Do You Love Me More Than These?
Do you love me more than the present?
"Do you love me more than the past?”
It is further worth noting that the one thing about which Jesus questioned Peter prior to commissioning him to tend the flock was love. This is the basic qualification for Christian service. Other qualities may be desirable, but love is completely indispensable (cf.
What matters is that the question is asked and answered; and, even more, that the answer earns, each time, not a pat on the back, not a ‘There, that’s all right then’, but a command. A fresh challenge. A new commission. Time to learn how to be a shepherd. Time to feed lambs and sheep, to look after them.
Why should I care?
The present participle “breathing” (ἐμπνέων) indicates that Saul was involved over an extended period of time in uttering (lit., “breathing out”) “threats” (ἀπειλή) and “murder” (φόνος) against the believers. The interpretation which takes the phrase “threats and murder” as a hendyadis (“murderous threats;” TNIV, cf. NET) weakens the sense of Luke’s statement. The threats are described in 26:11 (“by punishing them often in all the synagogues, I tried to force them to blaspheme”), the “murder” in 26:10 (“I locked up many of the saints in prison with the authority that I received from the chief priests. And when they were condemned to death, I cast my vote against them”). On the reasons for Saul’s violent persecution of the followers of Jesus, see on 8:3.
Saul’s active persecution of the followers of Jesus contradicts the advice that his teacher Gamaliel had given earlier in a session of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem (5:34–39). Gamaliel may have changed his mind in the meantime, observing the continued growth and expansion of the movement of the followers of Jesus. Or Saul regarded Gamaliel’s position as too soft in view of the threat that the teaching of the followers of Jesus posed, in his view.
Allow yourself to imagine that that is what Saul of Tarsus—not yet called Paul—was doing, on the long, slow road from Jerusalem to Damascus. (A journey might be an ideal time for such a thing, with the steady plod of the horse, and the quiet countryside around.) You might then be able to grasp the impact of what happened to him. He was on his way to act for the glory of God, the glory which he believed was being besmirched by these crazy followers of Jesus. He needed to keep that glory firmly before his eyes, to make sure his zeal was properly fired up and rightly directed. To that end, shall we suppose, he had been in prayer and meditation, trying to envisage the divine throne-chariot. He had gazed with the eyes of his heart on the angels. He had stared at the wheels as they flashed to and fro. He had longed to be able to raise his eyes from the angels and the wheels to the chariot itself, and then (would it be possible? he must have wondered; would he be allowed?) to the figure which sat on the chariot, flaming with fire, surrounded by brilliant light. Imagine his excitement as, in the depth of devout meditation, he saw with the eyes of his heart, so real that it seemed as though he was seeing it with his ordinary physical eyes, and then so real that he realized he was seeing it with his physical eyes, the form, the fire, the blazing light, and—the face!
And the face was the face of Jesus of Nazareth.
Suddenly Saul’s world turned upside down and inside out. Terror, ruin, shame, awe, horror, glory and terror again swept over him. Years later he would write of seeing ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah’ (
A striking modern parallel to the narrative is Sundar Singh’s story of his own conversion after a period of bitter hostility to the gospel. Praying in his room in the early morning of December 18, 1904, he saw a great light. “Then as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had such an appearance of glory and love. If it had been some Hindu incarnation I would have prostrated myself before it. But it was the Lord Jesus Christ whom I had been insulting a few days before. I felt that a vision like this could not come out of my own imagination. I heard a voice saying in Hindustani, ‘How long will you persecute me? I have come to save you; you were praying to know the right way. Why do you not take it?’ The thought then came to me, ‘Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.’ So I fell at His feet and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get anywhere else. This is the joy I was wishing to get. When I got up, the vision had all disappeared, but although the vision disappeared the Peace and Joy have remained with me ever since.”23 Several circumstances make it difficult to set down this experience as a dream or as the effect of self-hypnotism; it is also interesting to be told that, to the best of his remembrance, “at that time he did not know the story of St. Paul’s conversion; though, of course, on a point of that kind the human memory cannot be implicitly relied on”24 (and even if he did not know the story at the time of his conversion, he knew it by the time he related his conversion in the words just quoted, and it may have influenced the wording of his narrative). Here too we cannot properly evaluate the Sadhu’s account of his experience without taking into consideration the remarkable life which was its sequel and the exceptional signs that attended his ministry.25
How can I do it?
lovest (ἀγαπᾷ͂ς, Vulg. diligis)] It will be noticed that the foundation of the apostolic office is laid in love and not in belief. Love (ἀγάπη) in its true form includes Faith (comp.
Transition
Point 3: Do you love me more than the future?
What does it mean?
Not only is this a fresh commission. Not only is Jesus trusting Peter to get back to fruitful work, and to turn his undoubted though hitherto wobbly love for Jesus to good account. It is more: Jesus is sharing his own work, his own ministry, with Peter.
Here is the secret of all Christian ministry, yours and mine, lay and ordained, full-time or part-time. It’s the secret of everything from being a quiet, back-row member of a prayer group to being a platform speaker at huge rallies and conferences. If you are going to do any single solitary thing as a follower and servant of Jesus, this is what it’s built on. Somewhere, deep down inside, there is a love for Jesus, and though (goodness knows) you’ve let him down enough times, he wants to find that love, to give you a chance to express it, to heal the hurts and failures of the past, and give you new work to do.
These are not things for you to do to ‘earn’ the forgiveness. Nothing can ever do that. It is grace from start to finish. They are things to do out of the joy and relief that you already are forgiven. Things we are given to do precisely as the sign that we are forgiven. Things that will be costly, because Jesus’ own work was utterly costly. Things that will mean following Jesus into suffering, perhaps into death. In the last week, as I have been writing this, more Christians have been killed around the world, simply for worshipping Jesus. ‘Someone else will dress you and take you where you would rather not go.’ Peter will complete his task as a shepherd by laying down his own life, in turn, for the sheep.
But even this is not something different from the call that drew the disciples in the first place. ‘Follow me!’ Now that Jesus has taken the steep road to the cross, and has proved that death itself is defeated by the life and joy of the new creation, he can ask for everything from those he has rescued, and know he will get it.
Peter went from strength to strength. He was still muddled from time to time, as Acts indicates. But he became a shepherd. He loved Jesus and looked after his sheep. No one could ask for more. Jesus never asks for less.
Even if it means dying to glorify God?
when thou shalt be old] The martyrdom of St Peter is placed in the year A.D. 64, and he seems to have been already of middle age (
Why should I care?
How can I do it?
The verb diazōnnynai, which means “to tie (clothes) around oneself,” is found in the NT only in John (Luke uses the LXX form perizōnnynai). It can mean to put on clothes, but more properly it means to tuck them up and tie them in with a cincture so that one can have freedom of movement to do something. In 13:4–5 the verb is used for Jesus’ tying a towel around himself that he might use it while he washed the disciples’ feet. The item of clothing involved in the present scene is an ependytēs, a garment put on over underclothes. The word can be used to describe a workingman’s overalls, and in this case it was probably a fisherman’s smock that Peter was wearing in the chill of the morning. The adjective gymnos, “naked,” can mean lightly clad, and Marrow thinks that because Peter was wearing the ependytēs, he could be described as lightly clad. Here we prefer Lagrange’s suggestion: the writer means that Peter was naked underneath the ependytēs and that is why he could not take it off before he jumped into the water. Thus we get a more logical picture: clad only in his fisherman’s smock, Peter tucks it into his cincture so that he can swim more easily and dives into the water
fasten your own belt. The verb zōnnynai or zōnnyein (BDF, §92), used twice in this verse, is literally “to gird,” that is, to tie a belt or cincture around one’s freeflowing clothes, so that one can move and act without encumbrance. Often it has the sense of getting dressed, but here a more literal rendition is desirable in order that the same verb can be applicable to the binding of an old man in line 6.
The idea is that having been called to the apostolate in 15–17, Peter is no longer his own master and is to serve Jesus
In Judaism, an abundant catch was a sign of God’s favor and blessing (T. Zebulon 6:1–8); this is precisely what Jesus has done. He blesses them further by greeting them with a fire and roasting fish together with fresh bread (the mainstays of a first-century meal in Galilee). Peter is told to haul the 153 netted fish to shore not to supplement Jesus’ breakfast, but to preserve the catch as any responsible fisherman would do. Some of the minor harbors in Galilee (such as Kursi) had stone catch-basins where newly caught fish can be kept fresh for later cleaning.16 Peter either drops the fish into one of these or keeps them in the shallows.
What is so surprising in this discussion is the neglect to observe the significance for our passage of the concept “shepherd,” with its closely similar term “bishop,” in the NT Church (here Schnackenburg is a conspicuous exception, 3:364). In
In the lectionary, parentheses can be dangerous. They suggest that the verses contained within them are optional for the preacher. On this particular Sunday, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The theological richness of this story requires the inclusion of verses 7–20 (and even 21–22). When these verses are included, the story embodies the movement of the season of Easter toward its climax at Pentecost. Just as Jesus’ resurrection moves to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the mission of the church, so Saul’s encounter with the risen Christ leads him to the community of faith, the gift of the Spirit, and his mission in the world.
If the preacher were to conclude with verse 6, these important theological realities would be short-circuited. The text might simply become the source of a sermon about dramatic, individual conversion. Saul’s “mountaintop” encounter with the risen Christ, as critical and transformative as that is, could become an end in itself, apart from the mission to which Saul is called through his experience and apart from the community which interprets that mission to Saul and ordains him to his work.
The text itself makes this reality abundantly clear. At the end of verse 6, following his “mountaintop experience,” Saul is stuck. He’s blind; he’s helpless; he’s dependent not only on the living Christ but also on other people to help him take the next step. Rather than entering Damascus in power, he must be led into the city by others, and there he must wait for someone to come and tell him what to do. Indeed, the last word of verse 6 in the NRSV is “do.” The living Christ is calling Paul to do something—to carry out the mission to the Gentiles, as we learn later in the story. The key theological focus here is not conversion, but calling (see Krister Stendahl’s important essay, “Paul among Jews and Gentiles,” in Paul among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976], esp. pp. 7–23).
The term “the Way” (ἡ ὁδός),2050 derived from
Conclusion
Summary
5. ἐγώ … σὺ] Very emphatic antithesis, lost in English.
