Do You Love Me? Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles (John 21:15-19)

June 29, 2026, Peter and Paul, Apostles, Red-Letter Holy Day, Season after Pentecost

John 21:15-19, Psalm 87, 2 Timothy 4:1-8, Ezekiel 34:11-16

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you on this feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles.

Yesterday was Proper 8, the last Sunday in our opening stretch through Matthew this summer. We heard Jesus commission the Twelve and heard the cost named honestly: the sword, not peace; take up your cross; whoever finds his life will lose it. We heard him promise that anyone who gives a cup of cold water to a little one because he belongs to Christ will not lose his reward. And we named Peter and Paul as the faces of that passage: two men who lost the psychē (psoo-KHAY) and found it. Today they have their feast.

Let’s start in our Gospel reading, John 21:15-19. The scene is the shore of the Sea of Tiberias. It is early morning. The disciples have been fishing all night and caught nothing; then a stranger on the shore tells them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, and the catch overwhelms the net. John is the first to recognize the stranger: “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7, ESV) And Peter, characteristically, throws himself into the water and swims to shore. When they get there, Jesus already has a charcoal fire going with fish on it. The detail matters: the last charcoal fire in John’s Gospel was the one in the high priest’s courtyard, where Peter warmed himself and said three times that he did not know the man. Now there is another charcoal fire. And after breakfast, Jesus asks Peter a question.

Verse 15: “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15, ESV) Notice the name. He does not call him Peter, the rock. He calls him Simon, son of John, the old name, the name before the calling and the renaming and the denials. The old name brings us back to the man beneath the title, the disciple who denied him and is now standing before the risen Lord. And he asks: do you love me more than these? Whatever “these” represents in Peter’s heart at that moment, the question is the same.

The Greek of the passage has drawn considerable comment. In verses 15 and 16, Jesus asks using agapas (ah-GAH-pahs), often associated with self-giving love, while Peter answers with philo (FEE-lo), a word for friendship and affection. Scholars debate whether John intends a sharp distinction; many today see the two verbs functioning more synonymously in his Gospel, and John himself uses them interchangeably elsewhere. What is clear is that the third time, in verse 17, Jesus shifts to Peter’s own word, phileis (FEE-lays). John tells us that Peter is grieved because Jesus asks him the question a third time. The threefold repetition echoes the threefold denial by the charcoal fire in the high priest’s courtyard. Peter does not try to argue or to promise. He appeals to the only authority that could adjudicate his sincerity: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” (John 21:17, ESV) He has no resume to offer. His record gives him nothing to boast about. He throws himself not on his own consistency but on the knowledge and mercy of the one who is asking.

Three questions. Three answers. Three commands: feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep. The structure is unmistakable. The three questions answer the three denials, not by erasing them but by meeting them directly and overriding them with love and commission. Peter is not restored by pretending the denials did not happen. He is restored in full sight of them, by the one who knew they were coming and called him the Rock before they occurred. This is what restoration looks like in John’s Gospel: not the denial reversed but the commission renewed, the call re-issued, the vocation handed back to the one who failed and now knows personally the mercy he will be called to extend.

It is worth noting that Peter’s apostolic calling is not revoked through the denials. Jesus does not demote him, reassign his role, or name a replacement. The commission in John 21 is given here to Peter specifically, which is consistent with his role throughout the Gospels as primus inter pares (PREE-mus in-ter PAH-rays), first among equals: the spokesman and representative of the Twelve, the one who voices the great confession at Caesarea Philippi, and the first named in every apostolic list. His primacy is a primacy of honor and initiative, not of monarchy; the other apostles share fully in the apostolic commission. But the commission to tend the sheep is given here to Peter by name, and the denials do not cancel his calling. The resurrection has already handled the grave; three questions on a shoreline handle the courtyard.

There is something worth dwelling on in Peter’s appeal in verse 17. He does not say: Lord, you know my record is now clean, or you know I have made amends. He says: Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. The appeal to Christ’s omniscience is the appeal of a man who has nothing else to offer. His track record in the courtyard gives him no ground for self-confidence. His courage in the weeks since has been modest. He is standing on the shore with fish on the fire and three denials behind him. And yet the risen Christ has come to him, questioned him, restored him, and called him again. That is where everyone who has failed stands before the risen Christ: not on our performance but on his mercy, not on our consistency but on his gracious knowledge of us. Peter is not restored because his love is strong enough. He is restored by the Lord who knows him completely and still says: feed my sheep.

Our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel 34 gives us the theological ground on which this commission stands. God speaks through Ezekiel against the shepherds of Israel who have failed their flock: they have not strengthened the weak, bound up the injured, sought the lost. And then God declares: “For thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out.” (Ezekiel 34:11, ESV) The human shepherds have failed. So God takes the work himself. He will seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, strengthen the weak. And then, six centuries later, on a Galilean shore after breakfast, he turns to a fisherman who denied him three times and says: feed my sheep.

The connection is direct and staggering. The shepherd work that Ezekiel’s God claimed for himself is the work Jesus hands to Peter. The divine vocation, the seeking of the lost and the binding of the injured, is entrusted to a man who has just demonstrated how badly a shepherd can fail. The grace of John 21 is not that God waits until he finds a flawless candidate. It is that Christ restores a failed shepherd and entrusts him again with the care of the flock. The one who needed the Shepherd’s mercy is now sent to extend the Shepherd’s care.

He gives him three images: lambs, sheep, sheep. The language is pastoral in the most literal sense. The shepherd’s work is not merely administrative but relational: seeking the scattered, tending the hurt, feeding the hungry. Ezekiel’s language for the shepherd work is entirely about individual animals: the lost one sought, the strayed one brought back, the injured one bound up, the weak one strengthened. Peter is not merely commissioned to maintain an institution. He is commissioned to shepherd Christ’s people. And Jesus immediately tells him what that shepherding may cost: the shepherd’s road will lead Peter toward the cross, just as the Good Shepherd’s did.

Verse 18: “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” (John 21:18, ESV) John adds that Jesus said this to show by what kind of death Peter was to glorify God. The language of stretched-out hands points toward crucifixion. Jesus is telling Peter from the first moment of his restoration that the shepherd’s road will finally cost him his life. And then, in verse 19: “Follow me.” (John 21:19, ESV) The same words spoken on the shore of Galilee at the first calling. The same two words. Follow me. Not: serve me efficiently, or lead my organization, or build my institution. Follow me. The shape of the following is the shape of the cross. Peter would understand that more fully later, and he would follow.

The feast of Peter and Paul together on June 29 is among the oldest observances in the Christian calendar. The Depositio Martyrum (deh-POH-see-tee-oh mar-TEER-oom), a Roman list of martyrs and their commemorations preserved in the Chronography of 354, already records June 29 for Peter and Paul. The date does not require us to suppose that they died on the same day. Their witness belongs together. They disagreed sharply: Paul describes opposing Peter to his face at Antioch in Galatians 2, where the question of table fellowship with Gentiles exposed a genuine conflict between the apostle to the circumcised and the apostle to the uncircumcised. The New Testament does not paper over the disagreement. The joint feast does not erase it either. It holds both men under the same Collect and asks the Church to receive their teaching and example together, knit by the same Spirit into a unity that does not depend upon the absence of conflict.

Now Paul. He was not on that shore. He had not followed Jesus in Galilee. His calling came on the road to Damascus, not beside the sea: a blinding light, a voice, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4, ESV) His version of the question was not do you love me but why are you persecuting me. His encounter with grace was not three commissions on a shore but a blinded man led by the hand into the city, waiting, not eating or drinking, until Ananias was sent to him. The structure is different; the grace is identical. The man who had persecuted the Church became, by the sovereign call of the risen Christ, the apostle to the nations. Both Peter and Paul arrived at the same place by different roads. Neither of them chose the road.

Our reading from 2 Timothy 4 is Paul’s final letter, written from prison in Rome, near the end that he can already see coming. He charges Timothy to preach the word, in season and out of season, to reprove, rebuke, and exhort, because the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching. And then the personal testament: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.” (2 Timothy 4:7-8, ESV) These are not the words of a man who is afraid. They are the words of a man who has spent himself entirely in one direction and knows it. He fought the fight, not without suffering: five floggings, three shipwrecks, a night and a day in the open sea, danger from rivers and bandits and his own countrymen. He finished the race, not without conflict and disappointment: the confrontation at Antioch, the sharp disagreement with Barnabas, the churches that turned away from him. He kept the faith, not without being tested to keep it.

What Paul bequeaths to Timothy, and through Timothy to the Church, is not just his theology or his missionary zeal. It is the example of a life that went all the way. He did not protect himself. He did not manage his platform. He did not calculate what was safe to say. He preached the word in season and out of season until there was no more season left, and then he wrote this letter, and then he died. The crown, he says, is not his alone: it belongs to all who have loved Christ’s appearing. Both the apostle and the congregation are inheritors of the same promise.

Psalm 87 gives us the vision toward which Peter and Paul both spent themselves. It is the psalm of Zion, the holy city, open to all nations: “Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Cush—‘This one was born there,’ they say.” (Psalm 87:4, ESV) Nations once outside are registered as citizens of Zion. Egypt, Babylon, Philistia, Tyre, Ethiopia, peoples that surrounded and opposed Israel, are counted as born in the holy city. The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob, and peoples once outside are now counted as belonging there. This is the Old Testament’s vision of the nations being gathered into the people of God, and it is appointed for the feast of the two apostles whose ministries visibly enacted that outward movement. Peter went to Cornelius. Paul went to Athens and Corinth and Ephesus and Rome. Psalm 87 is the vision their missionary work was enacting: the nations being registered in Zion, one city at a time, one household at a time, one cup of cold water at a time.

The Collect for this feast holds both men under a single sentence: “Almighty God, whose blessed apostles Peter and Paul glorified you by their martyrdom: Grant that your Church, instructed by their teaching and example, and knit together in unity by your Spirit, may ever stand firm upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.” (BCP 2019, p. 630) They glorified God by their martyrdom. Ancient Christian testimony places both in Rome under Nero, Peter crucified and Paul beheaded. A later tradition says Peter was crucified upside down because he did not consider himself worthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. The one who was restored by a threefold question and the one who was stopped by a blinding light both finally gave their lives for the same Lord they could not stop confessing. And the Collect asks the Church to stand firm on the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord, not Peter, not Paul. Paul makes this exact point in 1 Corinthians 3:11: “For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 3:11, ESV) The ultimate foundation is not Peter or Paul. It is Christ, whom the apostles confessed and to whom their foundational witness points.

And that is where the feast lands on us here at Christ the King. The commission to feed and tend and follow is not reserved for first-century apostles. It is the calling of this congregation: visiting the homebound, welcoming the newcomer, bearing witness in these mountains, showing up week after week in the Season after Pentecost when the calendar is green and the work is quiet and faithful. Do you love me? Feed my sheep.

Jesus does not ask us on June 29 whether we have fought the good fight or tended the sheep adequately enough to earn his favor. He asks the same question he asked on the shore. Do you love me? It is not a theological examination. It is not a performance review. It is the question that precedes every commission and underlies every calling. Peter answered it from the depth of his failure, with an appeal to the only one who could know the truth of it: Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. That is still the answer. It does not require a clean record. It rests on the mercy of the one who knows the whole record and still calls sinners to follow him.

The question is also pastoral. For those of us who have carried the faith for fifty or sixty years and wonder whether it has amounted to much, 2 Timothy 4 speaks directly: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Paul does not say: I built the largest churches or persuaded the most people or left behind an organization that still bears my name. He says he fought, finished, and kept. That is the testimony available to every believer who has endured in faithfulness, and it is sufficient. The crown, Paul says, is not reserved for apostles. It is laid up for all who have loved Christ’s appearing. That includes us, on this Monday in June, in the Season after Pentecost.

The feast of Peter and Paul arrives in the middle of the Season after Pentecost to ask ordinary people the question that grounds every extraordinary calling. The fisherman who denied was restored, commissioned, and martyred. The persecutor who was stopped was called, sent, and martyred. Both of them, in the end, followed all the way. The Church they served is still here, still bearing the apostolic Gospel, still living beneath the same question: do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? Feed my sheep. Follow me.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.