We recently prayed for the Cardinals gathered in Conclave to choose Peter's successor, listening to the Holy Spirit. During the voting, Cardinal Ratzinger, as he later said, sensing where the will of the Holy Spirit would lead him, prayed that God would spare him such a difficult task. But he was chosen and accepted the call to follow Jesus's will. The reflections that follow by Don Antonio Torresin on the passage from John's Gospel thus seem particularly fitting, coming after Don Marco Bove's piece in the latest issue of Ombre e Luci.
When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?" He answered, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." Jesus said, "Feed my lambs." Again Jesus said, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" He answered, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." Jesus said, "Take care of my sheep." 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. And then he said to him, "Follow me."
(Jn. 21:15–19)
To end with a question is to leave a space open—a space for freedom. To end with a question is to reopen what seemed concluded. "Things did not unfold as you hoped," Jesus seems to say. But what actually happens next remains entirely to be seen. What endures? What decisive things do we gather from this story? Finding the ultimate, determining question—the one that shapes the quality of an entire life (spiritual in the fullest sense: including flesh, emotion, feeling, body)—can be truly crucial. The ultimate question is not whether he will stumble again, whether he is ready for the task Jesus intends to entrust to him, whether he feels secure. The question has to do with the threefold denial, certainly. Jesus places it at the center of their dialogue, with discretion but unmistakably. The question also concerns suffering, pain, and failure. The experience of failure is central—but for that very reason it could swallow Peter whole and paralyze him. What is needed is a question that opens him to life, not one that nails him to death.
The question frees me from the deadly pull of my own pain. Though Jesus references the wound of the threefold denial, he will not let his disciple be consumed by self-preoccupation or even by his own manifest inadequacy. The wound remains; it should not be suppressed. The disciple must not fall into the trap of needing omnipotence or perfect correspondence—the trap of thinking he must somehow earn the love of the one who loves him, that he can do it, that he can be perfect as the aspiration calling him to life seems to demand. This need to measure up can become lethal. No. Peter remains a man—a man bearing his own failures, his own fragility.
Something Great From Us
The question about love is creative; it is an act of love that recreates the disciple. It does not simply tell him, "I love you, despite what happened." That would crush Peter in a childish state. Instead, Jesus asks him to love, treating him as worthy of a trust that generates in him the very capacity to love. It matters that someone asks us to love them. A life without love and compassion makes no sense. There is grace in knowing that someone expects us to love them, that we are not treated as children but as people capable of something great. Responsibility—answering to the love and trust placed in us—is, before it is any heavy burden, a gift. The question posed draws the answer from within us.
Peter's response is both his recognition that he does not know everything about love, that he is not master of the relationship that keeps him alive ("you know all things"), and also the courage—awakened by the trust the master has restored to him—to refuse to withdraw, to expose himself still with a promise of love: I love you.
Love as the fullness of spiritual life is also the condition for Peter's service. "Feed." Only those imperfect, those who know the wound of failure, can feed. Only those who know the possibility of being lost, the crisis of faith, the fragility of their own promises can serve their brothers. Only those who have been lost know the strength of the shepherd's compassion that searches for the lost. Peter's experience of fragility is not an obstacle to his service but its decisive passage.
Following and Being Led
Finally, the last word is the first: follow me. The fulfillment of spiritual life is its beginning, but transfigured by passage through the labor of trial, through the stripping of obedience. Jesus's prophecy about Peter's future is full of mysterious but compelling words. "When you were younger"—there is a time when one believes oneself master of one's own life, able to lead and control it. This is good and right. But the greatest things happen when we lose control, when we lose the possibility and the will to direct ourselves and allow ourselves to be led. We are led by those we are called to serve. The paradox of the shepherd: he is led by others, to places he does not want to go—and in exactly this way he leads them, loves them, serves them. As Jesus, dragged against his will toward Golgotha, was as never before the shepherd saving his sheep, seeking the lost by sharing the condition of the lost.
So it happens that in the spiritual life we find ourselves brought to lands, times, places that were utterly beyond all expectation. The continuity remains: "Do you love me?" and "Follow me." But the ways of loving the Lord and one another, and of following him, are utterly unpredictable and certainly contrary—as Jesus says to Peter—to the disciple's own legitimate hopes.
This is the paradox of maturity: complete freedom lies in complete obedience; love is something we are asked for because it is given to us; to follow is to be led; the fulfillment of my desires passes through the loss of every expectation, the surrender of all control over my life.
Edited by Valentina Gallo, 2005
