5/10/2026_Easter 6_Love is (Not) Easy
The most disappointing thing I’ve learned in my adult life is that love is easy—until it has to take shape.
It’s too easy to fall in love, and fairly easy to feel love: romantic love, friendship, care for neighbor, even a genuine desire to follow Jesus. And then the real work begins as the world worlds and people people. Family tensions. Church misunderstandings. The person on the bus taking a phone call on speaker. The human being I might walk a block around because I simply do not have the emotional capacity to be asked for money again today.
Our readings meet us exactly there: in the lived, complicated reality of trying to love in the world as it actually is.
In the Gospel, we are still in the Farewell Discourse. Jesus is speaking to disciples who are anxious, confused, and about to lose the physical presence of the one who has grounded their lives. Some of them will become so afraid that they betray him.
And Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
And that little word if catches me in the throat—making love sound conditional, as though belonging to God depends on an overwhelming list concrete actions .
But the word “keep” here—tēreō—doesn’t mean rigid obedience but guarding, holding onto, treasuring. And the commandment Jesus has already given them is this: love one another as I have loved you.
So maybe Jesus is not issuing an ultimatum. Maybe he is describing what love becomes when it takes shape in real life.
When you love me, you will begin to hold onto the things that make for life. When you abide in my love, that love will begin to spill outward toward others. To love God is to be drawn more deeply into communion—with one another, with creation, with the world God refuses to abandon.
And honestly, that changes how I hear my own failures.
Maybe walking the extra block is not proof that I am failing at loving God. Maybe it is information. Information about my exhaustion, my fear, my unrootedness. An invitation to ask: what do I need in order to find my grounding again?
Then comes the promise: “I will ask God to give you another Advocate.”
The word is Paraklētos: comforter, counselor, helper, companion. One who stands alongside you. One who refuses to leave you alone in what you are facing.
And then Jesus says: “You know this Advocate because they abide with you, and will be in you.”
“Abide”—menō—means to remain, to dwell, to make a home. We heard it last week… “In God’s house there are many abiding places.”
This is not God occasionally visiting your life. This is God choosing to dwell within you.
So when the Gospel says, “I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you,” it is describing this profound interwoven life between God and humanity.
In her book God for Us, Catholic theologian Catherine Mowry LaCugna writes that the Trinity is not a puzzle to solve so much as a way of describing God’s living relationship with us. God’s life is not closed off from humanity. God’s life opens outward, drawing us into communion.
For LaCugna, salvation is participation now in the life of God itself.
Which means Jesus is not saying, “One day you may get close to God.” He is saying: God is already making a home in you.
Theologians call this mutual indwelling—this interwoven life of God and humanity. Your identity is not something you must endlessly construct or defend. It is something you receive and live within. You belong to a communion that began in God long before you arrived.
And then we hear Peter speaking to a vulnerable community living under suspicion and fear. He says, “Even if you suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed.”
Here, the exegesis matters.
When Jesus says, “Even if you suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed,” he is not asking anyone to remain in places of abuse, danger, or harm, but reminding us that choosing love, truth, and justice in a fearful world can carry a cost—and that God is present with us in that struggle, never blessing the harm itself.
The word for “blessed” echoes Jesus’ Beatitudes. It doesn’t mean “happy” in a surface-level sense. It means living in alignment with God’s deeper reality—even when circumstances are hard or don’t reflect it.
“Always be ready to give an account for the hope that is in you.”
Not certainty. Not perfection. Hope.
And Christian hope is not wishful thinking. It is trust that God is still at work—even in places that look lifeless.
That is why Peter reaches toward baptism, death, resurrection, even Christ descending to the dead. He is trying to say—there is nowhere God refuses to go. Not suffering. Not failure. Not grief. Not death itself.
And that becomes the thread holding these readings together.
You are called to love in a way that takes shape in real life. You are called to trust that you are not alone in it. You are called to remember that your identity rests somewhere deeper than fear. And you are called to believe that suffering does not get the last word—because God is already at work there, bringing life.
And that sounds beautiful until it collides with ordinary life and ordinary exhaustion.
What does it actually look like to keep love? Not just feel it, but guard it?
What does it look like to live as though the Spirit truly abides in you? Not only in peaceful moments, but in strained conversations, hard decisions, and the days you feel worn thin?
For LaCugna, the deeper we enter communion with God, the more our lives open outward toward others—in mercy, tenderness, courage, and shared life.
If I can preach to myself today—what I really need to hear— When you choose, towards others and yourself, patience instead of cruelty, compassion instead of indifference, acknowledgement instead of avoidance, honesty instead of self-protection—those are not merely moral choices. They are participation in the life of God.
Even these small acts of love matter.
They become signs that the life of God is still moving through the world: a story where love is stronger than fear, presence stronger than abandonment, and life stronger than death.
An perhaps our invitation is to live more deeply into what is already true: to let love take shape, to trust you are not alone, to remember who you are, and to keep going— trusting that even now, wherever you might be, God is at work in you and through you, telling a story of life.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
