The determination of Christ to clear away all misunderstanding and all
doubtfulness about the relation His professed followers hold to Him is
strikingly exhibited in His subjecting Peter to a second and third
interrogation. He invites Peter to search deeply into his spirit and to
ascertain the very truth. It is the most momentous of all questions; and
our Lord positively refuses to take a superficial, careless,
matter-of-course answer. He will thus question, and thrice question, and
probe to the quick all His followers. He seeks to scatter all doubt
about our relation to Him, and to make our living connection with Him
clear to our own consciousness, and to place our whole life on this
solid basis of a clear, mutual understanding between Him and us. Our
happiness depends upon our meeting His question with care and sincerity.
Only the highest degree of human friendship will permit this persistent
questioning, this beating of us back and back on our own feelings,
deeper and deeper into the very heart of our affections, as if still it
were doubtful whether we had not given an answer out of mere politeness
or profession or sentiment. The highest degree of human friendship
demands certainty, a basis on which it can build, a love it can entirely
trust. Christ had made good His right thus to question His followers and
to require a love that was sure of itself, because on His part He was
conscious of such a love and had given proof that His affection was no
mere sentimental, unfruitful compassion, but a commanding, consuming,
irrepressible, unconquerable love--a love that left Him no choice, but
compelled Him to devote Himself to men and do them all the good in His
power.

Peter's self-knowledge is aided by the form the question now takes. He
is no longer asked to compare the hold Christ has upon him with his
interest in other things; but he is asked simply and absolutely whether
love is the right name for that which connects him with his Lord.
"_Lovest thou Me?_" Separating yourself and Me from all others, looking
straight and simply at Me only, is "love" the right name for that which
connects us? Is it love, and not mere impulse? Is it love, and not
sentiment or fancy? Is it love, and not sense of duty or of what is
becoming? Is it love, and not mere mistake? For no mistake is more
disastrous than that which takes something else for love.

Now, to apprehend the significance of this question is to apprehend what
Christianity i