“The end of all things is at hand; therefore, keep sane and sober for your prayers. Above all hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins.”
1 Peter 4:7-8
By repeating the call to love (see First Peter 1:22; 2:17) Peter underlines the fundamental place love holds in the Christian life. This is in keeping with Christ’s injunction to put love of God and neighbor in first place (Mark 12:30–31) and with the constant teaching of the apostolic letters (1 Corinthians 13:1–13; Colossians 3:14; 1 John 4:7–11).
What is Peter getting at when he says that “love covers a multitude of sins”? The background to this statement is Proverbs 10:12 (“love covers all offenses”), which Peter cites rather loosely.1
The primary meaning is that our love “covers over,” that is, “overlooks,” the “multitude” of daily sins that people commit against us. In this sense our love covers over the sins of others.
Rather than allowing grudges and judgments to pile up, we are called to put away these offenses through the merciful love we extend to one another.
Peter may also mean that our practice of merciful love toward one another will prompt God himself to “cover” our offenses. In this sense one’s love results in our own sins being forgiven by God:
“If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”
Matthew 6:14
Both meanings are true and Peter may have them both in mind here.
Footnote
1 James 5:20 also speaks about covering a multitude of sins: “Whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”
This article © 2011 by Daniel Keating is excerpted from the book, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude, published by Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Top image credit: Return of the Prodigal Son (cropped close-up view), painted in 1669, by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Source of image from Wikimedia.org. In the Public Domain.
Dan Keating, (DPhil, Oxford University, UK) is an elder in The Servants of the Word, an ecumenical international brotherhood of men living single for the Lord. He is a professor of theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan, USA where he teaches on Scripture, the Church Fathers, evangelization, and ecumenism.