Do you love Me? Then feed

These seven chapters are the long last act of John’s Gospel, and Day 4 is where we live inside them rather than watch from a distance. They open in an upstairs room the night before the cross. Jesus has washed feet, broken bread, and now He talks the way people talk when there is not much time left. “I am the vine and you are the branches,” He says. “Remain in Me” (John 15:5, 15:4). And then the sentence the whole night has been moving toward: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

From there the story descends. A garden across the Kidron. An arrest. A courtyard where Peter, who had sworn he would lay down his life for Jesus, instead warms his hands at a charcoal fire and says three times that he does not know the man. A trial. A hill. And on the cross, when the sour wine has touched His lips, three words that are not a defeat but a completion: “It is finished” (John 19:30). The love of 15:13 is not a saying. It is a deed, carried all the way down.

Then the tomb is empty, and the same Lord who said “As the Father has sent Me, so also I am sending you” (John 20:21) does something almost ordinary. He builds a fire on a beach, cooks breakfast for tired fishermen, and turns to the one who denied Him. Day 4 is application: here is what the cross is for. Not admiration from a safe distance, but a question put to your face – and a flock put in your hands.

A friend of mine came back to faith after years away. He told me the hardest part was not believing again. It was believing he could be trusted with anything again. He had walked out on a marriage, a church, a list of people who had counted on him. “I can say I love God,” he said. “What I cannot imagine is Him handing me anything to hold.”

The thing that finally turned for him was small. An older man at his new church asked him to drive a widow to her chemotherapy appointments every Thursday. No microphone, no platform, no second chance to prove himself in front of the people who had watched him fail. Just a car, a calendar, and one frightened woman who needed someone to show up.

He told me later that the first Thursday he sat in the parking lot and cried, because he understood that this was the answer to a question he had been too ashamed to ask out loud. Do you love Me? Then here – feed this one. Not your love announced. Your love spent on someone who cannot pay it back, in a place where no one is keeping score but Me.

A Galilean fisherman, son of John, the disciple who walked on water and then sank, who swore he would die for Jesus and then denied Him three times over a charcoal fire the night of the arrest. In John 21 the risen Christ does not lecture him; He cooks him breakfast, asks three times if he loves Him, and three times commissions him to feed and shepherd the flock. Tradition holds that Peter was later martyred in Rome under Nero – stretching out his hands, as Jesus foretold, finally laying down his life for the Friend who had laid down His first.