1 Corinthians 13:4-7

This passage is read at weddings, and it was written to a church behaving badly.

The Corinthians were competitive about spiritual gifts, taking each other to court, and holding communion in a way that humiliated the poor. Read the list against that background and it stops being lyrical. Doesn't envy, doesn't brag, is not proud, doesn't seek its own way — these are not general virtues. They are the precise inverse of what that congregation was doing, itemised.

And every item is a verb or a behaviour, not a feeling. Paul does not describe what love feels like. He describes what it does, and more often what it declines to do. Roughly half the list is negative: the things love does not.

That is a mercy for anyone who has wondered whether they love someone enough. The test on offer is not the temperature of your affection. It is whether you kept score, and the phrase takes no account of evil is an accounting term — it means not entering something in the ledger.

The four verbs at the end move differently: bears, believes, hopes, endures, each with all things. After a long list of restraint, the passage finishes with capacity.

And Paul has just said in the verses above that eloquence, prophecy, knowledge, faith that moves mountains and giving away everything you own are worth nothing without this.