ICCRS INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS 2009
at Kkottongnae (South Korea)
Love in Action
By Cardinal Albert Vanhoye, SJ
Let me begin by expressing my great joy at being in this country which is dear to me and where I have many friends, and also my great joy at taking part in this international charismatic congress.
“Love in Action” is my theme for this morning. I am aware that this theme accurately describes the spirituality of Kkottongnae and of its religious congregation. It corresponds to the charism/gift of Kkottongnae, which is quite original, because it leads people to live out a true love, i.e. a love that is manifested by work in the service of those who don’t even have the strength to beg. On the other hand, this love is not mere philanthropy, but endeavours to foster spiritual life in needy people, and to convey salvation to them, even at the cost of offering up one’s pain and suffering for their sake. I read that the founder of Kkottongnae, Father Oh, found great inspiration in two words of Jesus’s, one from the Gospel of St Matthew, the other one from the Gospel according to St John. In St Matthew he found: “Verily I say unto you, every time you have done these things to just one of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done it to me” (Mt 25:40). The things Jesus mentions are gestures of love in action, such as feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless and clothes to the naked, visiting the ill or the imprisoned (Mt 25:35-36).
The words of Jesus in the Gospel according to St John are the ones that set the limits to love, i.e. “No one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). This greater love was lived out by Jesus in His Passion. “Having loved those who were his in the world, he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1), to the point of suffering and dying for us. Jesus was “the good shepherd”, who laid down his life for his sheep (Jn 10:11). He had said: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45). He set us the example of humble and generous service (Jn 13:15). In His First Letter, St John tells us: “He laid down his life for us and we too ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 Jn 3:16). The charism/gift of Kkottongnae corresponds perfectly to this teaching: “it is taking suffering and death on behalf of helpless neighbours who do not even have the strength to beg, following the words of Jesus Christ: “The greatest love you can have for your friends it to give your life for them” (Jn 15:13). To embrace this spirit is to live a life of ceaseless love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus who shed even down to the last drop of blood for us”.
Therefore it is clearly not merely a matter of human generosity, even though it does indeed have to do with human generosity. But it is a love that comes from God, fills the Heart of Jesus and, through this pierced Heart, overflows onto the members of Kkottongnae. This is a charism, a gift of God.
That being said, my conference will deal with two issues: first of all, the issue of the relationship between charisms/gifts and love; secondly, love; thirdly, the issue of the relationship between faith and action.
1. Charisms/Gifts and love
As I said, the charism of Kkottongnae is quite original. In effect, when Saint Paul speaks of the charisms/gifts in his First Letter to the Corinthians, he does not mention a charism/gift of this kind, but rather juxtaposes the charisms/gifts of the Corinthians, and love.
Charismatic manifestations were overabounding in Corinth and they brought about some difficulties in the life of the Christian community, to the point that the Apostle felt the need to tackle the problem thoroughly. This discussion takes up three entire chapters of the Letter, Chapters 12, 13 and 14. The Greek word chárisma comes up 5 times in Charter 12 and two more times in the preceding chapters, thus making 7 times in all, while in the rest of the entire New Testament we find it a total of only 10 times.
Saint Paul introduces the theme of charisms/gifts from the very beginning of the First Letter to the Corinthians and he presents it in a positive way, because he presents it as a reason to give thanks to God. He writes: “ I am continually thanking God about you, for the grace of God which you have been given in Christ Jesus; in him you have been richly endowed in every kind of utterance and knowledge” (1 Cor 1:4-5). Thus Paul thanks God for the gifts bestowed on the Corinthians. Later on he was to thank God for a gift he himself had received, saying: “ I thank God that I speak with tongues more than any of you” (1 Cor 14:18). (By the way, speaking in tongues created trouble in the community; nonetheless, St Paul viewed it as something positive.) On the other hand, St Paul specifies that “you have been richly endowed with every utterance and every knowledge”. It’s significant that he would point this out, because it limits the scope to the gifts of speech and of knowledge and does not mention at all the gifts of love. This omission can be easily understood when you continue reading because right after that St Paul criticizes the Corinthians on account of the divisions among them in their community. He wrote: “From what Chloe’s people have been telling me about you, brothers, it is clear that there are serious differences among you” (1:11). Therefore charity did not reign in Corinth! There was, instead, a lack of charity, because of the division in factions; Apollo’s party was pitted against Paul’s, the party of Kephas, that is of Peter, was pitted against Apollo’s (1:12). St Paul could hardly thank God for the gifts of charity, since there were none.
The Apostle’s insistence on the charisms/gifts of word and of knowledge can be understood by reading the part of the Letter that deals with charisms/gifts in detail, since there one clearly sees that the two charisms/gifts that most impressed the Corinthians were glossolalia, another name for speaking in tongues, and the gift of prophecy, i.e. a charism/gift of supernatural language and one of inspired knowledge. The Corinthians were not interested in the gifts of charity, because what distinguishes man from animals is not the life of affection but the capacity to know and to speak. Animals too have a love life, for example they have a beautiful motherly love; Jesus himself point to the hen as a model, as she “gathers her brood under her wings” (Lk 13:34); but animals neither speak nor reason.
Of the Corinthians St. Paul says that they were “eager to have spiritual gifts” (literally the words are: “eager to have spirits” (1 Cor 14:12). The charism/gift that seemed to them to be the most spiritual was speaking in tongues, which consists in a very particular linguistic activity, in the sense that, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit, one’s voice emits a succession of sounds that more or less resemble a language, yet are incomprehensible. About this St. Paul says: “Those who speak in a tongue speak to God, but not to other people, because nobody understands them; they are speaking in the Spirit and the meaning is hidden.” (1 Cor 14:2). This corresponds to a certain level of spiritual intensity and an attitude of union with God and of praise; one might perhaps compare it to a musical way of expressing oneself. Since ancient times Greek culture has known the tension between the light of reason, symbolized by the god Apollo, and the dark impulse of irrational dynamism, symbolized by Dionysius. There were several religious cults that proposed experiences of this kind to their followers. It is certainly exhilarating to feel supernatural strength invade you and thereby free you from the inhibitions that rational education imposes on each of us. The Christians of Corinth visibly felt a strong attraction for this kind of religious experience. They held that the most evident manifestation of the active presence of the Spirit of God in them was this speaking in tongues, because those who speak in this way do not direct their tongue with their minds in order to form intelligible sentences, but surrender to the action of a mysterious force that directs their tongues in an unpredictable way, not submitting to the rules of ordinary speech, and at the same time fills the person with a mystical fervour. In the Acts of the Apostles, when Cornelius and his people speak in tongues it is immediately recognized as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, prompting Peter to say: “They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have” (At 10:47).
The other charism/gift that was most appreciated in Corinth was the gift of prophecy. As you know, by prophecy we do not necessarily mean foreseeing future events; prediction is only one possible aspect of this charism/gift. In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke tells of two cases of such predictions, pronounced by a Christian prophet named Agabo: once when he announced the coming of a famine, and another time when he announced the imprisonment of Paul (At 11:28; 21:10-11). In another passage, however, St. Luke tells of two Christians “being themselves prophets”, and shows that the gift of prophecy enables one to “encourage and strengthen the brothers” (At 15:32). Similarly, St. Paul says: “Someone who prophesies speaks to other people, building them up and giving them encouragement and reassurance.” (1 Cor 14:3). The gift of prophecy, therefore, can be defined as pronouncing inspired words. What glossolalia and prophecy have in common is inspiration, the impulse received by the Holy Spirit: the difference lies in the fact that, in the case of glossolalia, inspiration produces a language which is incomprehensible, while, in the case of prophecy, it produces phrases that all can understand. Apparently, even if they could be understood, the words of the prophets were often disconcerting to human reason. “The natural person, wrote St. Paul, has no room for the gifts of God’s Spirit; to him they are folly; he cannot recognize them, because their value can be assessed only in the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:14).
The Corinthians, therefore, appreciated above all these two gifts, glossolalia and prophecy, gifts of inspired speech and knowledge.
How did St. Paul react? He did not hesitate; he reacted by stating the primacy of love, the primacy of charity. The Greek word is agape, which can be translated either “love” or “charity”. By agape, St. Paul apparently does not mean a simply human type of affection, but the love that the Holy Spirit pours forth into the hearts of those who believe in Christ; St. Paul says so in his Letter to the Romans (Rm 5:5). This love is a theological virtue, charity, which unites us to the Heart of Christ and, through him, to God. St. Paul praises it in Chap. 13 of First Corinthians and juxtaposes it with the two great gifts preferred by the Corinthians.
He presents it as “the best way of all” (1 Cor 12:31) and says: “Though I command languages both human and angelic – if I speak without love, I am no more than a gong booming or a cymbal clashing.” (1 Cor 13:1). What a cold shower for the Corinthians, who were so enthusiastic about glossolalia! To be compared to gongs and cymbals, noisy instruments that strike one’s ears but do not express any meaning nor produce any melody. Notice, however, how gentle St. Paul is, in using the first person singular. He does not say to the Corinthians: “YOU are a gong booming”, but: “If I …., I am no more than a gong booming…”.
In the second place, St Paul tackles prophecy and all knowledge and repeats: “if I am without love, I am nothing” (1 Cor 13,2). In a previous passage, he had declared: “knowledge puffs up”, that is, it swells one up with pride, “while love is what builds up” (1 Cor 8:1). St. Paul therefore praises love. It is love that positions all gifts in the right direction. Without love, they are worthless. But with love they maintain their value completely. Therefore St. Paul does not reach the conclusion that one must seek only love/charity and neglect the gifts, but rather: “Make love your aim; but be eager, too, for spiritual gifts, and especially for prophesying” (1 Cor 14:1).
Sometimes one hears people say that love/charity is the greatest of the charisms/gifts. Is this right or wrong? It’s wrong. One can and must say that love/charity is the greatest gift of God, because it allows us to participate in the life of God himself: “God is love and he who lives in love lives in God and God lives in him” (1 Jn 4:16). But one can not say that love/charity is a charism/gift, since, by definition, charisms/gifts are particular gifts of grace, bestowed on certain believers but not on all; St. Paul says so: “Everyone has his own gift from God, one this kind and the next something different” (1 Cor 7:7). A charism/gift is a gift that is not indispensable to enable one to live a Christian life; on the other hand, theological virtues are always indispensable to all. In this sense St. Paul says that they “remain”. He wrote: “As it is, these remain: faith, hope and love, the three of them; and the greatest of them is love” (1 Cor 13:13). Love therefore is not a charism/gift.
But certain particular forms of charity can be charisms/gifts, precisely because they are particular forms, not given by God to all believers. Not everyone has a charism/gift for the care of the ill, but all have a charism/gift for consoling the afflicted. The charism/gift of Kkottongnae is a beautiful form of charity: “taking up suffering and death on behalf of helpless neighbours who do not even have the strength to beg”, a charism of love in action.
For it to be an authentic charism, it needs for it to be a form of the theological virtue of charity, rooted in faith, rooted therefore in listening and meditating the Word of God, in prayer, and in taking part in the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist.
2. Faith and action
This characteristic of “love in action” may need clarifying on a doctrinal level as to what place works should occupy in Christian life. In the Letter to the Galatians St Paul wrote that “someone is reckoned as upright not by practising the Law but by faith in Jesus Christ” he repeated that “no human being can be found upright by keeping the Law” (Gal 2:16). Again, in the Letter to the Romans he says: “a person is justified by faith and not by doing what the law tells him to do.” (Rm 3:28). Naturally, the Law St. Paul refers to is the Law of Moses, given to Moses by God. In the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul excludes all works in general; he no longer says “the works of the Law”, but “works” period. He writes: “By grace you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God; not by anything you have done, so that nobody can claim the credit” (Eph 2:8-9). It may seem then that insisting on love in action might not conform to the teaching of St. Paul, who excludes works and requires faith alone. Actually, this impression is an interpretational error; however, it makes us aware of an important issue of Christian doctrine and behaviour.
In order to interpret the thinking of the Apostle, we must see whether he is speaking not of Christian behaviour in general but of the moment when a person is justified through Jesus Christ. When one starts believing in Christ and is baptized, one is purified of all one’s sins and thereby justified, i.e. made just before God, thanks to the Passion of Jesus, who “died for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3). The basis for this justification hardly lies in this person’s good works, but solely in his faith in the redemption carried out by Christ and in the person of Christ, our Saviour.
In the Church of Galatia, on the other hand, a doctrine was spreading that declared to Christians who had come from pagan nations that faith in Christ was not enough for them to be acknowledged as just before God and thus receive all the benefits promised by God to Abraham and to his descendents, i.e. the divine blessings during their life and, afterwards, happiness with God forever. Those who spread this doctrine maintained that besides faith they needed circumcision and the observance of the Law of Moses.
The apostle Paul rose up vigorously against this doctrine, because he saw that it contained a serious and pernicious error. He analyzed the implications of the act of faith in Christ. He dwelled on this precise moment and saw that, at that moment of the basic choice between two conflicting religious attitudes, one which consisted in presenting oneself to God with one’s works done in accordance with the Law, to be “justified”, i.e “declared just ” by God; the other consisting in acknowledging oneself a sinner and accepting with faith the redemption accomplished by God in the paschal mystery of Christ and thereby being “justified”, i.e. “made just” by means of faith in Christ.
The former attitude is one of self-justification; the latter is an attitude where one relinquishes all selfjustification and opens up to the divine gift which freely conveys the justification deserved for us by Christ. Believing in Christ, accepting him as he who “gave himself for our sins” (Gal 1:4) means, in effect, recognizing oneself as a sinner, incapable of making oneself just, and accepting the work of redemption carried out by Christ.
On the contrary, to claim one is justified by one’s own works means claiming one has no need of Christ to present himself to God (cf. Gal 2:21, 5:4). This claim, however, is baseless, a mere illusion. Self-justification is a blind alley. The psalmist says so in no uncertain terms when he turns to God: “Do not put your servant on trial: for no one living can be found guiltless at your tribunal” (Ps 143:2). St. Paul has recourse to this text to support his position (Gal 2:16, Rm 3:20). In the light of the paschal mystery of Christ, St. Paul understood that all men were sinners: “All have sinned and lack God’s glory” (Rm 3:23); he understands that the stain of sin was impressed on them so deeply that nothing could take it away, except for God’s divine intervention. To do the works of the Law did not change the situation. The Law is incapable of “justifying” a sinner, it can only proclaim him guilty and condemn him. For the sinner, the only solution consists in accepting the perfect effectiveness of the death of Christ and this is done by means of faith in Christ. St. Paul therefore declares that faith alone “makes just”, “justifies” the sinner.
Thanks to this analysis, St. Paul was able to fight the delusion that the Judaizers based their propaganda on. They claimed that observance of the Law was as necessary for justification as faith in Christ. In other words, they wanted to base their religious situation on a double foundation: faith in Christ, on the one hand, and observance of the Law on the other. St. Paul discerned in this a serious inconsistency, because these two foundations are incompatible with each other. The former opens a person up to the generous gift of God and places him in a condition of humble and profound gratitude; the other attitude, instead, is a claim of self-justification which locks a person into himself and nourishes his pride. St Paul, therefore, completely excludes the latter foundation and proclaims that “someone is reckoned as upright not by practising the law but by faith in Jesus Christ” (Gal 2:16).
We must all be careful to maintain ourselves in this position, i.e. not to take our works as a basis for our lives and our personal value, but to found everything solely on our union with Christ in faith and in love. Of themselves, charisms/gifts foster this direction, because they are free gifts of God. One must always, however, beware of this risk of losing sight of this gratuity and of taking as one’s own merit that which is a gift of the Lord, thereby falling into the sin of pride. By means of prayer we must often hark back to the fact that the only basis of our Christian life is our union with Christ in faith. We must be able to say, like St. Paul, “It is no longer I, but Christ living in me” (Gal 2:20).
This being said, we must not misinterpret the exclusion of works that St Paul refers to and imagine that the Apostle wouldn’t leave any room for works in Christian life and therefore would not admit love in action. This would be a total mistake. In Christian life we must distinguish several levels, in particular the basic level and the level of activity. St. Paul excludes the works of man at the level of the foundation of Christian life. Christ is the only foundation (1 Cor 3:11) and therefore faith in Christ. On this level, there is no room for the works of man, not even for the best of these works, the ones that are according to the Law of Moses. But this doesn’t mean that works are excluded from other levels. St Paul’s argument against the works of the Law must not be confused with a general rejection of works. It only rejects human claims to consider human works as the basis of spiritual life. The only valid basis is faith in Christ. Faith, however, in order to be authentic, must produce works on the level of activities. Otherwise, as St James says, “it is dead” (Jm 2:17.26); St. Paul totally agrees. In the Letter to the Galatians, where the Apostle argues so hard against “the works of the Law”, he declares: “[whatever] can effect anything […] is only faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Then he insists: “And let us never slacken in doing good; for if we do not give up, we shall have our harvest in due time. So then, as long as we have the opportunity, let all our actions be for the good of everybody” (Gal 6:9-10). In all his letters, St. Paul exhorts Christians to conform their behaviour to their faith, to base their behaviour on their faith. He proposed himself as “a model for you to imitate”, because he “worked with unsparing energy, night and day” (2 Ts 3:8-9). Far from excluding action from Christian life, St. Paul demanded it insistently, specifying however that what Christians do must not be simply human works, but “works of faith”, made possible by their vital union with Christ (Gal 2:20) and by being led by the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:16-25). In this way they will no longer be “works of the Law”; even though they will often appear to conform to what the Law prescribes, on the inside they will have a completely different substance, because they will be above all the work of Christ himself, carried out by means of the believers. They will not therefore give believers any chance to grow proud, but rather great reason to give thanks to Christ and to God. To be taken as instruments of the work of Christ is a marvellous grace. In the Gospel according to St John, Jesus himself lets on to this, when he speaks of the true vine, which makes his branches fruitful. “Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty, for cut off from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).
In conclusion. We have seen that the charismatic inclination of “love in action” is original. This leads us to examine two issues, i.e. the relationship between love and charisms/gifts and the place of action in Christian life. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul teaches us that love of charity is more important than the great charisms/gifts of glossolalia and of prophecy; without love/charity, the charisms/gifts are worthless; with the theological virtue of love/charity, the charisms/gifts preserve all their value. On the other hand we have seen that there are charisms/gifts that enable one to carry out particular acts of charity very well. As to the place of action in Christian life, we have seen that it is not a basic place. The only basis for Christian life is faith. St. Paul excludes the works of the Law from this level. Faith, however, leads to action and an action that is full of love. “What counts, says St. Paul, is faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Without faith, love in action can not be a true charism/gift. Without love in action, faith can not truly come alive.
