This beautiful argument for the importance of active love as ‘a more excellent way’ (1 Corinthians 12:31) is part of an extended discussion about how Christians are to live in unity and use the charismatic gifts the Spirit has brought for the common good.

Paul, who has himself the gift of tongues (14:18), begins by comparing his ability for angelic speech to what might seem its opposite: a ‘noisy gong or a clanging cymbal’ (v.1). These instruments are far from the joyful cymbals of Jewish worship in the Psalms but shockingly evoke the cymbala of the ecstatic mystery cults of Cybele, all too familiar to Paul’s Corinthian audience. Rhea/Cybele’s guards originally clashed their brass weapons—and, taken literally, Paul’s words indicate ‘sounding brass’ (v.1, KJV)—to conceal the cries of the infant Zeus from being heard by his murderous father, Cronos, and the goddess’s initiates imitated this clamour in their rituals. References to ‘mysteries’ and moving mountains may refer to this story. This is sound intended to confuse and it embodies what Paul finds amiss about the charismatic gifts: they do not give themselves in the act of communication but rather enjoy their own self-expression.

A Roman terracotta relief illustrates the scene at Mount Ida with Rhea’s guards absorbed in their protective dance, their heads bowed, feet carefully aligned. Despite the sense of movement in the rippling cloaks against their muscular bodies, there is something hermetic and enclosed about their self-involvement, which is how Paul envisages his sounding brass, shorn of its relation to other instruments.