Hearth & Altar

Festus, explaining Paul's case to King Agrippa, identifies the whole controversy with embarrassing precision: they had issues about a certain Jesus who had died but whom Paul claimed was alive. That is the Gospel compressed into a pagan governor's bureaucratic summary. The dispute about the resurrection is the thing. Festus cannot adjudicate it because it falls outside Roman law. But he names it exactly.

Jesus asks Peter three times: do you love me? Three times to match the three denials. Peter is grieved at the third asking, and he says: Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. Jesus does not argue the point. He gives the commission three times instead: feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep. The love is received. The commission follows the love.

And then: when you were young you dressed yourself and went where you wanted. When you grow old another will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. The cross is coming for Peter. Jesus tells him before it arrives, so that when it does, the going is deliberate rather than surprised. The follow me at the end is the invitation into the path that leads through the cross toward the glory.

• For our family, that we would answer the Lord's question with Peter's honesty: Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you, we pray to the Lord.
• For those being led where they do not want to go, that the follow me would be the compass in the going, we pray to the Lord.
• For those who have denied the Lord three times and are sitting in the grief of it, that his question would reach them as restoration rather than condemnation, we pray to the Lord.
• In this novena week, for the Spirit who feeds and tends the flock through those who love the Lord, we pray to the Lord.

Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. The commission is feeding and tending - the pastoral care that comes from the love. This week, feed someone: a meal, a word, a presence that nourishes. The feeding is the love made concrete.

The threefold question is restoration for the threefold denial. Jesus gives Peter back his commission by asking the question again. When your children fail badly - not just make a mistake but genuinely betray something that mattered - the question is not whether to restore the commission. It is how to ask the question that makes restoration possible without minimizing the failure.