Why Love is the greatest of Faith, Hope & Love

Recently I provided a questionnaire to my class of 9th and 10th grade students (Go Eagles!) at our Wednesday Faith Formation meeting.  Being excellent Catholics, they knew all seven of the Sacraments, but when it came to deciding which of Faith, Hope and Love is the most important; they all made the same choice…and it was not “Love.”

Many words in our vocabulary are interchangeable – synonyms we call them – but of these three words each has a very specific meaning as well as a ranking in importance.  Though the phrase has Love coming last in word order, it is actually first, central, and the only eternal reality.

Faith. Faith can be described in a two-fold way.  First, it can be defined as a form of trust.  Generally speaking, faith is trusting in the word of another, assuming that the person trusted knows what they are saying and that it is truthful (having authority and integrity).  For example, I trust in the expertise (authority) of my mechanic to know when a “widget” has broken in my car, and also in his reliability (integrity) to fix it.  Ordinary life necessitates human faith.

Second, and when applied to God, faith is called divine.  Unlike human faith, divine faith includes the component of grace as a gift from God and the internal aid of the Holy Spirit.  This gift is a supernatural virtue infused by God, which, before it can be exercised, we must have God’s grace and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who moves the heart toward God (CCC 153).  Pope John Paul II, writing in Fides et Ratio, states, Faith is said first to be an obedient response to God.  This implies that God be acknowledged in his divinity, transcendence and supreme freedom.  By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals. In the act of faith the intellect and the will display their spiritual nature.

Hope. Hope is an expectation of something that has not yet occurred.  We hope for a good grade on our test tomorrow.  We hope for a good review at our place of work.  We hope that our children grow up to be fine Catholic adults.  We hope that the bill to fix the widget on the car is not too high.  And spiritually speaking - through God given faith - we hope for eternal salvation. 

Love.  Most of us are overly familiar with the phrase “God is Love.”  So familiar that it’s like a worn-out bumper sticker.  Yet this phrase is central to our Catholic faith, because God is central.  Christ died because God “so loved the world.”  And before the birth of Jesus Christ, the greatest commandment of the Law for the Jews was to “Love the Lord your God with all you heart, soul, strength and mind,” something which Jesus also declared (Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27).  This is called the Shema Yisrael Prayer practiced by the Israelites, and still said today in Judaism. The second great commandment that quickly follows the first is to “love your neighbor as yourself.”  This is why the apostle Paul stressed the critical centrality of Love in 1 Corinthians 13.

God is not Faith.  God is not Hope.  God is Love, and as God is eternal, so is Love. 

When we reach heaven there will be no need for Faith or Hope; we will see and hear, and if need be, we may touch the hands of our crucified Lord.  Our faith and hope will have come to fruition and no longer be an aspect of our eternal lives.  Love, on the other hand, will be that heavenly bond that binds us to our eternal God, forever and ever and ever. 

Faith can be “dead” (James 2:17), and Hope may be “delayed” (Proverbs 13:12), but only eternal Love will last beyond the grave.