Three times the love

 Sermon for Easter III, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Text: John 21:1-19

I love you all. I really do. This may be a surprise to some who I don’t know very well, and that is because love occurs in the context of a relationship. I have good relationships with many people here, but with some others I have more of a passing relationship. But I love you just the same. There is the question of what do I mean by expressing love for all of you? Do I feel the same way about everyone? That is the issue we face with the gospel reading this morning, specifically toward the end where Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” The problem with the English language is that we have few words for love: adore, love, affection, fondness, and friendship, and they don’t exactly fit the Greek words for love that Jesus and Peter use. We have to explain what we mean when we say “I love you” to someone.

Those Greek words of love used in the reading are agapé, meaning an unconditional, selfless, sacrificial love, and philos, an affectionate friendship or brotherly love. Jesus asks Peter twice if he loves Jesus unconditionally, and then the third time if Peter loves him as a dear friend. Peter responds each time saying that he loves Jesus as a friend, or perhaps a brother. It appears that John uses these two words for love interchangeably as he does in other parts of his gospel, so we can’t make much of what Jesus or Peter mean, or contrast those two words of love. That is too bad, because it would have made for a great sermon. But there is still the question of why Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves Jesus, and what feeding or tending to sheep or goats is all about. There is something in this reading that moves the story of Jesus’ resurrection along.

In chapter 10 of John’s gospel, Jesus tells the people around him of the good shepherd who cares for and defends his flock, and that he is the good shepherd. Because of that reference, it is known as the Good Shepherd passage. That theme is present in the conversation between Jesus and Peter, but this time, Peter is called to be the shepherd. First, Jesus says to him, feed Jesus’ lambs, then he says to tend his sheep, and then at last to feed his sheep. It is a progression of raising the young that starts by making sure that they have enough to eat, or for Peter, feeding Jesus’ teachings to new believers hungry for truth and salvation. Once they have matured and become sheep, Peter is to tend to them, to lead them, to care for them, to protect them. Peter is also to give them food to keep them healthy, spiritual food for the community of believers and to feed them more of Jesus’ teachings to help the community thrive. This is Jesus’ call to Peter to live up to his name, that is, rock, on which the community, the church, is to be built. And that rock is made up of love, somewhere between affectionate friendship or brotherhood, and selfless, sacrificial love. Where lambs and sheep graze on grass for food, the church grazes on Jesus’ actions and words to live. This is Jesus’ call to Peter to take over teaching and building the community, because Jesus is about to ascend to heaven.

It is easy to draw a line between Peter’s three denials of Jesus and Jesus asking him three times if he loves Jesus, but I do not think that is the reason for the three questions. Maybe Jesus was looking for a sure commitment from the rock on which the church was to be built. Maybe he was looking to see if Peter understood what he had been prepared to carry out. But I don’t think Jesus was testing Peter’s love for him after denying him three times to others. That doesn’t fit the love Jesus had for Peter or any of the other disciples, even Judas. Three is a sacred number in scripture, along with seven and twelve, so three points to the holiness, the sacredness of the conversation between Jesus and Peter. Given what Jesus is saying to Peter, that holiness is passed to Peter, who will bring it to the church and all who believe. If anything, it is a restoration of Jesus’ holiness that was covered over by his trial and death and a reminder that it was not lost.

We have experienced a loss of holiness and sanctity in the past few months, as we see people deported without the legal due process. We’ve seen the sanctity of the rule of law discarded as judicial rulings are ignored. We’ve seen the sanctity of people ignored as they are treated or spoken of without dignity or grace. The holiness and sanctity that we have lived with and participated in up to this point in time are being covered over by an overt exercise of power and vengeance, things that Jesus spoke against. It is hard to watch, and makes me wonder that if we can’t keep our social foundation of love together, a foundation that we have built our lives on, then what do we do? What will we lose if that foundation fails? What will we be left with?

The cynical, hard-bitten view of us having naively built a society on love in its many forms is discouraging, but that attitude offers nothing toward building a different, just world. It seeks to wallow in its own self-pity because it believes that life and the world are worthless. Peter himself was likely on the verge of succumbing to a cynical, bitter life as he returned to his occupation as a fisherman, interrupted by following a charismatic preacher who got himself killed. But it was Peter’s encounter with the resurrected Jesus who gave him hope and a new purpose in life. It was an encounter that turned him to leading people out of bitterness and despair by building a community that loved unconditionally as friends, or at least as acquaintances. Maybe that was Jesus’ reason for asking Peter three times, to get him to see that returning to love and finding hope for the future, in the face of failure, was not foolish. Being a disciple meant not giving up, but finding a way to make Jesus’ love for the world real. Maybe Jesus showed him something that we could learn, that there is a future worth working toward. And like Peter, we have a vision of what it could look like that starts with loving your neighbor as Jesus loves us, both philos and agapé.