Easter 5-Year B

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost. Amen.

When I was growing up in the First Assemblies of God
church in Choutea Oklahoma, I desperately wanted to be
a good Christian. So I read the Bible, daily and attentively.
The older I got, the more I concentrated on the Gospels,
memorizing long passages like the Sermon on the Mount.
I figured that if I did my best to follow the direct teachings
of Jesus, I couldn’t go wrong. I noticed that all three of the
synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) contain a
passage called “The Great Commandment.” It’s recited at
the beginning of almost every Mass here at St. Mary’s:
“Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love

the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind. This is the first and great
commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments
hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

The remaining Gospel, John, contains a version called
The New Commandment: “A new commandment I give to
you, that you love one another.” Today’s Epistle reading
from First John can be read as a commentary on the
Great Commandment and New Commandment. Even
more, it can be read as a guide to love as the central
Christian practice.

As a teenager I realized that while other parts of the Bible,
even the Gospels, might sometimes be difficult or obscure,
THIS was a teaching that was simple and clear. It’s a
standard by which all the rest of Scripture can be
interpreted. St. Augustine said, “Whoever thinks he
understands the divine Scriptures in a way that does not
build the love of God and love of neighbor does not
understand it at all.”

In today’s reading, the First Epistle of John says, “Beloved,
let us love one another.” In last week’s sermon, Fr. Sean
told the story of heroic love shown by St. Maximillian
Kolbe, who exchanged his life for that of a fellow inmate in
Auschwitz. Fr. Sean also talked about the love we can

show in small ways in our everyday lives. This simple,
smaller way, this “little way” of expressing love and living
out our Christian calling was advocated by St. Therese of
Lisieux, a patron saint of St. Mary’s whose relic is on the
altar behind me. She wrote that something as simple as “a
word or a kindly smile, will often suffice to gladden a
wounded and sorrowful heart.”

This is so simple, yet, as you’ve probaby experienced, so
very difficult. Many of you know that I’m a barista at the
Nelson Atkins Museum. Before I open the coffee shop, I
like to duck into the back room, cross myself, say an Our
Father, a Hail Mary, a Glory Be, and then pray, “Oh my
Jesus, please help me to love you more and more every

day. And please help me to show your love to everyone I
meet.” Then I open the shop, and, during the course of the
day, I proceed to fail spectacularly. Invariably, I will be
annoyed by someone, I will be irritated by someone else,
someone will walk up to the counter five minutes before
closing and order four hot chocolates, a 16 ounce caramel
chai, and a 12 ounce half caf vanilla lavender, oat AND
almond milk latte, extremely hot. “You know,” they’ll say,
“hot enough to scald my tongue.” And while I may remain
professional, I’m not sure that in that moment I’m a shining
example of the love of God.

Trying to live up to this ideal, and failing, on a daily basis,
might be discouraging, but we are enabled to keep trying,

day after day after day, not by the success of our efforts.
Our ability to practice love comes from the fact that God
loves us. The Epistle says, “We love, because he first
loved us.”

This passage is full of images of the magnitude of God’s
love. “So we know and believe the love God has for us.
God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and
God abides in him.” God’s love is big enough that we can
live in it. We can make it our dwelling. We can rest in it.

The passage makes clear that love isn’t just “of God”, an
attribute that proceeds from God. God IS love. Love is the
Godhead’s very being and essence. In classical theism we

say that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
Love is omniscient. It know everything...about you. Love is
omnipresent. It is everywhere. It is vast enough to live in
because there is nowhere else we can live. Love is
omnipotent. No power in the universe is stronger than its
power.

These sound like abstract ideas, but God’s love was
shown to us, in the flesh, in the incarnation, death and
resurrection of Jesus. The Epistle says, “In this the love of
God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only
Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In
this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us,
and sent his Son to be an expiation for our sins.” Jesus

poured forth his love for all humanity on the Cross. His
heart was wounded by the centurion’s spear, providing all
humanity a certain shelter. This image of dwelling in
Christ’s wounded heart has been widely used in
Christianity since at least the medieval period. “Establish
your dwelling in the amiable Heart of Jesus,” one saint
wrote, “and you will find unalterable peace and strength to
carry out your good desires

And just as Jesus offered himself entirely to us on the
Cross as an expression of his infinite love, offering his own
heart as a dwelling place, he offers himself to us in the
Eucharist at every Mass. St. Peter Eymard declared, “The
Eucharist is the supreme proof of the love of Jesus.” In it,

Jesus comes to us in a form that will allow him to
physically and literally dwell in us.

“He who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in
him.” We make this a reality at every Mass. Jesus offers
his wounded heart to us in the Eucharist, in the bread and
wine. We offer him our wounded hearts, our sorrowful, our
confused and troubled and angry and lonely hearts. We
offer “ourselves, our souls and bodies.” And in this mutual
offering, we , in the words of Eucharistic Prayer One, are
“made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we
in him.”

The image of us dwelling in God and God dwelling in us is
found throughout the Gospel and Epistles of John. It’s in
both of today's Johannine readings. When we dwell in
God’s love, and God’s love dwells in us, we are free to
attempt to offer that love to others, to succeed AND to fail,
and over and over and at the last, to return to God’s
infinite love for us.

Of this, St. Therese wrote, “[It makes] me think of a little
child that is learning to stand but does not yet know how to
walk. In his desire to reach the top of the stairs to find his
mother, he lifts his little foot to climb the first step. It is all in
vain, and at each renewed effort he falls. Well, be like that
little child. Always keep lifting your foot to climb the ladder
of love, and do not imagine that you can mount even the
first step. All God asks of you is good will. From the top of
the ladder He looks lovingly upon you, and soon, touched
by your fruitless efforts, He will Himself come down, and,
taking you in His Arms, will carry you to His Kingdom
never again to leave Him.”