Published: May 22, 2026
There is a moment in the Gospel of John that is almost too intimate to read without pausing. The Risen Christ, standing on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias in the early morning light, turns to the man who denied him three times and asks a question that carries the weight of the entire relationship between God and humanity: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
He asks it three times. Most Scripture scholars note the deliberate symmetry: three denials around a charcoal fire on the night of the Passion, and now three professions of love around another charcoal fire on the shore of new life. Jesus is not rubbing Peter's nose in his failure. He is doing something far more tender and far more radical. He is rebuilding a man from the inside out.
This passage — John 21:15–19 — comes to us today as we move toward the close of the Easter season, just days before Pentecost. The Church gives us this text at precisely this moment because it is a text about what the Resurrection actually does to broken people. It does not simply restore them to where they were before. It commissions them. It gives them a new name, a new task, and a new future.
The Wound That Heals
Peter had done the unthinkable. He had looked a servant girl in the eye and said, "I do not know the man." Three times. The crowing of the rooster in Luke's Gospel is followed immediately by the note that "the Lord turned and looked at Peter." That look has haunted Christian imagination for centuries. What was in it? Anger? Disappointment? Luke says only that Peter "went out and wept bitterly."
Now, weeks later, Peter is back on the water doing what he always did before Jesus called him — fishing. There is something heartbreaking about that image. A man returned to his old life because he did not know whether the new life was still available to him after what he had done.
But Jesus comes to the shore. He cooks breakfast. He feeds them. And then, when the meal is done, he asks the question.
The Greek text of the Gospel is worth dwelling on here, though we receive it in translation. In the first two questions, Jesus uses the word agapas — from agape, the deep, self-giving love that is often associated with divine charity. Peter responds both times with philō se — "I love you" — using the word for personal, affectionate friendship. Some scholars have wondered whether Peter is consciously using a lesser word, humbled by his own failure into a more modest claim. Then, in the third question, Jesus himself shifts and uses phileis — as if meeting Peter exactly where Peter is willing to stand. It is as though Christ says: very well, that is the love you have to offer me right now. It is enough. Now go and serve.
This is not a small theological detail. It is a window into the mercy of God. Jesus does not require Peter to make claims he cannot back up. He accepts the love Peter has, wounds and all, and makes it the foundation of a mission.
Feed My Lambs. Tend My Sheep. Feed My Sheep.
Three times Jesus asks. Three times he responds with a commission. "Feed my lambs." "Tend my sheep." "Feed my sheep." The Church sees in this moment the institution of the pastoral office — Peter receives not simply forgiveness but responsibility. He is being made a shepherd.
This is the logic of Christian mercy from the beginning: to be forgiven is to be entrusted. God does not simply wipe the slate clean and leave us standing there, relieved but purposeless. He wipes the slate clean and hands us a calling. The guilt is gone, but something more than absence fills the space it leaves behind. A vocation takes its place.
This pattern runs through the whole of Scripture. Moses murders a man and flees to the desert, and God meets him in a burning bush and sends him back. Jonah runs from his mission, nearly drowns, and is sent again to Nineveh. Paul persecutes the Church with ferocity, is knocked from his horse on the Damascus road, and within days is preaching in the synagogues. The Resurrection of Christ is the supreme expression of this pattern: the death that should have ended everything becomes the beginning of something that will never end.
Peter is not given his freedom back. He is given a flock.
The Cost of Love
The passage does not end in comfort. Jesus tells Peter something sobering: "When you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." The evangelist adds plainly: "He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God."
Love, the Gospel is telling us, has a cost. This is not love as a feeling or a preference. This is love as the orientation of an entire life, including its ending. Peter is being told, in the gentlest possible terms, that following Christ will eventually require everything. And then Jesus says the two words that contain the whole of Christian discipleship: "Follow me."
There is no program here. No strategy. No five-step plan. Just those two words, and the whole life of a person is asked to answer them.
What This Means for Us
We are not so different from Peter on that shore. Most of us carry some private form of the denial — a moment when fear or weakness or selfishness made us act contrary to the love we profess. We know the weight of that. And we know, or perhaps we have not yet allowed ourselves to believe, that the Risen Christ is standing on the shore of our ordinary lives asking us the same question.
Do you love me?
Not: have you been perfect? Not: have you never failed? Not: have you proven yourself worthy? Just: do you love me?
The question is both the easiest and the hardest we will ever face. It is easy because love, even imperfect love, even wounded love, is something most of us can honestly claim. It is hard because answering "yes" carries with it the full weight of the commission: then feed my lambs. Then tend my sheep. Then feed my sheep.
This is what it means to live in the aftermath of Easter. The Resurrection is not simply a miracle that happened once to one person two thousand years ago. It is an ongoing reality that reaches into the present moment and asks each of us to step back into the vocation we may have fled, the relationship we may have damaged, the community we may have neglected. It invites us to stop going back to the boats of our old life and to receive instead the breakfast Christ is already preparing for us on the shore.
The Seventh Week of Easter is almost over. Pentecost is coming. The Spirit who will descend upon the Church is the same Spirit who can turn our broken, three-times-repeated "you know that I love you" into something that actually feeds people. Into something that actually tends the flock.
We do not have to be perfect for that. We only have to be willing to say yes.
Gospel: John 21:15–19 | Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter | May 22, 2026