“Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”
— John 21:17
This happens after the resurrection. The disciples have gone back to Galilee, back to their boats and nets, as if trying to return to something familiar. Then Jesus appears on the shore.
John includes a detail most of us read past. When the disciples drag their net to shore, Jesus already has a charcoal fire burning, with fish laid on it and bread (John 21:9). The Greek word John uses for that fire, anthrakia (ἀνθρακιά), is charcoal fire and it appears only twice in the New Testament. The first time is in the high priest’s courtyard, where Peter stood warming his hands while he denied Jesus three times (John 18:18), and here in John 21.
That fire was placed there. Jesus brings him back to the place of the wound, gently, so the healing can happen where the breaking did.
After breakfast, Jesus speaks. “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15). He uses the old name, the one Peter carried before Jesus called him Cephas, the rock (John 1:42). We may hear in it Jesus reaching past the title to the fisherman underneath.
“More than these” reaches back too. On the night of the arrest, Peter had announced, “Even though they all fall away, I will not” (Mark 14:29). He measured his love against everyone else’s. Now he doesn’t compare. He only says, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you” (John 21:15).
The third time, John tells us, Peter was grieved (John 21:17). Three questions for three denials, and each one presses the same bruise.
Then listen to what he finally says: “Lord, you know everything” (John 21:17). This is a man who no longer trusts his own declarations. The boast from the courtyard is gone. What remains is an appeal to what Jesus sees in him.
Jesus answers each confession with a task: Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. In this conversation, feeding is something Peter will do with his hands, for people who are hungry.
The church has always been tempted to become a religion of insight, as if understanding the truth were the same as living it. The rich young man knew the commandments well. When Jesus asked him for something concrete, he went away sorrowful, because he had great possessions (Matthew 19:22). He had the knowledge. He could not take the next step.
John, who tells us the beach story, opens his first letter by refusing abstraction. The word of life was something “we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). If the truth came to us in a body, our love for Him will need one too.
Amos once warned of a famine “not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD” (Amos 8:11).
We don’t have to look far for it. The coworker scrolling past midnight. The friend who stopped coming to church and won’t say why. The young person who has endless information and nothing solid to stand on.
Who will feed them as Jesus asked Peter to? Feed my sheep.
A letter bearing Peter’s name urges the elders of the churches, “shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:2). Peter received the call at a charcoal fire on the beach, and for the rest of his life, he answered it and gave it away.
The conversation ends with a hard word. When Peter is old, another will stretch out his hands and carry him where he does not want to go (John 21:18). John explains that this pointed to the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God (John 21:19). Early Christian tradition holds that he died in Rome under Nero, by crucifixion.
And then the last line: “Follow me” (John 21:19).
Years before, on the shore of this same lake, with a net in his hands, Peter had heard those words for the first time (Mark 1:16-17). The call has not changed. Peter has.
We may imagine restoration as Jesus finally forgetting what we did. On this beach it looks different. He remembers all of it, and hands us His sheep anyway.
If you are reading this convinced your failure has disqualified you, look at who Jesus chose to feed His lambs.
He never asked Peter why he ran. He asked him to feed his sheep, just as he was fed.
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