Love has to be the one of the most often used and yet least understood words to be found in the English language these days.  It seems that just about everyone claims to love or to be loved, and yet nobody seems to know what love really is. 

People can acquire various nicknames for any of a number of reasons.  One of the sad ironies of life is that the nicknames that are given for negative reasons are the ones that always seem to stick and to haunt the people who bear them for the longest period of time.  On this Sunday after Easter the Gospel tells the story that earned the Lord’s disciple Thomas the nickname “Doubting Thomas.”  Twenty centuries have come and gone and this poor fellow still hasn’t lived it down. 

   The resurrection of Jesus Christ has always been a stumbling block to worldly-minded people because it totally contradicts our experience, which tells us that when people die, they remain dead. 

Caiaphas, a sworn enemy of Jesus, unwittingly prophesied the mission of the Savior: the justification of sinners through His suffering and death.

He (Luther) believed, as do we who bear his name today, that in our worship of God and particularly in the Lord’s Supper, we aren’t giving God anything or doing anything for Him.  On the contrary, He is serving us with His gifts of salvation and we are merely receiving those gifts with thanksgiving.

 It has a note of joy in it as we remember the triumphant entry of our Lord into the holy city of Jerusalem but, at the same time, we can’t help but to bear in mind the reason why He went to Jerusalem that last time.  

The truth of the matter is that we come to God with our cares and concerns, asking Him to deal with them according to His will, but then when things don’t work out quite the way that we would like them to, we start complaining that God either hasn’t answered our prayer or hasn’t dealt with us fairly and lovingly, even though we are well aware of the fact that we have qualified all of our requests with the phrase:  “Thy will be done”