Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Love, we know, is more than a feeling. We may or may not feel loving but we are always free to act with love, to will the good of the other. Ideally, our feelings would always be there to support such acts. They are in fact often there to assist us, for instance in family life as we strive to do our best for one another. But they may be absent. Yet even though we may not feel loving the obligation to act with love remains.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
It is not our feelings that make us begotten by God, nor are they the primary ways in which we know him. Instead, it is by loving in act that we are conformed to God, that we are made like him. As we our hearts become more and more like his own we come to know him. Not to say that he becomes comprehensible, but perhaps we might say that we are able to recognize his work and his presence more accurately the more we have already been shaped by that work in our lives.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
Love is actually a supernatural reality that is rooted in who God is in himself, a Trinity of persons, united in love. Only when we ourselves are rooted in him will our love truly be able to transcend the weakness and limitations we face as fallen and egocentric creatures. The call is not, therefore, to go off and work at love until we are worthy of his love. Such efforts inevitably frustrate us and come up short. It is rather firstly a call to let him love us. As we do so we should not look primarily at feelings to see whether or not it is in fact happening. The sign that everything is working as intended is that his love begins to overflow through us to others.
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.
Although Jesus had said that his plan was to go off to a deserted place to rest he allowed his love for the crowd to take priority. His own heart was such that he could not turn his back on their need for him. They "were like sheep without a shepherd" but he himself was the Good Shepherd who came to make them lie down in green pastures, who could not rest while even one sheep was lost and alone.
The first need of the sheep was a spiritual need, hence "he began to teach them many things." Yet he did not neglect their bodily needs. However, neither did he prioritize those needs over and against the spiritual. He satisfied their physical hunger in such a way that it kept them near him, within the aegis of his teaching. There is a paradigm here for all who seek, rightly, to address the needs of the body. To do so is truly praiseworthy. It is part of what it means to have a heart moved with compassion, grounded in love. But such love, if it sends the hungry crowd away from Jesus, could be better expressed by drawing them to him instead.
He said to them in reply,
“Give them some food yourselves.”
Miraculous things always happen when Jesus is at the center of our plans. It is when the logistics become central that we tend to get bogged down, for we are confronted with the limitations of our own resources. The secret of the saints was that they always kept proximity to Jesus as their primary motive and goal. They were therefore able to accomplish great things even when it seemed like they didn't have enough even to begin. One is reminded of how Mother Angelica founded EWTN, relying as she did on Jesus to provide the money that seemed, humanly speaking, impossible to attain. Counting our resources, focusing on our circumstances, can be like the waves that distracted Peter from Jesus when he attempted to walk toward him on the water. The circumstances are not entirely irrelevant. But in the presence of Jesus they are transformed, like the loaves and fishes. Rather than letting the waves distract us we can and should keep our eyes fixed on Jesus so that we can continue walking toward him.
They all ate and were satisfied.
And they picked up twelve wicker baskets full of fragments
and what was left of the fish.
The leftover baskets were an implicit promise that Jesus would always provide for his Church, always work through the successors of the twelve to feed the sheep. Even though many of those successors may leave something to be desired it has not prevented Jesus from giving us more than enough, whether teaching or charismatic or Sacramental graces, that we may eat and be satisfied.
The mountains shall yield peace for the people,
and the hills justice.
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