Reading of the Word of God

Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory

This is the Gospel of the poor,
liberation for the imprisoned,
sight for the blind,
freedom for the oppressed.

Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory

1 Corinthians 14, 1-25

Make love your aim; but be eager, too, for spiritual gifts, and especially for prophesying.

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.

On the other hand, someone who prophesies speaks to other people, building them up and giving them encouragement and reassurance.

Those who speak in a tongue may build themselves up, but those who prophesy build up the community.

While I should like you all to speak in tongues, I would much rather you could prophesy; since those who prophesy are of greater importance than those who speak in tongues, unless they can interpret what they say so that the church is built up by it.

Now suppose, brothers, I come to you and speak in tongues, what good shall I do you if my speaking provides no revelation or knowledge or prophecy or instruction?

It is the same with an inanimate musical instrument. If it does not make any distinction between notes, how can one recognise what is being played on flute or lyre?

If the trumpet sounds a call which is unrecognisable, who is going to get ready for the attack?

It is the same with you: if you do not use your tongue to produce speech that can be readily understood, how can anyone know what you are saying? You will be talking to the air.

However many the languages used in the world, all of them use sound;

but if I do not understand the meaning of the sound, I am a barbarian to the person who is speaking, and the speaker is a barbarian to me.

So with you, as you are eager to have spiritual powers, aim to be rich in those which build up the community.

That is why anybody who speaks in a tongue must pray that he may be given the interpretation.

For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit may be praying but my mind derives no fruit from it.

What then? I shall pray with the spirit, but I shall pray with the mind as well: I shall sing praises with the spirit and I shall sing praises with the mind as well.

Otherwise, if you say your blessing only with the spirit, how is the uninitiated person going to answer 'Amen' to your thanksgiving, without understanding what you are saying?

You may be making your thanksgiving well, but the other person is not built up at all.

I thank God that I speak with tongues more than any of you;

all the same, when I am in the assembly I would rather say five words with my mind, to instruct others as well, than ten thousand words in a tongue.

Brothers, do not remain children in your thinking; infants in wickedness-agreed, but in your thinking grown-ups.

It says in the written Law: In strange tongues and in a foreign language I will talk to this nation, and even so they will refuse to listen, says the Lord.

So then, strange languages are significant not for believers, but for unbelievers; whereas on the other hand, prophesying is not for unbelievers, but for believers.

Suppose that, if the whole congregation were meeting and all of them speaking in tongues, and some uninitiated people or unbelievers were to come in, don't you think they would say that you were all raving?

But if you were all prophesying when an unbeliever or someone uninitiated came in, he would find himself put to the test by all and judged by all

and the secrets of his heart revealed; and so he would fall down on his face and worship God, declaring that God is indeed among you.

Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory

The Son of Man came to serve,
whoever wants to be great
should become servant of all.

Praise to you, o Lord, King of eternal glory

After having sung the hymn of love, the apostle continues and urges the Corinthians to “pursue love!” Paul has underlined the stature of the charism of love, which is the soul, the heart, and the reason that move all other charisms. He refers to one in particular, the charism of prophecy, which he favours over “speaking in tongues.” “Glossolalia,” as speaking in tongues was called, was a phenomenon several times observed in the gatherings of the first Christian communities (today it is present in some Pentecostal groups), the point of which was to speak to God without consideration of whether the other people present could understand or not. Precisely because he is driven by his love for the community, the apostle Paul underlines the charism of “prophesy” - that is, the ability to speak to the lives and the hearts of brothers and sisters in a way that they can understand. In fact, this is how the community is built up. Paul is well aware of how important speaking is in the community of believers. This is why he insists that words should not be spoken into “the air,” but rather in the concreteness of life and behaviours - that is, that words be intelligible, that they touch the heart, that they move, and that they make people come back to themselves. Only this kind of speaking is able to change hearts and behaviours. The way to measure this is to verify that it can be understood even by the uninitiated and by those who are “foreign” to the community, so that they will say “God is really among you!” This insistence on prophecy and the comprehensibility of preaching is fitting for someone who knows what the pastoral arts mean: not to speak abstractly, not simply to state the truth, but to accompany them until they descend into the heart and bear fruit.