“Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” With this question, Jesus expresses the deepest want of every human heart, including His own which was also divine. We all want love, even God, especially God. What is life worth without love? Without love, life is a living death.

But the question of Jesus also highlights something else about the love we all seek. By asking Peter if he loved Him “more than these”, Jesus shows that among all the loves we want, there is a special love that we want above all. We want to be loved by someone more than they love anyone else. That’s the love of marriage or of friendship. While the love of everyone is wonderful, the love of someone, “the one”, surpasses it by far. Jesus wanted the love of all his apostles and followers, but He wanted Peter’s love above all. That’s what’s most required in our new Pope, as in every Pope: that he love Jesus more than any of us love Him.

The question of Jesus to Peter goes literally to the heart of what being a follower of Jesus means. Jesus wants all of us to love Him more than we love anyone else and more than anyone else loves Him. He is stirring us, provoking us to rivalry in love: He wants us to out-love one another in loving Him! But that’s not all. The question of Jesus to Peter goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being. The God who is Love, created us in, and out of, love. Our deepest identity as human beings is that we are loved by God and called to love Him above all in return. To follow Jesus means to follow Love because to be human means to follow Love, to be in Love. Humanity finds its fulfilment in Christ, as it takes its origin from Christ. Those with the gift of faith know that; those who don’t have faith but who, without knowing it, seek Christ with a sincere heart will one day know fully the Christ they have sought unknowingly. They will know, see, Love face to face.

It is a psychological and spiritual fact that we can only love if we have been loved first. It is love received that opens up the heart to give love in return. If we look at creation, it speaks to us, shouts to us, of the love of the Creator. The fact that I myself exist is the greatest proof of the Creator’s love for me. But I need to come to realise that, to grow into that marvellous truth and so come to a deep awareness of myself as loved by God. That happens, or should normally happen, firstly through the love of my mother and father, and then of those around me. I can then blossom as one loved so as to blossom as one who loves. But the aim of this blossoming, its fullest flowering is when my parents and others lead me, educate me, to discover the joy of God’s love for me. I come gradually to the awareness that it is God’s love which has given me not only to myself as a gift of His love but has also given to me my parents and those around me as gifts of His love, as my tutors in God’s love until I mature in that love myself. I come to understand that the whole point of my existence is to be caught up into the love of God. I perceive that, with regard to me, the main purpose God has given to my parents and family is to bring me to the God who is Love. It is to bring me to love Jesus more than these, more than my own parents and family. As He says, “if anyone prefers mother, father, son or daughter to me, he is not worthy of me.”

That being so, then it is even more the case that I will seek to love Jesus not just more than any other, not just more than myself, but also more than any thing. Every thing which God has made is good, and everything which the genius and industry of human beings have developed will also be good – to the degree it falls in with the will and love of God. The purpose of creation and of the creative skills God has given us is not to entrap us in them but to lead us through them to God Himself, to draw us more and more deeply into His eternal love for us.

And so the good things of nature, the good things produced by the genius of the human mind such as the world of industry, technology, commerce, science, medicine, the arts, politics, the humanities and every other such enterprise: all of these will lead to true human growth and flourishing to the degree that they equip us to love God and to love one another as God does. But, if we cut God out of them or ignore Him or deny He is there at all, then all these good things will, sooner or later, one way or another, stunt our human flourishing as individuals and as society. Unless the love of God more than these other things is the inspiration and guiding principle driving us to develop these same things, their development will inevitably lead to disintegration and destruction – of these things themselves, and of us. Rather than lift us to God, they will cast us away from Him.

This means that the question of Jesus to Peter, “do you love me more than these?” is in fact the basis of all true growth and development. It is the measure of why I choose or do anything. It is the compass of my motivation. Jesus is always asking me this question because He is always seeking my love. He knows that I can find no other final fulfilment than in loving Him more than these, whatever these may be. Without this question of Jesus, we so easily lose our way. Our society today in many senses has lost its way. We put the emphasis on ourselves and we separate the good things of the world from the good God who gave them to us. Not God’s will but the individual’s own will is now at the centre and society attracts our will to choose from among a host of values: some of them are good as far as they go, but they bind us to material needs or ideals which don’t begin to draw out the deepest and best resources of the human spirit. Other so-called values deceive: they only cater to egoism and self-absorption and turn people inwards and downwards, not outwards and upwards.

We especially betray our young people if we put before them as goals to strive for things which belong only to a materialistic mindset such as money, academic qualifications, sport, career, possessions and a superficial happiness of live and let live. Such things can and do have their place, but it is not the best and highest place where our children are called, are destined, to be. Those things do not tap the deepest resources God has put in our young, to love Him more than these, to strive for heroism in love, in self-sacrifice, in faith and hope in eternity. Much of what we offer our children anaesthetizes them, numbing them to the truly great values of the soul and heart and conscience.

Our young people, as we ourselves, were born for greater things, as St. Ignatius of Loyola states in his motto. We are born to love God, to love like God, to know and rejoice in God, to live and die for God. We are not born to be straitjacketed by material things or merely human affections and ideas which know nothing of God or even reject Him, or to live in spiritual or moral mediocrity. Our origin is divine; our destiny is divine, to become divine in body and spirit by the crucified love and resurrection of Jesus. The short span of our lives is not given to us to be consumed in the bubble of merely mundane realities, no matter how beautiful they are or appear. It is given to us to prepare us for heaven, to live with God, to sit at His table.

As we come forward to receive the Eucharist in our hands and on our tongues today, let us hear Jesus ask us personally: “do you love me, really love me, more than these?” Peter heard it three times. May we let Jesus keep asking it of us for as long as it takes us to answer Him truthfully: “Yes, Lord, you know everything. You know I love you.”