Beloved, let us Love One Another


Today's Mass Readings

In today’s first reading from the First Letter of St. John, St. John exhorts us to love one another. This passage was the inspiration for Pope Benedict XVI’s first papal encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, God is Love. In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, we find an example of what this love must look like in Jesus. Everything Jesus does is a teaching moment. Not only what Jesus says, but His very actions are placed in the Gospels to teach His audience lessons, and to teach us lessons as well, about how to follow Him, about how to live out our lives as Christians.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus sees a large crowd and He is moved with pity. He sees them as sheep without a shepherd. Jesus, of course, is their true shepherd, He is the shepherd of Israel and of the nations. Notice that Jesus’ disciples petition Him to dismiss the crowd. Jesus asks them in reply to instead feed the crowd with what little they have. In an act that foreshadows the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and entrusts the loaves to His disciples who distribute the bread to the people. Of course this points toward the Eucharist, the only other place where we see bread taken, blessed, and broken in Mark’s Gospel. But this also tells us something about what it means to love one another and to love God. Jesus sees that the people are hungry, and so He meets their physical need. In fact we find in the teaching of Jesus that physical needs are a form of spiritual needs. If we are to truly love one another, we need to meet basic needs. Feeding the hungry is just one of the many ways we need to practice the love of which St. John spoke in today’s first reading. Meeting such physical needs is an important part of Jesus’ message, and it is an important implication of the Eucharist.

Just as the multiplication of bread points to Jesus’ later multiplication of His own body and blood in the Eucharist, which is blessed and broken, and distributed by Christ’s representatives to the people, so too the Eucharist points to our responsibility to feed and care for those who need feeding and caring. The Eucharist is our spiritual food and our spiritual drink. The Eucharist, however, is not meant to be ours alone, but to be shared with others through the outpouring of love that comes from lives of service in Christ. Let us then love one another, and meet the needs we find in those around us using the little we have to offer.

- Jeff Morrow