For those who have listened to me preach, or for those who regularly listen to the podcasts on the Ephesus School Network, you know that we prefer to translate the Greek word pistis as trust rather than faith.
In English, faith can mean belief in the sense of mental knowledge, confessing the correct creed, or having a correct understanding of something (usually the nature of God). But this isn’t what Jesus or Paul had in mind.
For them, they meant more of what we think of as trust. They taught that if we live or walk the Way according to God’s instruction, then, in the end, things will turn out O.K. (we will be vindicated as Jesus was vindicated after death).
Yet, we all know that following Jesus’s instruction is difficult. Often, it seems that living by the Sermon on the Mount is nothing more than losing (do we really have to love our enemy?). But, to have trust, we must keep walking the Way as steadfastly as we can.
Well, this afternoon, I was reading Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the suggestion that we not translate agape as love. Instead, they argue that we should use the word share.
Typically, when we think of love, we think of how we feel about someone or something. It congers up images of teenage puppy-love and romantic encounters. But, again, that’s not what Jesus and Paul had in mind.
Crossan and Reed make the argument that we should understand agape through Jesus’s announcement of the Kingdom of Heaven. If we do so, we’ll better understand what the New Testament means by love.
The Kingdom of Heaven is a proclamation of a renewed world (what Paul calls, new creation) where God is the head of the household rather than Caesar. This implies a judgment of justice with a redistribution of the earth’s bounties in such a way that everyone has access (think of the Beatitudes or the Year of Jubilee). It brings about an equality that doesn’t currently exist in our fallen world.
In this vision, then, agape is better translated as sharing.
I once had a professor, Fr. Paul Tarazi, who said that a child can never love his parents, only parents can love. If we translate agape as sharing, this makes sense. The child doesn’t have a house, food, or money. It’s the parents who share and provide for the child.
So, how would 1 Corinthians 13 read if we translate agape correctly?
If I speak in the tongues of human beings and of the angels, but do not embody sharing, I have become resounding brass and a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy and know all the mysteries and all the knowledge, and if I have all trust, of such a sort as to remove mountains, but do not embody sharing, I am nothing. And if I distribute all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may be burned, and do not embody sharing, I am profited nothing. Sharing is magnanimous, sharing is kind, is not envious, sharing does not boast, does not bluster, does not act in an unseemly fashion, does not seek for things of its own, is not irascible, does not take account of the evil deed, does not rejoice in injustice, but rejoices with the truth; It tolerates all things, has trust in all things, hopes in all things, endures all things. Sharing never fails; but if there are prophecies, they will be made ineffectual; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be made ineffectual. For we know partially and we prophesy partially; But, when that which is complete comes, what is partial will be rendered futile. When I was an infant, I spoke like an infant, I thought like an infant, I reckoned like an infant; having become a man, I did away with infantile things. For as yet we see by way of a mirror, in an enigma, but then face to face; as yet I know partially, but then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known. But now abide trust, hope, sharing—these three—and the greatest of these is sharing.
So, how does translating agape and sharing change your perspective of the Good News?