We continue our celebration of the Resurrection of the Lord on this Second Sunday of Easter.  And we are in the second week of our message series for the Easter season which we are calling “Love Lives.”
            Last week, on Easter Sunday, we saw how Jesus was love in action.  Sometimes his love was kind and gentle, and sometimes his love was challenging and fierce.  But every time you see Jesus, you see love in action.
            As we all know, loving others does not always guarantee a loving response.  You can do good, and people might not like you. You can do good and people will criticize you.  This is exactly what happened to Jesus.  Jesus acted with perfect love, and in response his enemies had him put to death.  On Good Friday it looked as if love failed, that love had died.
            Then something extraordinary happened.  Jesus did not stay dead.  He rose from the dead.  On Easter Sunday, Jesus emerged from the grave victorious over sin, death, darkness, hatred, jealousy, and violence.  Easter is the celebration that love lives. God is love and he lives. 
            Easter is a celebration that the same power that gave Jesus the ability to love others is available to us.  Through a relationship with Jesus Christ we can access the power to love the people around us the way we really want to love them.
            In order to better access God’s love, we need to understand what God’s love is and what it is not.  We use the word “love” in many different contexts. We love our family and friends, and the Phillies (well, in my case, I love the Mets), we love pizza and ice cream, and anything chocolate.  In the spectrum of our emotions there isn’t always a great deal of difference between love and like.
            Then there is the way that God loves us.  God has loved us first and his love is unconditional. We read about this love in one of the shortest and most beautiful books of the Bible, the First Letter of John.  First John is actually more of a poem or a sermon than your typical letter and, as such, beautifully underlines the message of the Gospels. First John has only five chapters and I invite you to read this amazing text in the course of this series.
            One of my favorite lines in the Bible is from 1 John 4:8, “God is love.”  St. John tells us that God is love. He doesn’t say that God has love or feels love or shares love.  God is love; love is the essence of his character.
            Further, since God is perfect love in the fellowship of the Trinity, he did not need to create us or anything.  God was not lonely or bored.  Rather, he created us to express his love.  We have been created out of his love, in his love, and for his love. We live our lives in his love.
            What does that mean?  It means, quite simply, he is for us.  He is for us even when everything else is against us.  He is for us even when everyone else is against us.  He is for us even if we don’t know it.
            While God is always for us, he does ask something from us. But even everything he asks from us is ultimately for us. St. John writes: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God, and everyone who loves the Father loves also the one begotten by him” (1 Jn 5:1).
            The first key to loving others is to see them as God sees them.  When you and I look at the people around us, we see a great many things depending on the person. We may see the selfishness of a family member, or the irritating habits of a classmate or co-worker.  We see a potential customer or competitor.  If I like you, I probably see good things, if I don’t like you, I probably see bad things.  Whatever it is we see, however much we see, we do not see the whole picture.
            On our own power our love can never be sincere and pure like God’s. Love based on our human nature and human power can be fickle because it is love based on so many things:  our needs and our wants; our will, and our way. That’s not a condemnation, that’s just a fact.
            When looking at someone God doesn’t see a pain or a problem, an obstacle or an opportunity, an intrusion or an interruption, an enemy or an ally, or a friend or a foe.  He sees a son or a daughter.
            St. John goes onto to tell us how we can know for sure that we are loving people. He writes: “In this way we know that we love the children of God when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments” (1 Jn 5: 2-3a).
            This may sound strange, because when you speak of love, commands and commandments are usually not the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, in our culture commands and love are thought of as polar opposites.  But the commandments of God do not exist to control us, they exist to teach us. They are teaching us what love looks like.
            We see this in the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses.  They are mostly commands on basic human decency.  By the time we get to Jesus’ life, the end of his life at the Last Supper, God’s command is much wider and more comprehensive: “Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15.12).  The disciples had all experienced Jesus’ love, they were to be for others as Jesus was for them.
            How do we then access God’s power to love?  St. John tells us, “And the victory that conquers the world is our faith. The victor over the world is the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God” (1 Jn 5:4-5).  We love as God loves by faith.
            Faith is believing in something we can’t see. Faith is like a pair of glasses that allow us to see the world from God’s perspective instead of ours.
            Love takes faith because as we have already noted, love does not always get rewarded in the short term. On Good Friday it looked like Jesus’ love had been punished with a painful death.  Love can look like a loser’s strategy. It wasn’t until Easter Sunday that love proved victorious.
            It takes faith to see past someone’s flaws and failures and recognize them as the beloved children of God.  It takes faith to appreciate that even if in the moment my love is not appreciated by someone else, it is still the right call.  It takes faith to believe that the loving choice is the one we should always take. It takes faith to acknowledge that the loving action will be better for us in the long run.  It takes faith to accept that it’s worth it to make the tough call
because that’s the most loving call.  It takes faith to work to restore a broken relationship, even when you don’t feel like it, even when it doesn’t feel worth it.  It takes faith to apologize when you know you own only a small part of the problem, or even when it wasn’t your fault at all.  It takes faith to accept God’s commands of love when they don’t make sense.
            In today’s gospel we see St. Thomas and the other apostles struggling with their experience of the Resurrection. It just doesn’t make any sense to them.  The only way forward for them is to accept it in faith.
            At some point in our walk with God, his command to love won’t make sense.  When we accept that command in faith then we will know we are loving as he loves.
            This week ask God to help you to see every person you see as his son or his daughter.  To love as God loves, we’ve got to see as he sees.