Do you truly love me, more than these?

The most painful betrayal wasn’t the kiss in the garden; he already suspected it, anticipated its coming. No, the most painful betrayal was the Great Denial – the thrice-issued public disowning marked by curses and sealed with the haunting cry of a barnyard rooster in the early mist of morning.

Do you truly love me?

Three years together. Traveling, teaching, talking. Three years they walked from village to town to city. He had watched the man called Jesus do unimaginable things: life-long cripples had actually stood on once-shriveled legs and moved about freely on their own; there had been terrible visions of what can only be called pure evil being splintered from the souls it possessed; a man 3 days dead, embalmed, buried – he returned to the land of the living. And he had been there, right beside the man who did it all. In his posse. One of his twelve chosen.

God, were ever men more intimate than this? To not only have witnessed the paradigm-shifting life, but to have been invited into the journey? To share meals, long trips, days and nights for three years long? Jesus had even healed his own mother.

Do you love me?

Proudly, defiantly, perhaps desperately: “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” If someone said that to me, I would know it was love. If someone defended me to the point of drawing a weapon against my enemies, I would know it was love. If that is not love – what is?

But betrayal came. It always comes. Not merely once. Not merely a flippant comment overheard. Three times. Emphatically. Well within earshot. “I’ll be damned if I know who that man is.” The man who loved Jesus, denied him.

I’ve always been told that when Jesus appeared to the fishermen on the beach, cooked them breakfast, and then asked Peter that hard question three times, it was Jesus’ way of reinstating Peter, forgiving him, bringing him back into good graces. That’s not the whole story though. It can’t be.

Betrayed by love. By someone you trusted. Cared for deeply. Had invited into the deepest parts of your life. Don’t tell me Jesus didn’t experience in that moment the same pain I know – the same pain I suspect you do, too. The moment that love fails you is a bitter, terrible moment that strips you of the thing that sustained you and kept you going. When you are loved, it means someone believes in you. Can you even believe in yourself when no one loves you? How? Tell me how, because I can’t.

Jesus wasn’t merely reinstating Peter. That couldn’t have been the whole story. Jesus asked the hardest question to ask in that situation. A question that makes us feel weak, needy, desperate. But he asked it: Do you love me? He needed to be loved, he needed to believe this man who had walked with him for three years still believed in him. After going to hell and back, Jesus needed to hear the words, “I love you.”

If he had to ask three times… if he had to hear it for himself… If Jesus’ need for love was so great that he risked it all by asking the question, Do you love me – are you and I any different?