How can He?
But how is it? How can Jesus not take it into account? How can He talk to Peter as if Peter had not denied Him three times and had not run away from underneath the cross? How can He be so kind to the disciples after all had run away and had abandoned Him on the cross? How can He be so gentle, loving and benign even now, when He meets them as the Risen One, while many of them are still full of doubts and suspicions? How can He be waiting for them on the seashore in total peace and kindness, without any anxiety and agitation, while knowing perfectly well that His disciples are coming after having spent the night fishing with no results? How can He grant to these weak men, full of ego, who run away out of fear, driven by vainglory, a miraculous fishing which fills the nets and is almost sinking the boats? How can He be so calm and loving even if His disciples' eyes are still so impeded and their hearts so dumb and hard? Is it divine compassion? Is it love without limits?God's visceral mercy? Yes it is, but it is also something else. And what can be there beyond God's love?
Beyond God's love there is the fact that God's love is not as we think it is, and it is never as we want it to be. God's love expands and moves out of love and for love's sake only. God's love does not surround us, completely and always, in direct proportion with some form of merit, with our response of faith and love, or to our holiness. The most common blasphemy is to think that God's love and protection correspond to a kind of reward or appreciation, or even worse, that His love can side with someone at the expense of someone else. God's love never sides with anyone, it will never occur that our sins and wickedness may diminish His love just for a moment. God's love is incomprehensible to us, to our reasoning and our understanding capabilities.God's love does not follow preconceptions, the hardness of precepts, the coldness of laws and tribunals, the measures of conveniences, the strategies of interest, the arrogance of blackmail. But how can He do it? The question is “how” but “who” is He? Who is He, who can love with such love, unknown and unknowable to us? John replies to all: it is the Lord. John recognizes his Lord from His way of loving. John loves Jesus so much, he loves Jesus' divine and unknown way of loving so much that he is able to recognize Him anywhere, anytime. John immediately recognizes the Lord because John loves in himself the boundless love in which he is immersed in the heart of Jesus. Man should love himself and his brothers if only because of the love in which each person is immersed in the heart of God. Man should learn to recognize himself and the others just for the love and mercy of God to which we belong. We are literally, physiologically, electrochemically, energetically immersed in the ocean of God's love which will remain unknown and unknowable to us until we choose freely and lovingly to dive in it completely and consciously. God's love loves in us even the love that He gives to us, the mercy with which He surrounds and forgives us. Learning how to love God's love in ourselves and in the others every single moment is the most effective way to learn to recognize and know one another. You can not love someone you do not recognize. In this sense, Jesus' most terrible sentence in the gospel is when He reminds us that one day, after living a lifetime on this earth surrounded by God's love, if we do not choose to immerse ourselves completely in the ocean of God's love, we will be told at the gates of heaven: out of here, I do not recognize you. Peter cannot recognize Jesus, because Peter lives love on the dimension of duty rather than abandonment, possession rather than freedom, merit more than kindness and grace. Peter does not recognize Him yet, but has a good sense and humility - excellent qualities to become the first pastor of the church – and he trusts John's loving cry, he trusts the prophecy which sees beyond and before. Peter trusts John's word of and dives into the sea to go to meet Jesus, is Peter's first dive into the immense, unpredictable, deep ocean of God's love. With that dive towards Jesus, Peter, the pastor, had his baptism, his immersion in God, his consecration to Jesus in the Holy Paraclete. When the church no longer has the good sense and humility to listen to the prophecy of God's lovers, it immediately loses its immersion in God's love, its unity with the mandate of Jesus. Not feeling God's love, which encompasses, generates, guides, protects, enlightens, warms, frees, saves all and everything, is the greatest loss of humanity, the most gigantic obstacle to its progress. A prayer could save us, an unceasing, synchronic prayer in which we need to dive as if it were an ocean: Lord, love in us the love with which you love us. Anyone who fills his inner spiritual and mental dialogue with these words, night and day, will be freed by God from all his debts, he will be saved from the Evil one and freed from evil and will be able to recognize his Lord and to be recognized by Him. This prayer is the passport for those who want to cross the border of this generation to the next evolution in the Spirit.