On Loving God

The 21st chapter of John's gospel might very well be my favorite chapter of the entire Bible. It comes right at the end, and it recounts Jesus' post-resurrection appearance to his disciples, and particularly to Peter, along the Sea of Galilee. It's a deeply moving passage, and there's so much rich and various stuff that can be taken from it. I'm sure entire books could be written based on reflections from this chapter, and I'm sure they have.

But I'm not going to write a book here. (At least that's not my intention--you, reading the final version of this post have a better idea than I do of how long this is actually going to be. For me, promises of brevity tend to come at the beginning of especially long reflections.)

Anyway, one thing in particular has struck me about this passage over the past few days, and that's Peter's peculiar boldness. At this point in John's gospel, Peter has already seen the resurrected Jesus once before. Surely he shared in the joy of the rest of the disciples, but he played no prominent role in that first meeting. Now, as this passage opens, he's gone back to his old pre-Jesus occupation of fishing, and we can be sure that fresh in his mind is his three-time denial of Jesus the previous Friday.

If Peter is feeling ashamed of his denial, Jesus does nothing to ease the burden, at least at first. He calls him by his old name, "Simon, son of John," and he asks three times, "do you love me," mirroring the three times Peter had denied even knowing him. By the third time, John even tells us that Peter felt hurt by the questioning.

And this is where Peter's response is so interesting. He says not just "yes, Lord, I love you," but "you know that I love you."

"Really?" a less friendly Jesus might retort. "The evidence would indicate the contrary. Sure, you were my best friend when I was doing all sorts of miracles and the crowds thought I was great, but when times got rough, when I could have used a friend, you said you didn't even know me. Is that love? What separates you from the rest of the crowd that was praising me one day and demanding my death the next?"

Is this what was running through Peter's mind as Jesus asked him "do you love me?" the third time? Was Jesus just waiting for the right answer, that he clearly didn't? But Peter's third answer, even through all the hurt and the pathos, is even more emphatic: "Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you."

This passage has been on my mind because I've felt a lot like Peter in the past few weeks. It's not that I've denied my Lord recently, at least not directly. But having just graduated last month, and starting work next week (I started this post last week), I am in the middle of a big transition. My familiar roles and relationships and surroundings--the concrete, day-to-day stuff through which I sought to follow and came to know Christ--are gone, and they haven't been replaced by anything comparable yet. And not quite sure what to do with myself, the temptation is to go back to fishing, as it were--to entertain again all the old habits and ambitions and attitudes that defined me before I found my firm identity in Christ.

And this is where Peter's boldness is so striking. I think that in Christian life, the doubt we sometimes struggle with the most is not so much whether God loves us, but whether we love God. It's a dignifying doubt, because it means that we're not satisfied with being passive receptors of God's one-way love, and we realize that that's not what a true loving relationship looks like anyways. But it's also an especially difficult doubt, because like with Peter, an honest look at our lives will turn up mountains of evidence that we don't really love God all that much.

Sure, we can come to an understanding that God forgives us for this or that sin, but what does that look like practically? How do we sort through the ugly stuff our sin reveals to us about who we are?

If this is what Peter is wondering, then Jesus asks the perfect question. It's not, "are you very very sorry for what you've done?" or "do you promise never to do it again?" It's "do you love me?" framed in such a way as to make clear to Peter that his answer means everything.

And Peter says yes. Think about the implications of that for a minute. When we say "God loves me," we see ourselves as fortunate, grateful recipients of an amazing love that we could never merit on our own. This is all both true and wonderful. But it's never quite satisfied me--or at least, I've never felt like I understood the love I was receiving well enough if I just left it at that. But to say as well, "I love God" is another matter entirely. It's a plain and bold assertion of the self to presume that such a statement would even mean anything at all. We not only receive with gratitude but stake our claim as free beings to a part in the eternal plan of our creator.

What I'm missing, then, in thinking of myself as simply receiving from God is that sense of my own self, that what I do matters, and even that it matters eternally. This is also, I think, why I sometimes have such a hard time understanding God's forgiveness. How does one hear "you're forgiven" without hearing also, "it doesn't matter what you did--your actions don't have consequences"?

And so we return to Peter, and realize that while we may be free beings, we're broken ones as well. Peter has the boldness to say "I love you," but he's in no position to back up the claim with evidence of his own. As we've seen, the recent evidence largely points the other way. We may want to stake our claim to a place in God's eternal design, but it's plain that we have no business doing so.

But Peter doesn't just say "I love you" like he's entitled, or like he can back it up. He stakes his case of Jesus' knowledge. "You know everything. You know that I love you." The famously bumbling Peter has a knack for stumbling upon the exact right answer when it really matters, and here, he seems to intuit that despite the great evidence against his love, there is a deeper truth, firm within God's all-encompassing knowledge, that acquits him.

Because the truth is that Peter really does love Jesus. He wouldn't have followed him for three years or jumped out of the boat and swam to shore this last time if that weren't so. God knows this and counts it to our credit, even when we make a weak and poor show of expressing it, and even when we're tempted to doubt it ourselves.

This is not to say that in our love for God we somehow merit his response by our own power. Rather, God's interest is in accepting our weak love because he is the one who planted that love within us. And Peter can be so confident that Jesus knows his love because he recognizes Jesus as the source of that love. It was Jesus who called Peter, Jesus whose spirit inflamed and excited Peter's along the journey, and Jesus who returned to claim and regenerate Peter's love when Peter was tempted to return to his old ways.

There is amazing comfort in this passage, especially in times of spiritual dryness. To borrow from Reagan, it's often the case that in our Christian walks, we don't need to be taught nearly as much as we need to remember. So John 21 is a good passage to reflect on in times of uncertainty or self-doubt, because it reminds us that if we've ever felt God's love in our lives, or if the Gospel has ever excited our minds and our hearts, we can say with a boldness that isn't our own, "you know that I love you."

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One final thought. It strikes me that this passage may have some significance, if only as a clarifier, in the theological debates that sprung from the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church has always adhered to the formula that we are saved through a combination of faith in Christ and good works, while Luther raised the banner for "faith alone." The Catholic formulation is founded in scripture--it comes from the injunction in James 2:14: "what good is it, brothers, if you say you have faith but do not have works?", arguing that such a faith is dead. Nevertheless, it can be a fairly misleading way of expressing the Catholic doctrine on justification, leading to the conclusion--played out in Catholic popular piety throughout the ages--that it is the works themselves that justify us before God.

A better and more theologically precise way of expressing Catholic doctrine would be to say that we are saved through faith and love. Of course, the wide majority of Protestants, taking James seriously as well, would say that intellectual assent to the statement "Jesus Christ is God" is not enough for salvation. Someone--the devil falls into this category--could theoretically believe this about Jesus and hate him for it. Loving God is essential for true faith to be present.

The real debate concerns what is called the "process of imputation." Both sides believe that ultimately, we are saved by God's grace. None of us can achieve a saving faith or a saving love by ourselves. The faith we need is itself a gift from God. But what does the process by which God instills in us faith in him and love for him look like? I think I'll leave that as a cliffhanger for now, because I kind of want to go for a walk down by the river, and this post is plenty long as it is. I'll wrap up my thoughts and tie it all back to Peter in my next (?) post.