because people wanted more spiritual gifts, they wanted what they saw other people had and felt jealous that they did not have these gifts as well. Pride gives birth to jealousy because if I am proud, I want the most and the biggest and most spectacular of the spiritual gifts; pride leads to jealousy if someone has what the proud person wants.

If the parishioners in Corinth claim to practice love, they have to first stop bragging about themselves and being jealous of each other.

The greater the love of God that the saints possess, the more they endure all things for him.

St. Augustine of Hippo, On Patience, 17

Older translations of the New Testament often used “charity” to translate agape.

A man with charity fears nothing for charity casts out fear. When fear is banished and cast out, charity endures all things, bears all things. One who bears all things through love cannot fear martyrdom.

St. Ambrose of Milan, Letter 49

Love (our behavior now), faith (in God and Christ now), and hope (about the General Resurrection, the Kingdom of God, and the Second Coming of Christ) support and complement each other. They define authentic Christian life.

The Seventh Seal

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Dionysiou Monastery on Mt. Athos was founded in 1374. In its refectory (dining hall) is a magnificent series of frescoes that illustrate the Apocalypse. In this illustration of chapter 8, we see the seven angels with trumpets, the censer with smoke, a mountain in the sea, the bloody sea water, destroyed ships, the fountain of water, the star Wormwood (in the rocks in the right corner), a darkened sun, etc.

When the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. I saw the seven angels who stand before God and they were given seven trumpets. (Apoc. 8:1)

The silence in heaven is momentous. It grabs the attention. It is louder than the thunder and commotion that either precede or follow it. Silence is not simply the absence of noise or the lull between events, one thing having finished and the other not yet having started as sometimes happens when a reader or performer is not ready to begin. Silence is a living presence.

I read many years ago that the most brilliant moment in music is the silence before the Et incarnatus of Bach’s “B Minor Mass.” The silence in heaven is like that. It is the sudden silence that follows Dorothy’s house crashing into Munchkinland as it drops from the cyclone in which she has seen Miss Gulch become the Wicked Witch.

This silence in heaven is an echo of the silence in heaven that preceded God’s first utterance: “Let there be light.” (see 4 Ezra 7:30-33) The apocalyptic silence in heaven is liturgical silence, the moment when all creation holds its breath seeing the Word of God crucified. It is the silence of the Great Entrance on Holy Saturday: God the Word has died and descended into Hades. It is the moment before all creation is turned topsy-turvy by Life himself tearing Death to shreds from the inside out.

Before the angels blow their trumpets, another angel-deacon comes to offer incense at the heavenly altar. There is “much incense” offered. The smoke creates an impenetrable cloud, much like the cloud of incense that the prophet Isaiah also saw (Isaiah 6). It was said that when the High Priest offered incense in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur that there was not enough smoke if he could still see his hand in front of his face. The smoke creates a buffer that serves to protect the human from the brilliant glory of God that would annihilate anything or anyone that dared stand unprotected in the terrible light.

In the Our Father, we pray, “Thy kingdom come.” Before the kingdom comes, all creation holds its breath and peers through the smoky clouds of incense, waiting to see what will happen when God reveals himself.