The Second Fire

Peter denied Jesus three times beside a charcoal fire, and the rooster crowed, and the Lord turned and looked at him. That is the last thing that passes between them before the cross. What happens next is not in the Passion story at all. It is on a beach, after breakfast, and it is the reason Peter could stand up in Jerusalem seven weeks later and preach to the men who had done it.

The first fire

He had promised. "Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake" (John 13:37). And Jesus, who knew him better than he knew himself, answered: "The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice" (13:38). He said something else that night too, which Luke kept, and which is the key to everything after: "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren" (Luke 22:31-32). When. Not if. Jesus knew Peter would fall and had already prayed him through to the other side of it, and given him a job for afterward.

Then the courtyard. "the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coals; for it was cold: and they warmed themselves: and Peter stood with them, and warmed himself" (John 18:18). A servant girl asks if he is one of them. "I am not" (18:17). Twice more, the last with cursing in the other Gospels, "and immediately the cock crew" (18:27). Luke adds the detail that no one who has ever been caught can read without flinching: "And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter" (Luke 22:61). Not a word. A look, across a courtyard, from a man being led to His death, at the friend who had just sworn he never knew Him. "And Peter went out, and wept bitterly" (22:62).

Note what the fire was. John says a fire of coals, anthrakia, a charcoal fire. He uses the word exactly twice in his Gospel. This is the first time.

I go a fishing

Easter came, and the empty tomb, and the angel's message that had Peter's name in it on purpose: "tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee" (Mark 16:7). And Peter. The one who might think he was no longer counted. He saw the risen Lord, more than once. And still, some days later, in Galilee, with everything changed and nothing yet explained, he says the sentence of a man who does not know what he is for any more: "I go a fishing" (John 21:3). Back to the boat. Six others go with him, and "that night they caught nothing" (21:3).

"But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus" (21:4). A figure on the beach a hundred yards off, calling out the question every fisherman dreads: "Children, have ye any meat?" (21:5). No. "Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find" (21:6). They do, and the net fills until they cannot haul it, and John, who was there the first time this happened three years before, knows: "It is the Lord" (21:7). And Peter, who has never once waited for a boat to reach shore in his life, throws on his coat and throws himself into the sea.

The second fire

"As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread" (21:9). Anthrakia. The second charcoal fire in the Gospel. Jesus has built it Himself, and He has built it for Peter, and Peter, dripping on the sand, smelling it, would have known exactly where he last stood beside one. The Lord does not mention it. He says, "Come and dine" (21:12), and feeds them, and nobody dares ask who He is, because they know.

Then, when they had eaten, in front of the others:

Simon, son of Jonas. Not Peter, the rock; the old name, the one he had before. Three questions beside a charcoal fire, for three denials beside a charcoal fire. Peter is grieved at the third, and of course he is; he can count. But look at what Jesus is doing. He is not rubbing it in. He is letting Peter say, three times, out loud, in front of the men who saw him fail, the thing he could not say in the courtyard. He is giving him back his voice. And after each answer, before Peter can catch his breath, a job: feed, shepherd, feed. The forgiveness is not a feeling handed over. It is a flock handed over.

A note on the Greek, since people ask. Jesus's first two questions use agapas, and Peter answers each time with philō; the third time Jesus comes down to Peter's word, phileis. Preachers have made a great deal of that. The honest thing to say is that John uses the two words interchangeably elsewhere, and the old commentators mostly did not build on it. What is certainly there is the number three, and the fire, and the name.

Whither thou wouldest not

Then Jesus tells him how he will die. "When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not" (21:18). Stretch forth thy hands. John, writing decades later, tells us what it meant: "This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God" (21:19). The man who swore he would lay down his life and then could not say he knew Him to a servant girl is told, on the beach, that he will in fact lay down his life, and that it will glorify God. The promise he broke is handed back to him as a prophecy. And then two words, the same two words from the first day by this same lake: "Follow me" (21:19).

Where this lands

Fifty days after that breakfast, Peter stood up in Jerusalem, in front of the people who had crucified Jesus, and told them so to their faces, and three thousand were baptised. Thirty years after that, an old man, he wrote to the churches, "Feed the flock of God which is among you" (1 Peter 5:2), the word from the beach, still in his mouth. And then, the tradition says, he stretched forth his hands in Rome, and was carried where he would not, and did not deny Him.

None of that comes from the courtyard. It comes from the second fire. Jesus did not wait for Peter to work his way back; He built the fire, cooked the breakfast, called him by his old name, and asked the only question that mattered, three times, until the man who had been sifted like wheat had said it enough to believe it. That is what He does with the people who have failed Him worst. He goes ahead of them to Galilee. He is on the shore before they get there. And the question is not "what did you do?" He knows what you did. The question is lovest thou me, and the answer He is waiting for is the one Peter finally gave: Lord, thou knowest.

Related: The Word He Used Only Once, The Warning and the Way Home, No Man Plucks Them, and Thou Art the Man. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.