6 – 29 – 17 Do You Love Me? (and the Power of the Early Church)

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“Lord you know everything, you know that I love you.”

That Gospel reading is very emotionally powerful to me. I think it’s dry for few people who are really listening to it. The Lord God asks for confirmation twice that his disciple truly loves him. In this he gives Peter the chance to redeem himself for his denial of Christ during the time of the Passion.

In this passage we see again the dying and rebirth pattern found throughout the Gospel and most religions. Perhaps the reason I’m seeing this in this passage is that I was just reading about that pattern yesterday in Lewis’s Miracles.

During the Passion we see the early Church crushed and scattered. Its most belligerent and dedicated leader, the one who drew his sword and struck off someone’s ear to defend Jesus, has been reduced to denying the Christ three times in one night out of fear. It would seem the whole thing is unraveling. The Messiah will be killed, and the Church is not strong enough to claim Him, let alone go on without Him. The Apostles lock themselves away and hide out of fear. It would appear to be the end of some sort of rebellion that never really started.

Christ leads the way in the Church’s rebirth through his own resurrection. It seems obvious he should have to be reborn before the Church as He has been leading it all the way thus far. Then through his various appearances he strengthens the Church and guides it to young adulthood, able to survive without his physical presence. In one of the last times he will appear to the Apostles he is confirming with Peter that the treatment has worked, that the therapy and growth is complete.

“Do you love me?” Do you love everything that I stand for? Are you opposed to evil in all its forms? Will you tirelessly and forever work for the betterment of your fellow people? Are you prepared for me to leave you?

“Feed my lambs.” “Tend my sheep.” This flock is now yours. All the while I have been on this earth I have been grooming men to lead my Church into the ages. If the flock will perish, it will be your fault. If the flock will thrive, it will be your credit. Tend my sheep.

I’ve never gotten much out of Paul’s letters. He seems to talk always about himself. They seem to be partly an autobiography of who he has been meeting with, where he has went, his own life story. When he does speak on theological matters I find him redundant and vague. He will say the same thing in a couple different ways without being terribly specific. The thing which grates on my ears (or eyes I suppose) most is when he says “I am not lying” or “this is the truth I am speaking to you.” Because in common experience someone who is telling the truth does not say things like this. The only people who are constantly concerned and particular about the truthfulness of their statements are those who are lying or habitually lie. Now I’m not accusing Paul of lying, that would require a great deal more cheek than I possess, but it is precisely why it bothers me so much that he speaks as though he were.

Perhaps it is a problem of education. Maybe when I am older and wiser I will learn to appreciate what I currently, in my barbarism, cannot conceive.

I think one thing that is glossed over far too much in talking about our faith is the stories found in the Acts of the Apostles. Now once we believe in God, in His creation of the universe and so on, it is not too difficult to believe that he could heal leprosy and lameness, even raise men from the dead. But I find the miracles of Acts to be far more intriguing. Here we have ordinary men, fishermen raised from their status as day laborers mere years ago, performing the same types of miracles. Peter and John cure a man of his lameness by simply grabbing his hand and pulling him up. This is the truly fantastical part of the New Testament. Not only that God could come down and inhabit human form, but that men born fully human could be endowed with the healing power of the divine. 

(^The above is still absolutely WILD to me and should be to you too^)

Both the commissioning of Peter to lead the Church and the miracle of the lame man are indications of how powerful and purposeful our Church on earth is meant to be.