Do You Love Me?

Jesus repeated the question: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” John 21:16a NLT
Do not listen to that prophet or that dreamer, because Yahweh your God is testing you to see if you truly are loving him with all your heart and soul. After Yahweh your God you must walk; him you should fear; his commands you must carefully keep; to his voice you should listen; him you should serve, and to him alone you should cling. Obey his commands, listen to his voice, and cling to him. Deuteronomy 13:3-4 author’s translation

For those of you, like me, who love “Fiddler on the Roof,” the words above will remind you of Tevya’s to his wife Goldie after twenty-five years of marriage. Her response is that she has cared for him for twenty-five years, and if that’s not love, what is? Nevertheless, he presses her and she replies that she guesses she does and he is delighted. That is what Jesus asked Peter, and what Yahweh asked Israel. After the resurrection Jesus might have asked Peter, “Do you believe in me?” or “Do you accept me?,” but he did not. Is it possible that he wants something more than belief or acceptance?
The answer is that he certainly does want something more. He wants an intimate love
relationship. This is what we see in Deuteronomy 13. Moses says that Yahweh allows false
prophets to do miracles to see whether the Israelites love him heart and soul. If they only believe in him for what they can get out of him, then any fast-talking charlatan who seems to have super-natural ability will be able to seduce them. But if they are loving him, God himself, as a present experience, they are not going to be susceptible to fast talk. It is him they want (notice the position of the object – preceding the verbs). If it is him you want, that is going to be revealed in how close you walk to him, in your determination not to do anything that would offend or hurt him, in the care with which you do what he wants, in your attention to what he says, and in how tightly you cling to him, come what may. Do you love him? That’s what he wants.