Reading 1, 1 John 4:7-10

7 My dear friends, let us love one another, since love is from God and everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God.

8 Whoever fails to love does not know God, because God is love.

the shape of love....

9 This is the revelation of God’s love for us, that God sent his only Son into the world that we might have life through him.

10 Love consists in this: it is not we who loved God, but God loved us and sent his Son to expiate our sins

Gospel, Mark 6:34-44

34 So as he stepped ashore he saw a large crowd; and he took pity on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he set himself to teach them at some length.

35 By now it was getting very late, and his disciples came up to him and said, ‘This is a lonely place and it is getting very late,

36 so send them away, and they can go to the farms and villages round about, to buy themselves something to eat.’

37 He replied, ‘Give them something to eat yourselves.’ They answered, ‘Are we to go and spend two hundred denarii on bread for them to eat?’

38 He asked, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ And when they had found out they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’

39 Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass,

40 and they sat down on the ground in squares of hundreds and fifties.

41 Then he took the five loaves and the two fish, raised his eyes to heaven and said the blessing; then he broke the loaves and began handing them to his disciples to distribute among the people. He also shared out the two fish among them all.

42 They all ate as much as they wanted.

43 They collected twelve basketfuls of scraps of bread and pieces of fish.

44 Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.

 The passage in the letter of John is very carefully worded, so that by repetition and variation of the basic message, the readers should be clear about the truth, that God is love. Before this time, God had been allocated all sorts of attributes, power, wisdom, incomprehensibility and so on, but this is the first time in history a person defined God as love. This limits the actions of God: they have to be expressions of love. Of course, it’s not John who limits God, but rather God who does so. God freely chooses to be love. This is a momentous discovery which humanity still prefers to ignore. In the name of God all manner of terrible deeds are done-by Christians and Hindus as well as Moslems-which are blasphemies against God’s revelation of his/her self as love.

 But we must not sentimentalise love. John immediately shows the reader the true shape of love: it is God’s giving of himself in his Son, so that in Him humanity should make peace with God, and have life. In itself humanity is incapable of peace and life, but in Christ it shares them. Love is also understanding, planning, doing, and suffering. Love is the sharing of one life for the good of another, in the hope that it will be reciprocated. God first loved us, in the hope that we might learn to love God and each other.

 The same shape of love is seen in the story of the feeding of the 5000. Jesus sees the need of the people for a shepherd, a wise guide. He provides teaching and refuses to allow his disciples to think they have no resources to feed the people. He uses what they have, blesses and breaks it.  He creates “responsible groups” out of the mass of people so that they must recognise their neighbours. Then the miracle can happen. Mark contrasts Jesus the true shepherd with Herod (in the passage just before this), who does not feed his people, but feeds on his people even to the extent of having a severed head brought to his table. The study of love and its strategies is the heart of Christian education.