The word for love

SERMON  SS SIMON & JUDE WOODBRIDGE  SUN 15 MAY 2011.  J.K.Cannell

John 21: 15-19  The Word for Love

I love ice cream.   I truly loved my two grandmas, and Auntie Kate back in Adelaide.   I love Margaret my wife.   I fell in love with her when she was 21!  I love railways, especially I loved the giant steam locos of the great South Australian Railways, once the premier line.   I love my family: I love my 3 kids hugely, and their kids.  I love my friends.  I love the Lord Jesus Christ.    And to Greeks of biblical times I would be an illiterate peasant to be using that strongest of words, the word for love, so carelessly and in so many different ways.   They had different words for different affections and a literate person would never misuse them.  If they meant admire they would say admire, not ‘love’.  If they meant sexual attraction they’d say that, not ‘love’.  Or affection or sentiment or like, enjoy, care, treasure, depend on, delight in, be thrilled by, need, whatever, not call them all ‘love’.  They were more careful than us in their use of the right words, and this morning I’m going to apply this and do a bit more of what bible scholars call exegesis....reading the bible for all its worth.  

All those loves are God-given and at their best are God-blessed and God-enriched.  When I talk about loving my children, which I certainly do with all my heart, I should use the Greek verb storgew for my love of relatives.  Then there is friendship love, which the Greeks called filew.  Mateship in this country can be very powerful too.  There’s plenty of soldiers who gave a huge amount for their filw friendship love for their mates.  If I mention my wife when we were young and beautiful then the verb to use is based on eros which is different and very powerful and also God-given, the love between the sexes.  There was plenty of that  love, by God’s Grace, between delicious young Margaret and sporty young John in those potentially erotic and passionate days, even though it was controlled!  They say that philo, storge and eros love make the world go round.  They help, but there’s another type of love that does that.  And without this other type of Godly love all the others can grow stale and twisted.  This other love that the biblical Greeks would not classify under any of those other loves is the love of God,  agape or agaph.  That’s what called a young man to climax his life in dying on a cross, that hideous Roman torture structure.  The love of God for you and me was so strong that it reconciled God to having His most beloved Son sacrificed for our sins, so that we may be free to choose Him and eternal life.  Equally there’s the saintly love of some men and women for God.  That by-passes all their wonderful storge family loves, overtakes that erotic love that causes humankind to continue generation by generation and the precious philo friendship love that can make the world so wonderful a place to be in.  The word for God’s love is agape, sometimes called Holy Spirit love.  The verb is agapew.   It’s the verb that means that I, God, love you with the reasoning, intentional, spiritual and utter self-sacrificing eternal devotion of the Father.

 So there’s four Greek words for love.  A little girl sitting on my lap may reach up and say “storgew I love you Grandpa” and then the sun comes out, as you know well.  Or Sophia Loren may say “I feel great eros for you Yves Montand, I loff you” and stars explode.  Or a healthy Australian man may seldom (or never) say, but sometimes feel deeply, filew.   Eventually he may pluck up courage to say “Your’e OK Jack!” But filew (I have a deep affection for you as my friend) is what he means.

To depart briefly from the point of this sermon, I should point out that we would be unwise to decry any of these mortal loves. Often they are pure and intense whether or not they are accompanied by agape.  Not only in the horror of war but in ordinary times some people have been prepared to die as a consequence of one of these human loves. Paul (Rom 5:7) discusses whether a person might die for someone else.  If my child’s impending death could be averted by my death, I would certainly consider making that supreme sacrifice (giving a vital organ for example).  But even then a Christian would need God’s approval for such extreme action, for the ordeal of going through the suffering of having my beloved child in extremis might well be God’s intention by which He intends to achieve something even greater.

St.John particularly uses some of these words in his Gospel.  For example, “hgaphsen o’ jeos God loved the world so that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”  That’s agapew!    John uses these two of these words for love in Ch.21 but it’s a pity that almost all translators have not felt compelled to discriminate between them.

 So let’s enter the scene of vv15-19.

It’s still in what we call the Easter season, about four weeks after that dreadful crucifixion Friday and the amazing resurrection, with which they are still coming to terms.  They are on the shores of the beloved lake.   There are Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel from Cana, and James and John Zebedee and two others;- waiting for him in Galilee.    They still have their boats, these fishermen, but their glance is on Jesus and they’re desperately looking out for him.   Peter has been difficult:-a right misery.  They all knew why.  They have had at least two general visitations from Jesus but there has been no private reconcilation between Jesus and Peter.  Life has been bad for Simon Peter.   You remember that at the Last Supper when Peter said that he, unlike the other disciples, would never deny Jesus.  “I will go with you to prison and death”.  That was a confession of love, but a love that was unable at that time to make the necessary sacrifice.  And Jesus replied “Peter, the cock will not crow tonight until you have denied three times over that you know me.”  That very night it happened.  He shouted at the servant-girl “I’m certainly not one of them...I don’t know who you’re talking about”.   There’s got to be some sort of showdown.   Or perhaps he’ll just be cast out of the team.

Imagine how wretched Peter is feeling.  He probably kicks the dog, pulls his hands out of his pockets, shrugs, and blurts “Well, I’m going fishing!  There’s still one thing I can do.”   Probably they’re all restless and worried.  So they all go out in the boat fishing with him.  All night they toil at it, casting nets, pulling them in empty.  Tired and cold!  Nothing!  Then as dawn was breaking they see a man on the beach.  “Caught anything lads” the man calls.   “No” they reply.  Then this interfering bloke calls “Cast the net right now out on the starboard side”.  I bet Peter grumbles but they do it, and suddenly the net is full of fish.   153 big ones, they count them later!   John breathes to Peter “It’s the Lord!”  There is a splash and in the dawn light they see crazy Peter swimming like mad to the beach.  The rest of them seal the net (it’s too heavy to pull on board), and prepare the boat for coming ashore.   They see it is Jesus!  “Bring up some fish, men”.  Peter goes back and helps pull up the bursting net.   They all get out and hurry over to warm themselves by the fire Jesus has lit.  He cooks breakfast.  He gives them some bread and serves the delicious hot fish.

Imagine the next little scene.  They’ve eaten well.  The sun is just up.  There’s the sound of satisfied voices among the other six.  Galilean seabirds are poking the remains of the fish.  There’s the sound of gentle wavelets or ripples, turning over on the sand.  Jesus has drawn Peter a little way apart.                                   Let me now read to you the story as John actually wrote it, concentrating on the word for love, including explanations.   I also include the probable best translation of a difficult and widely used Greek word in eluphjh o petros translated as “Peter was grieved” in v17.  In all our bibles this verb lupw is translated unemotionally and minimally as “Peter was hurt, was upset or was sad”.  But by the classic way of becoming involved in the text and identifying with Peter in his misery, and how in the passive voice eluphjh is translated much more strongly in other scriptures as ‘was rejected and crushed’  we realise the story goes like this:-  

V15  Jesus: “Simon, do you agape me? “ (Do you love me with reasoned intentional spiritual devotion as one loves The Father?)   Peter: “Yes Lord, you know that I filw you” (I have deep personal affection for you as my close friend).  Jesus: “Feed my lambs”.

V16  He says to him a second time, “Simon, do you agape me?”  Peter:  probably becoming distraught “Yes Lord, you know I filw you.”  Jesus:  “Tend my sheep”. 

V17  Jesus then says the third time “Simon, do you filw me?”  (do you really like me, even as just your friend?’).   Peter was filled with grief and pain.  (a) Distressed by now having been asked whether he loved Jesus even as just a friend instead of as one loves The Father and is loved by the Father, (b) in near panic that Jesus asked him a third time in view of his thrice denial of his Lord, and (c) desperate because he really did not quite know what Jesus was talking about in the love called agape, Peter broke down.  I imagine Peter choking now “Lord you know everything.  You know my heart.  You know that all I can say is filw,  that I love you as my friend”.   (He meant ‘I don’t know about agape .  I don’t know anything.  I’m crushed by the dreadful memory of having lied that I didn’t know who you were.  We are all so ashamed of having run away and not having stood like men with you, our best friend.  But I’m worse.  I’m such a coward!’).  And probably more.  Peter’s proud self-image was shattered.

In VV18-19 Jesus goes on.  No doubt He knew, and certainly He implied, ‘You will come to know all about agape, my beloved Peter’.  Then He said “Truly, when you were young you fastened your belt and went wherever you chose, but when you are old you will stretch out your arms and a stranger will bind you fast and carry you where you have no wish to go”.  The Gospeller John adds an explanatory note:- ‘Jesus said this to indicate the manner of death by which Peter was to glorify God’.  Then He added those ultimate words that He may be saying to you and me, which comprehensively solve our uncertainties, and Peter’s, about where we are going to go and what we are going to do:- “Follow me.” 

One way of putting all this is to say that Jesus heard Peter’s confession and that He brought Peter to face up to what he had done.  Another is that he highlighted the deficiency of Peter’s friendship love, and the gap between that and God’s agape love.  But in each verse Jesus adds a few words to lessen the crushing.  “Feed my sheep.”   These are words of encouragement rather than rejection after each round and need to be heard deep down.   Peter hears that amazingly Jesus still loves him, and needs him.  But Peter is not yet ready.  He isn’t to be trusted, not yet.  He needs to be set free from trusting in himself.  He needs to accept and be transformed by Jesus’ agape love.  He will be needed soon, to prove not his own friendship and his own abilities and principles and so on, but to prove God’s love, and his own for Jesus.

Sometimes in the Church it’s a pity that our liturgy requires us to read the Gospel last.  In this case one of the best sequels to this gospel drama about Peter’s ability to love is our first lesson from Acts.  I suggest we go home and read Acts 2 and Ac ts 5, to see how magnificently Peter responded to the transforming love of God. 

What a man, what a saint, what an evangelist and example.  What a brave and truthful and competent apostle and eventually martyr he became, he the leader of the disciples who betrayed his Lord!

So there’s immense hope for you and me!  Thankyou, Lord!