Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
God, John tells us, is love. But is this love in some abstract, philosophical sense? Is he merely using poetic license to make God seem more relatable when he is really still distant and unapproachable? It would have been hard to tell for sure except that, "God sent his only-begotten Son into the world". In Jesus we see the Father's heart revealed. And this revelation makes it clear. We are not merely projecting human terminology on God. The love of God is related to human love as its source and origin. Thus the main thing is "not that we have loved God, but that he loved us".
Of course our human understanding of love is imperfect. We call some things love that are closer to categories of use and even exploitation. But this does not mean that we can't recognize true love when we see it in action. It does mean that we need to allow God's kind of love to purify our ideas of love. It was difficult to do this when there was still the immense difference between humanity and God that preceded the incarnation. But once Jesus became flesh his own life became the perfect example of love, a love greater than which no one ever had.
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (see John 15:13).
Because God is love and Jesus is God all of the individual episodes from the life of Jesus take on rich meaning as the love of God is revealed in the shape of a human life.
When Jesus saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
Jesus possessed a love that was not merely an indifferent altruism. Rather he saw the deepest needs of the crowds and longed to fulfill those needs. He was sympathetic with their hunger for bread, but especially for their hunger for him. He knew that the crowds possessed a desire that he alone could satisfy, that they were in fact made to find fulfillment in him. This was not merely a curious fact that he addressed because, as God, it was easy for him to do so. Rather it was something that deeply mattered to him, so much so that he gave all that he was, his very life, to satisfy them.
They all ate and were satisfied.
The crowds that ate and were satisfied pointed to the future when Jesus would far surpass the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves with the gift of himself in the bread of the Eucharist. His love for his people would stop at nothing less than giving his very life as a sacrificial lamb so that his Church could forever keep the feast (see First Corinthians 5:7-9) and experience satisfaction, a peace the world could not give or take away.
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