I recently rewatched the second and final season of “Fleabag” after reading an article suggesting the Amazon Prime series aired a nearly perfect finale. The promotional tagline for the final episode was an intriguing question posed after viewers had grown to love a complicated character: Will she get the ending she’s looking for?
After six episodes of cheering on a love story between the main character and a Catholic priest, who is torn between his love for her and his commitment to the priesthood, the protagonist finally tells him that she loves him. And he responds, “It will pass.”
As the priest leaves her, he confesses, “I love you too,” though it’s not the type of love that she desires. It’s an unresolved, unrequited, incomplete love—a painful love, for both of them.
Getting Love Right
Lately I’ve also been reflecting on one of the first sermons I ever preached, on a text and a theme that I can’t shake. It was over 20 years ago; I was an eager and earnest divinity school student enrolled in Greek.
The text for my sermon was the post-resurrection story in the final chapter of John, depicting Jesus and Peter’s reunion after an unbelievably traumatic week. On its surface, the scene is so ordinary: friends who have been through so much together, now simply eating breakfast by the seashore.
As Jesus and his friends share a meal, they express their love for each other. Jesus, who was killed and resurrected, offers forgiveness before he leaves the Earth. Peter, who denied him three times and ran away, expresses his love and accepts his role in the future church.
It’s a beautiful and inspiring story of redemption and grace. It’s so mundane, yet so evocative. It was one of my favorite passages.
Until I learned Greek. Grad school really does ruin everything.
Permit me a brief, nerdy moment of Greek grammar.
In English, we have one word for love, no matter what kind of love it is. In Greek, there are three.
Eros is the Greek word for romantic love—Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Travis and Taylor. It’s a word that isn’t used much in the New Testament.
The word for love between family or friends is Phile, as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.
But the word for godly, unconditional love is Agape. My Greek lexicon calls it “love without limitation.” The New Testament uses this word throughout for God’s love for us and the kind of love Jesus calls us to imitate.
In John 21:15, Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, do you agapao me?” But when Peter answers this question, from the man he betrayed and abandoned to die alone, the man who now offers forgiveness and blesses him with a great charge, Peter replies, “Yes, Lord, you know that I phileo you.”
Jesus asks him if he loves him with all his heart, unconditionally and beyond borders. Peter responds that he loves him… like a bro.
Jesus, obviously not receiving the answer he was looking for, asks a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you agapao me?”
For the second time, Peter replies, “Lord, you know that I phileo you.”
Readers can’t see this in our English Bibles. We skip right over it, believing Peter responds correctly. We wonder why Jesus keeps pestering the poor guy with the same question.
Jesus, yet again seemingly hurt by one of his closest friends, asking for love without limitation and receiving a love with limits, asks a third time. But this time, perhaps worn down by Peter’s responses, not wanting to ruin the moment, or maybe understanding again, all too well, the fundamental human condition, he asks, “Simon, do you phileo me?”
“Peter, do you at least love me as you say, will you at least love me like a brother?” And despite what must have been a disappointing, perhaps even heartbreaking exchange, Jesus asks Peter to tend his flock anyway.
The NIV translation renders this distinction subtly: Jesus asks Peter if he “truly loves” him, and Peter responds that he simply “loves” him. Still, most commentators believe we should read no nuance into the use of two Greek words for love. John uses the words interchangeably, they argue, and this is just a matter of vocabulary variety.
And that might be true. But could we be missing something meaningful by skipping over this grammatical oddity?
Rarely has such a minor shift in word choice borne witness to such a fundamental human condition. And it might be worth asking if this helps us to understand Jesus, and ourselves, better.
Perhaps one of Jesus’ final acts on Earth is to experience the immensely personal heartbreak of unrequited, unfulfilled love. Based on Peter’s uncomfortable third response, this love is painful for both of them.
It’s a deeply personal ending to such a cosmic story. After twenty-one chapters of cheering on this sweeping, intimate love story, I wanted more, or better for them. Frankly, the series finale of John’s gospel sucks.
Embracing a Disappointing Finale
I preached this sermon as a seminarian still on the borders of Evangelicalism. I landed it with a point about God loving us despite our failures.
But at a time when I’ve been thinking a lot about moral complexity and human failing, what might this passage and my disappointment with it be saying now?
I love a short essay by Isaac Villegas in The Christian Century on the ordinariness of Jesus, fishing with his friends after the spectacular resurrection event. Villegas ends by suggesting that this scene depicts the steady, ordinary divine presence. “God’s love is an unassuming pulse at the heart of our lives,” he writes.
But I also wonder if anything is more ordinary, more human, than the disappointment we all experience in our relationships with one another. And if this is one of Jesus’ final experiences, what does that mean?
Disappointment is inevitable. People will let you down—even those you know and love the most. These are universal truths, experienced by everyone.
But history and experience concur: every movement for freedom and liberation is left incomplete, every advance for the sake of justice eventually steps backward, every personal relationship contains heartbreak.
It feels right to say that on this side of heaven, everything remains incomplete. Even in resurrection triumph, in Easter joy, something is missing, something yearned for but unfulfilled. Something already…but not yet.
We try, we experience pain, and then we keep going anyway. I think this hidden clue in the midst of one of the most glorious stories ever told is also part of the Good News. The incompleteness is part of the story, and that is liberating news.
You don’t have to always get it right; God will love you anyway. But the same is true for everyone else.
The Good News is that we are all trying to figure it out. We are all afraid to say what we feel, to commit, to take the step. And we all hope the loved ones around us will do those things for us. Many times, they won’t.
Sometimes, “It’ll pass” is all we can hope for, and that has to be okay. We try and then keep going anyway.
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Dr. Kristopher Norris is the author of Witnessing Whiteness: Confronting White Supremacy in the American Church, as well as other books and articles on church, politics, and race. Previously, he worked as a professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, along with degrees from Duke and Emory Universities. Originally from North Carolina, he is an ordained Baptist minister and now serves as Vice President of the Alliance of Baptists.