Daily Thought For April 6, 2018

Love Increases The More It Is Given

This is part of the mystery of the Risen Jesus, of the humility of God: he asks men and women for their contribution. He needs their assent. The Lord asks us to set out for him. He asks us to become fishers for him. He asks us to trust him and to act according to the guidance of his Word. He expects us to take this Word of his as more important than our own experiences and perceptions. He asks us to act and to live on the basis of his Word.

But then something remarkable happens. When the disciples return Jesus does not need their fish. He has already prepared breakfast, and now invites the disciples to eat it; he is the host who provides them with food. The gift is mysterious but nevertheless not hard to decipher. The bread is he himself: I am the bread of life. He is the grain of wheat that dies and now bears fruit a hundredfold and is abundant for everyone until the end of time. His cross on which he gave himself is the miraculous multiplication of loaves, the divine overcoming of the attempt by the devil to catch people with bread and dramatics. Only love can bring about the true multiplication of bread. Material gifts, what is quantitative, always diminish through being divided.


Love however increases the more it gives itself. Jesus is the bread, and he is also the fish that for our sake has gone down into the water of death to look for us there and to find us. This is the lesson of the breakfast to which Jesus invites his own on the borderline of time and eternity, the Eucharist. Come and eat, he says to us and thus enables us already to cross the boundary of time and death.

Pope Benedict XVI (from the Daily Reflection from the Magnificat)