In John 17, Jesus prayed that his disciples might see his glory (the glory of a love that loves to the end) and that he might be glorified in them. In today’s gospel (John 21:15-19), we see just how intimately a disciple can share in the Glory of the Lord. Curiously, this glory, for Simon Peter, begins with humiliation: “do you love me?” The correct answer, the answer that Simon Peter can give by grace and in union with the communion of saints that is the Church, is “yes.” But it is a “yes” that recognizes its own inadequacy except in union with this freely given grace, which can only declare: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” The grace that lifts Simon Peter up simultaneously makes him capable of sharing in the Lord’s own mission: “feed my sheep.” We are never redeemed just for ourselves, and our dignity is such that the Lord, who could ably feed all the sheep on his own, actually entrusts us with this task which he enables us, by grace, to accomplish.
There is a further glorification that this gospel mentions, the “death by which Peter would glorify God.” Though Simon Peter has betrayed the Lord three times, a great gift that Jesus assures him of is that his final act will be not only an act of fidelity, but one in which he shares in the Lord’s very passion, completing in his body those things that Jesus could have borne on his own but chose to share with Peter (Cf. Col 1:24). It is for God’s greater glory that our God does not hoard his glory for himself jealously, but rather fills those willing creatures created in his image and likeness with that same glory so that God’s glory might redound throughout all creation, but most especially in those holy creatures (i.e. the saints) who most fully and most freely share in the fullness of life that Christ alone offers them, and which can be perhaps most strikingly seen in the ones who, like Peter following Christ to his death, go out of love where they would never have gone without God’s grace.