Third Sunday of Easter, May 1, 2022 – Acts 5:27-32; Revelation 5:11-14; John 20:1-19

So, I asked you, before the first reading, “Do you love God?” It’s a difficult question because we can’t see or feel or touch God. He’s an intellectual concept. How do we love an intellectual concept? Even if we talk about loving Jesus, the stories we know about Jesus took place 2,000 years ago. And we’re told that He’s with us in the Church and in the Eucharist but, aside from that little piece of bread, we can’t see Him or feel Him or touch Him, so it’s hard to love Him.

Today’s gospel provides one avenue through this puzzle. But, before we talk about it, we have to talk about today’s gospel. Because last Sunday, at the end of the gospel, John, the writer, told us that, “… there were many other things that were not written down in this book, but these are written so you may believe and, believing, have life in His name.” End of story! He just finished writing his gospel, then this morning we read the next chapter of the gospel. It’s got two endings. And the two endings are very different.

If you think about last week’s gospel, the overall story is this. The disciples are gathered in the upper room in Jerusalem, the capital city of Judea, in the room where the Last Supper took place. Jesus appears in the room, wishes them peace, and sends them on mission. “Receive the Holy Spirit. As the Father sent Me, so I send you. If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven them.”

The interesting gesture that Jesus performed in the story was that He breathed on the people in the room. None of us go around going [deep outward breath] on other people. Jesus breathed on them because, at the very beginning of St. John’s gospel, the very first words were these. “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. And all things were made through him, without him was made nothing. And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” St. John connects the story of creation with the coming of Jesus as all part of the same story. And, if you remember, in the story of the creation of the world in the Old Testament, there are two creations. The first time, God simply speaks over the roiling waters and says, “Let there be,” and there is. And then, after creating man and woman, the second chapter goes back and tells us the creation story again and says that, “God breathed into the lifeless form - the lump of clay – He breathed into it the breath of life and the clay became a living man. So, at the end of the gospel, St. John pictures Jesus as recreating the universe. How? By breathing the power of forgiveness into a forgiven human race. He’s starting life over again with the power to forgive. And that power was given to all the Christians there were at the time, just those people huddled in one room.

There are, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, different resurrection stories. One bunch of them takes place in Jerusalem, in and around the upper room. The other bunch of stories takes place 70 miles away, in Galilee, near the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus was raised, where He grew up, and where He made his headquarters until just before the crucifixion. All the good stuff we know about Jesus’ life, almost all of it took place in Galilee. And how did Jesus’ mission start in Galilee? He walked along the seashore, picking up friends along the way. And one of them was a guy named Simon, whom Jesus renamed Peter.

And so, St. John writes a second ending for his story that takes place not in Jerusalem, but in Galilee. And once again Jesus is home. He’s home in the place that He loved. And, once again, He’s going looking for fishermen. And, once again, one of them is named Simon, the son of John. Now known as Simon Peter. But Simon Peter had betrayed Jesus. And so, when Jesus appears, He refuses to give him the name that He gave him, the name of affection, Peter, the Rock. Instead, He calls him Simon, son of John. Jesus is starting over again. “Simon, son of John, do you love Me?”

Now, the interesting thing about this little dialogue between Jesus and Peter is that He uses the word love. But in the Greek language, there are two different words for love, and they mean very different things. There’s one word called agape, which means the way people imagine that we love God. God is up there and out there and awesome, and we love Him by adoring Him and fearing Him and worshipping Him. The other word for love is philia, which means I love you like a brother. You’re my best friend. You’re my BFF. And so, Jesus says to Simon, “Do you agape Me? Do you adore Me and revere Me?” And Simon says back to Him, “You know that I philia you. You’re my buddy. You’re my best friend.” Ah, maybe that’s not the answer Jesus was looking for. So He says to him a second time, “Do you agape Me? I want you to worship me as risen Lord.” And Peter says, “You know that I philia you. I’ve loved you since the first time we met.” So then, Jesus changes his tack. He says back to Simon, “Simon, son of John, do you philia Me? Are you really? Are you really my best friend? You who denied knowing me three times. Are you really my best friend?” And all Peter can do is answer again, “You know everything. You know that I love you.” And each time Peter answered, Jesus said to him, “Ok. If you really are my best friend, then feed my sheep. That’s what I want you to do for Me, if you’re really my best friend.”

The reason I asked you, before the first reading, “Do you think you love God?” is because, in Jesus’ teaching, He said the first commandment is thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all the heart and all thy soul and all thy mind and all thy strength and any other qualities you have, you have to use to them to love God. The word He used for that commandment was agape. That’s pretty difficult. I had that same issue throughout my own teenage years. Even after I entered the seminary, I didn’t know if I really loved God. Because I didn’t feel anything. Nothing. But I wanted to be a priest. It didn’t seem right. It was this gospel that helped me to reconcile the issue.

If you notice, in the first resurrection stories, around Jerusalem, Jesus recreates the world through the power of forgiveness. And he missions all Christians to do that. In the second resurrection story, centered in Galilee, He reconstitutes His chosen missionaries, the church. And so, because one of the things I like to do is art, when I was in the seminary, guys would come to me in ordination year, and ask me to design their chalice and their paten for them. So, when it came time for me to be ordained, I designed my own. You don’t see this too often because it’s over in the other church. I use it for daily Mass. But the bottom of the chalice has three little pictures engraved on it. There is the Ten Commandments, and there is a scroll that represents the writings of the Old Testament prophets, and there‘s a little thing that looks like a tulip, that represents the staff of Jesse that budded. Jesse was the father of St. Joseph, who recreated the House of David in his foster son, Jesus. And the Old Testament gave birth to the New Testament. This is a stone, this thing here - a piece of rock. The church is built on the rock of Simon Peter, which offers to the whole world the chalice of salvation. The blood shed for the forgiveness of the world. But to remind myself of what I was doing, and to answer my own question to myself, whether or not I loved God, I had engraved on my plate that holds the bread, broken for us for forgiveness of the world. I wrote on it three words, “Feed my sheep.”

I finally figured out that, if I want to love God, what I need to do is feed God’s sheep with the talents I have. And we’re all called to do exactly the same thing. You are involved, every day, in feeding sheep. If you’re still working for a living, the people who are your customers or your fellow workers or your bosses or your clients, you are busy feeding them. And how you feed them indicates how much you love or don’t love God. You have family that you feed every day. Not just with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but with a whole bunch of other things. And how you feed them indicates how you love God and whether you love God. And we all feed all sorts of other things. We feed our community organizations and our schools and our churches and our clubs. We feed all sorts of things.

“Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven them. As the Father sent Me, I send you. Do you really love me? Are you really my BFF? Then feed my sheep.”