THE LOST ART OF RELATIONSHIP
Love is a choice to be committed to someone else; to place ourselves in a vulnerable position with them. When we look at it this way and not as if we are “falling in love,” we recognize that if we choose to love, we can also choose not to love.
Emotions come and go. They are unstable. I wish I could stay happy all the time, but inevitably something will happen where I become sad. Love does not have to be as unstable as our emotions. As a matter of fact, Jesus showed how stable love really is by loving us before we ever accepted him as the Son of God and the One that takes away our sins. He loved us while we were denying his existence. He loved us while we were living our lives for ourselves. Maybe this is how we are to love others. By Christ’s example, we can love others like that too.
A Brief History
I want to dig a little deeper into the meaning of love by giving some histor- ical background on what was going on in Corinth at the time the apostle Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 13. I think it will help clarify what Paul meant by love.
Julius Caesar re-founded the city of Corinth in 44 B.C. as a Roman colony. He saw an opportunity to link the two bodies of water on either side of the three-mile isthmus of Greece with a canal—the Corinth Canal.
When revived as a Roman colony, it was populated by freed slaves for the most part, who came from Syria, Judea, Egypt, Greece, and other parts of the Roman world. They brought their expertise with them, which made them valuable: technical, administrative, financial. Now they were free to exercise their talents for their own benefit. With their combined knowledge and expertise, Corinth became a shipping center, bringing with it economic growth, business investors from around the Mediterranean, and lots of money!
The population of Corinth in the apostle Paul’s time was about 250, free persons and 400,000 slaves. The culture, although under Roman rule, held a very Greek influence, concerning philosophy and its value in wisdom.^14
Corinth had at least twelve temples, two of which were the temple to Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, whose worshipers practiced religious prosti- tution, and the temple to Asclepius, the God of Healing. They were very mixed regarding religion. Along with the religious temples, especially the one to Aphrodite, immorality was practiced and celebrated. At one particular time in its history, about one thousand prostitutes served at the temple. Corinth became so widely known for its immorality, the Greek verb “to Corinthianize” came to mean “to practice sexual immorality.”