Love Says Things Once and Means Them Forever

Dear brothers and sisters,

I am aware—well aware—of how difficult it can be these days to call ourselves Christians. Just the other day—despite the cause or reason—we saw a church gathering interrupted by protests. At the same time, day-to-day we are tasked with what often feels like the theological gymnastics of remaining charitable to our brothers and sisters who often confuse the gospel as politics over and above a promise. I also know that it is easy to look at our nation—and in fact the world—and wonder where God is in all of this? Where is God? And why is it this way?

So I understand how faith feels tested day after day these days. But this struggle is not unique, and in fact it is far from new. “Where is God? Why is it like this?” Is a question as old as Job and echoed by King Solomon in Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes). The Jewish people themselves not even a century ago asked the same question, well documented in tomes of the most thought-provoking philosophies of contemporary modernity.

And we too are tasked with asking this question today. Where is our God? Who are we when Jesus often feels too hard to find, or when the unjust seem to win? I don’t have a simple answer to that. But I do have a story I want to share about faith, about promises, and about love. And I want to offer it to you in hope.

The Apostle John, the beloved one, lived a life that is a testament to what a lifetime with Jesus can looks like.

Historically speaking, John was likely between the ages of 12-14 when he first met Jesus. We know he was the youngest of the band of brothers, and we also know that it was around the age of 13 when a boy would first be able to follow his Rabbi. 

A rabbi back then was more than just a teacher in the way that we understand the word. They were more than just mentors or counselors or religious guidance. To be a disciple of a Rabbi meant to follow him, literally. To live like him, to speak like him, to teach like him.

And so we ought remember that John was just a boy when he met the Lord. A boy, not yet fully himself, whose body and desires are changing faster than his understanding. He was a pimple ridden, hormonal, and awkward boy, just like the rest of us. So I must imagine that John was  a boy who latched onto Jesus not only as rabbi but as orientation—as someone whose presence steadies the chaos of becoming. I imagine that John saw Jesus as a father. 

That kind of attachment isn’t abstract. It’s visceral. It’s the way adolescents cling to adults who see them without exploiting them, who give them a place to stand while they don’t yet know who they are.

So when John stands at the cross and doesn’t leave, I don’t read that as heroic resolve. I read it as an attachment. As a child who cannot abandon the one person who made the world make sense, bearable, liveable.

And I also imagine the sheer joy John must have felt knowing that Jesus came back from the dead, just like he said he would. John’s ears were attentive to promise because Jesus was everything for him. Very likely Jesus was the reason food was on his plate, Jesus was the one who soothed him when his heart ached. Jesus was the one he would wait for at the cross and follow behind after the resurrection.

And that brings me to John 21. I want us to be mindful that this is the Gospel according to John, traditionally the same beloved John I just illustrated.

John 21 is the story traditionally known as the restoration of Peter. The story goes that after the resurrection, Jesus is speaking to Peter and asks him three times, “Do you love me?” And we know how the story goes. Peter affirms his love for Jesus emphatically, and Jesus in turn tells him to follow Him and feed His sheep. 

This story’s central figure is Peter. Peter carries the main action in this story. Let’s now listen closely to the end of this dialogue:

The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!”

Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, “Lord, who is going to betray you?”) When Peter saw him, he asked, “Lord, what about him?”

Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.” Because of this, the rumor spread among the believers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?”

(John 21:17-23, NIV)

Notice how John keeps Peter at the focus of this story. Even when speaking of himself, John somewhat clumsily refers to himself in third person as a background character: “the disciple…this was the one who had leaned back against Jesus.”

When this story is preached, usually the focus shifts to Peter’s “what-aboutism” pointing at John, and Jesus’ rebuke “What is it to you?” This has pastoral and theological merit in itself. But, the story I want to tell you today turns back to pimply, hormonal, maybe 16-year-old John in this story, standing behind the wall that is his father Jesus. I imagine this same John biting his tongue when Peter points to him, and I imagine that puffed-up chest, fraternal sort of pride he must have felt when his father, Jesus, rebukes his brother Peter for pointing fingers and asking (like all older brothers given the harsher punishment), “What about him?”

I think it is clear in the text here that John clearly saw this as a rebuke of Peter and a lesson about not asking questions about what the Lord wants of other people, but rather to worry about what he wants from you. This is the usual reading, and I think the intended one. But what I want to illustrate more here is that in this didactic excerpt, there is more than just a theological lesson in the academic or moralizing sense, but a story about a transcendent and faithful love that is shared between John and Jesus, and it is set in this story about a father restoring the wayward older brother, and rebuking him for the whataboutism that points fingers at the younger son. This is a story about love in the most banal sense: the love between a father and his son.

You might be asking yourself now, “What in the world is Kevin talking about?” So let me get right to it.

This same John, years, decades later, has endured all sorts of persecutions, watched his brother disciples die martyrs, and has been forced to grow old in exile on the Island of Patmos, where he was likely in his 80s or early 90s. It was on Patmos that John received the visions of the apocalypse he describes in the Book of Revelations. Let’s turn our ears now to the first chapter of Revelations where John writes of his vision:

“Look, he is coming with the clouds,”

    and “every eye will see him,

even those who pierced him”;

    and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”

So shall it be! Amen.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

(Revelations 1:7-8, NIV)

This vision and declaration of Jesus returning on the clouds is given to John, echoing the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke who each describe the Son of Man coming on the clouds in the second coming. What was foretold in the Gospels, John receives here on the Island of Patmos.

So, how is the story of the restoration of Peter related to the second coming in Revelations?”

First, these two texts are both traditionally attributed to the same John the apostle that I’ve at length been trying to flesh out as a character. Second, there is a subtle theme shared between these two texts of which I am not sure even John was aware as he wrote them.

Return to John 21:22. Jesus rebuked Peter saying, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?”

In the beginning of Revelations 1:7, John sees Jesus “coming with the clouds,” in the second coming.

Pause for a moment. Let that sink in.

Decades before, in an off-handed rebuke of Peter, Jesus had issued a one-off remark about John, “If I want him to remain alive until I return.”

Near the end of his earthly life, John is the apostle privileged to witness the vision of Jesus returning again.

It is of note that it was only shortly after John was freed from Patmos that he died.

If you haven’t already seen the line I am trying to draw for us to hear, it is that even in a one-off comment that was not even directed at him, but was within his earshot, the words carried promise, at least for John. 

John did live until he saw Jesus return. Unexpectedly, probably buried under a pile of other more important stories to share with the church, was this one, off-handed remark that spoke more of the love that Jesus has for each of us particularly and individually than anything else that we could find in the Gospels.

I imagine John—old now, worn thin by years and loss—cast away on Patmos. I imagine him standing at the edge of faith, nearer to death than to certainty. And I imagine what quiet consolation returned to him there as he witnessed the revelation of Christ’s second coming: the memory of a single sentence, spoken long ago on a Galilean shore. A remark not meant for him, uttered almost in passing, yet spoken by a Father who never wasted a word, who never said anything he did not mean. And in that remembered voice, perhaps John found the strength to remain faithful to the end.

That’s exactly the point, I think. The line isn’t delivered as a blessing. It isn’t framed as a prophecy. It’s almost tossed over Jesus’ shoulder while correcting Peter’s anxiety. And yet—because it comes from someone who never speaks carelessly—it lodges itself in John. Not as doctrine, but as atmosphere. As something that could mean more, someday.

That’s how love speaks. Not always ceremonially. Often sideways. Often in rebukes that accidentally contain mercy.

I imagine John old, his body no longer reliable, his friends murdered, the Church fractured and institutionalized. The immediacy of those early days gone. Exile instead of intimacy. Silence instead of daily companionship.

This is where the story lands for us: the idea that at the edge of exhaustion, memory returns differently. Not as argument. As consolation.

I can imagine John, too tired to believe in the confident way, suddenly remembering that moment on the shore: not as proof that he was somehow special, but as proof that Jesus never spoke emptily. That even a snapped remark, even a dismissive rebuke, carried intention. 

Love doesn’t waste words. Fathers don’t either—not the good ones.

This faith of ours is chronicled for us in this book we call a bible. It is filled with words from the mouth of God, carried by the pens of the inspired and the lips of the prophets. These are, in the truest sense, God’s words. And it is filled with promise. Because God is Love.

Love says things once and means them forever.

Love lets meaning ripen slowly, in secret, until the person who heard it is finally old enough—or broken enough—to understand.

So my brothers and sisters, I ask you to hear this story of our forefather John the beloved, and to remember that even a broken and tired life with Jesus is a life filled with promise and fulfillment. That a life close to Jesus, even in pain, confusion, and a world full of suffering, is a life filled abundantly with a love that lasts the tests of time. 

So while many of us rightly cry out in our hearts these days asking, “Where is God? And Why has he left us so?” I offer us all the lesson of the long life of the apostle John: that our God is faithful till the end. And as it was true for John, and as it was true for Simeon in the temple, and while I have no answers for why God allows the world to be the way that it is, God is not finished with us until our eyes have seen the fulfillment of the promises he speaks over us from all of eternity, and again even today.

Peace be with you.

+In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.