Matthew 24:12

ψυγήσεται ἡ�. ‘The love of the majority shall grow cold.’ The use by our Lord in this passage of a word which expressed the highest and most enduring (1 Corinthians 13:8; 1 Corinthians 13:13) of Christian graces, and which was the bond of the future Christian society is in itself prophetic. ἀγάπη in this sense occurs here only in the Synoptic gospels (τὴν�, Luke 11:42, is not an exception). Yet from the fourth gospel we learn that this word or its Aramaic equivalent was very frequently on the Lord’s lips. In the Epistles no word meets us more often, though the occurrence of ἀγάπη in the LXX. seems to imply that it was a vernacular word before it took its place in literature; its absence from classical Greek enabled it to enter Christian thought and literature unstained (ἔρως has no place in the vocabulary of the N.T.). To the Greek, however (though Christianity raised ἀγάπη far above the range of pagan thought), it would recall the purest and highest conceptions of Greek poets—the pure love of brother and sister—the devotion of a child to her father—duty to the living—respect for the dead. The drama of Antigone is the story of ἀγάπη triumphant: οὔτοι συνέχθειν� (Soph. Ant. 523) breathes the spirit of Christianity. As a Christian word ἀγάπη meant the love of the Christian brotherhood to one another and to God, and the outward symbols of that love in the Eucharist (ἀγάπην ποιεῖν ‘to celebrate the “love-feast’ ”) in ‘charity’ or ‘alms’ (see note on δικαιοσύνη, ch. Matthew 6:1) in the salutation or holy kiss (see Sophocles’ Lex., sub voc.).