Why did Jesus ask Peter ‘do you love me’ three times?

Two fires

The night Jesus was arrested, Peter followed him into the high priest’s courtyard. It was cold, and the servants had lit a fire.

Now the servants and the officers were standing there, having made a fire of coals, for it was cold. They were warming themselves. Peter was with them, standing and warming himself.

Three times someone asks if he is one of the disciples, and three times he says no. Then the rooster crows (John 18:17, 25–27). A few hours earlier he had promised, “I will lay down my life for you” (John 13:37). The Greek word for that fire is anthrakia, a fire of charcoal, and it appears only twice in the New Testament: in that courtyard, and on the beach in John 21:9, where the risen Jesus has fish and bread cooking at dawn. Many readers take it as a stage direction: the same fire, a second chance.

The old name and the hard question

After breakfast Jesus turns to Peter. He doesn’t use the name he gave him, Peter, “rock.” He says “Simon, son of Jonah,” the name from their first meeting (John 1:42). The first question has an edge: “do you love me more than these?” More than these other disciples do? Peter had boasted that even if all the others stumbled, he never would (Matthew 26:33). Or more than these boats and nets, the old life he went back to that night? John doesn’t say.

He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you have affection for me?” Peter was grieved because he asked him the third time, “Do you have affection for me?” He said to him, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I have affection for you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”

The third question hurts. Peter doesn’t argue. He appeals to what Jesus already knows.

Love or affection?

The Greek uses two verbs. Jesus asks twice with agapaō, then switches to phileō, the verb Peter has used in every answer. The World English Bible marks the change: “love” for the first, “have affection for” for the second. Preachers have built many sermons on it: Jesus asks for the highest love, Peter can only offer friendship, and at last Jesus comes down to meet him. Many scholars doubt John meant the contrast. Elsewhere he uses the two verbs for the same thing, even for the Father’s love of the Son (John 3:35; 5:20), and in this very passage he varies other words too: lambs and sheep, feed and tend.

What “feed my sheep” means

The three tasks are a shepherd’s work. In John’s Gospel the shepherd is Jesus himself: “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Peter, who swore he would die for Jesus and then ran, is handed the flock. Jesus also tells him the cost: when he is old, he will stretch out his hands, and another will dress him and carry him where he does not want to go (John 21:18). John calls it a hint of Peter’s death; see how Peter died. The scene ends where Peter’s story began, with a call to follow: “Follow me” (John 21:19). A letter in Peter’s name later hands the same charge to church elders: “shepherd the flock of God which is among you” (1 Peter 5:2).

How churches read it

Catholics read the scene with Matthew 16:18–19, as Jesus giving Peter charge of the whole flock; the First Vatican Council cited it in 1870. Orthodox and Protestant readers mostly see a personal restoration: the leader who failed, taken back in front of his friends. Both readings agree on what Peter had lost. They argue over what he received, as was Peter the first pope? explains.