Sometimes God asks the same question more than once! In John 21:1-17, Jesus asks Peter the same question (‘Do you love me?‘) three times. The first time, He asks if he loves Him ‘more than these’, showing us that a love for God must be exclusive and above all other loves. We may be surprised at the importance God places on love, but since He is love (1 John 4:8), we ought not to be surprised. Jesus put love for God and others as the summing up of the law (see Matt 22:37) and told HIs disciples that it was through their love for each other that the world would come to know God and believe Him. (John 13:34-35)
Interestingly, Jesus addresses Peter as ‘Simon son of John’ in each of these questions, despite having named him Peter on earlier occasions (John 1:42, Matt 16:18). This reinstatement of Peter after his threefold denial of Jesus before the crucifixion reminds us that we have to lean on God rather than on our own understanding; perhaps Peter needed to be reminded that he could not hope to serve Jesus in his own strength. This whole chapter echoes earlier miracles (see Luke 5), but Peter must re-affirm his love before being commissioned to feed the lambs, look after the sheep and feed the sheep.
Jesus’s questions to Peter are not hard for us to understand, but sometimes we find it harder to deal with what we do understand than what we don’t! Certainly, we see the pre-eminence of love (see 1 Cor 13) and begin to understand that our service must stem from the overflow of love from God’s heart, rather than from our own abilities and strengths. God’s ways are the ways of love; this revolutionary strategy hasn’t changed and must always be our motivation for service.
