Eventide & Altar

Do you love me? Jesus asks it three times of the man who denied him three times. Peter is grieved at the third asking - the grief is the evidence that the question reached something real. And the answer comes from the deepest place: Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. The appeal to the Lord's own knowing is the most honest prayer available when words feel insufficient.

As high as the heavens above the earth is his kindness toward those who fear him; as far as east from west has he put our transgressions from us. The psalm puts the threefold denial in its theological context: the kindness that is as wide as the distance between east and west, the forgiveness that is as high as the heavens. Peter's betrayal is inside that space. And the commission that follows is the evidence that the space is real.

When you grow old another will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. In the evening of life, you have known the truth of this sentence - the losses that came uninvited, the diminishments you did not choose, the places you were led that you would not have chosen. The cross does not always look like crucifixion. Sometimes it looks like a body failing, or the death of someone central, or the loss of what you had assumed would be permanent. Follow me is spoken into all of it.

The Sorrowful Mysteries walk the passion - including the moment in the courtyard when Peter denied the Lord three times and went out weeping. Tonight's Gospel is the other side of that moment: the restoration, the question asked three times, the commission given back. Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries as a meditation on what the passion made possible - including the possibility of being given back what was lost.

• For those being led where they do not want to go, that follow me would be the thing they are following into it, we pray to the Lord.
• For those grieved by the Lord's question - who hear it as accusation rather than restoration - that the kindness as high as the heavens would reach them, we pray to the Lord.
• For all keeping the novena, that the Spirit would deepen the love that produces the commission, we pray to the Lord.

Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. Say that sentence tonight, in your own name, as a prayer rather than a statement. Let the appeal to the Lord's own knowing be enough when your own words feel insufficient.