[stephenkhoo]

CAPACITY TO LOVE COMES FROM THE LOVE OF GOD IN CHRIST’S DEATH ESPECIALLY IN THE EUCHARIST
SCRIPTURE READINGS: 1 JN 4:7-10; PS 71: 1-2, 3-4, 7-8, MK 6:34-44



Christmas is the revelation of God’s love for us when God assumed our human nature in Christ. This love that St John speaks about is not a philosophical understanding of God’s love. Rather, he points to a particular event, namely, the incarnation and the passion to speak about God’s love. “God’s love for us was revealed when God sent into the world his only Son so that we could have life through him … but God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.” So for John, our understanding of God’s love must be a personal consciousness, not a mere intellectual perception of His love. A true knowledge of God’s love must be existential, personal and doctrinal. It is within this context that John was combating the Gnostics who reduced salvation to a mere intellectual illumination of the truth.

Indeed, love is more than just reason. In fact, reason does not know what love does. When we love, we go beyond logic and cold reason where everything is seen in a calculative manner. Love comes from the heart and the latter has its own reason by intuition. The crisis of faith today springs from the fact that many of us are not ready to open our hearts to love. We are afraid to be in touch with our feelings when love is actually affection, passion and emotions. Such people who never venture to love or take the risk of opening themselves up to someone can never experience the full meaning of love. Isn’t this the way Jesus loves when He handed Himself over to us? So when we are able to hand ourselves, our lives, our thoughts and innermost secrets to another, aren’t we too like Jesus, taking the risk to hand over ourselves because of love?

For in love there is a true knowledge that comes from a personal knowing. When St John wrote, “everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love”, he is not speaking about an intellectual understanding of love. The biblical interpretation of knowledge is always that of intimacy, especially in marriage. One knows another person, or is known by another, only when one is ready to give oneself to the other, not just in doing things for the person but when one is ready to open one’s heart to another and make room for that person. In pouring out one’s deepest secrets and feelings to another, that person is known as a person, for it is no longer some external knowledge of that person, but an interior knowledge of the person’s thinking and feeling, knowing and willing. This precisely was the way Jesus loves and knows His Father. Only because Jesus knows His Father’s love could He also extend that same love to us.

Today’s story of the multiplication of the loaves is an anticipation of the ultimate revelation of His love for us, which is to take place at the passion of Jesus. This miracle would be remembered by the disciples after His death and resurrection because at the Last Supper, Jesus broke bread for them, saying, “This is my Body, given up for you” and with the wine, He said, “This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is to be poured out for many.” Indeed, Jesus wants to be that bread broken for the world, the blood shed for the redemption of many. Such an outpouring and self-emptying of Christ for us in the Eucharist which is the extension of His incarnation is possible only because He feels for us as much as the Father feels for us.

This is what St John meant when he said, “this is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.” Indeed, it is not so much our love for God; rather, it is God’s love for us that makes it possible for us to love like Him. By emptying His divinity to share in our humanity, Jesus reveals to us that man is capable of loving God so long as he is loved by God. By His life of unconditional love and total trust in God as a man, He shows us the depth of God’s love by sharing in our suffering. Most of all by His death, He reveals the utter love of God who, without reservation, gave Himself totally to us in Jesus.

On this basis alone, we are called to love like God in Jesus. We are called to manifest the love of God in Jesus particularly during this season of Epiphany. St John makes it clear that the command to love one another is rooted in the love of God in us, and the measure by which we know whether God’s love is in us, is in our love for others, “since love comes from God and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.”

Thus, if we find ourselves lacking love for the people in our lives, it is because our knowledge of God’s love remains on the cerebral level rather than on the level of personal experience. Anyone who knows how much God has loved him can no longer contain this love within himself. Anyone who knows the price of God’s love for us in His death on the cross will no longer harbour resentment and grudges against those who have hurt them. For the truth is that no one can cause us so much hurt as we have towards Jesus. So with the love of God in our heart, we begin to see everyone not with the eyes of reason but with the eyes of the heart and the eyes of faith that enable us to see in the sinner, the seed of sainthood.

That is why, in His wisdom and love, Jesus left the Church the Eucharist, so that we can recall and experience His love for us every time we celebrate the Eucharist. The Eucharist is in fact the prolongation of His incarnation made possible through His resurrection. Just as the Magi in faith saw in the baby Jesus the King and Messiah of the world, so too in faith, what we see beyond the bread is Jesus truly present in the bread and wine. Through the Eucharist, we are able to partake in a real way, the same sacrifice of Jesus at Calvary sacramentally, and are thus empowered to be generous like Him in giving ourselves to others. Through the Eucharist we are also able to participate in the resurrected life because every time we receive the Eucharist and live out the life of Christ, we have a share of that divine life.

So today, we are more privileged than the Magi, the holy people of Israel, such as Simeon and Anna, and indeed the people of Israel. They saw only the baby Jesus. They saw the miracles He worked in Israel during His ministry. But not all came to see Jesus as the Son of God until after His death and resurrection. However, we are able to touch, feel, hear and see Jesus in the Eucharist. It does not really matter whether we have encountered Jesus physically in the flesh 2000 years ago, or encounter Jesus now in the flesh in the Eucharist today, because what matters at the end is whether we have the eyes of faith like the Magi to see beyond the mere bread or the body of Jesus, to recognize Him as truly the Son of God, the Saviour of the World, the love of God made flesh. If we have that faith, then Jesus’ sacrifice of becoming man and dying for us would not have been in vain. Contemplating on the mystery of His love for us as we receive Him in the Eucharist and adoring Him in the Blessed Sacrament, we will continue to receive His Holy Spirit to love as He has loved, even if it costs us our lives.