Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
When we truly love one another we do so by first opening ourselves to the source of love, God himself. Love on this level cannot come from ourselves, but is only possible if we are in filial relationship with him. Nor can we claim to be truly in relationship with him if we don't love, since placing barriers on his love isn't just acting against something to which he assigns special priority and importance. It is rather placing a barrier on himself and his own presence within us. If we truly love him, we let him in. And if we truly let him in, if we become truly vulnerable before his love, we won't resist when he begins to flow out through us to others.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only-begotten Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
Our conceptions of love are often too limited and sentimental. Even when they tend toward the good of the other they often do so in a nearsighted way that can only produce temporary effects. But God's love is such that it lifts us up above the limits of our mortal existence into his eternity. It is also true that what we are willing to do for the sake of love is often constrained and compromised. Therefore we cannot measure the true nature of love based on our past experience or any human precedent. Even the best earthly loves fall short. Only in God do we see a love that refused to limit itself or be compromised. He went to the utmost extreme limits for the sake of his beloved. Only in him, then, do we see the full measure of love. He held nothing back for himself but gave everything he had for our salvation. He died in order to share his very life with us.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
John is not merely saying that we must get in line with God by imitating his love. Nor is he saying that we must perfect love in ourselves if we are to communicate with him, as though it were a language we could study, or a skill we could master. Love is not something that we can truly have apart from he who is himself love living within us. That is why the fact that he loved us first always has to have priority in our definition of love. Only his love was able to break the chains of our sins that kept us living in a state of perpetual compromise where our love was only ever expressed in fits and starts.
When Jesus saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
and he began to teach them many things.
Jesus saw a people compromised by sin, unable to be all that God intended them to be, and his heart was moved with compassion. Therefore he gave the gift, not just of bread, but of the bread of life, his own Body and Blood, in order to defeat sin, and strengthen us with his very self to make us able to love as he first loved us. Even in the symbolic act of the multiplication of the loaves we see that his love draws others up together with himself into the dynamics of love, both the crowds that contribute the loaves and fish, and the disciples who help distribute them. His Eucharistic feast does even more to draw us into a communion of love, love that is not a mere idea or sentiment, but one which changes first us, and then the world.
Saint Meinrad Schola - Of The Father's Love Begotten
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