For years I preached “love” the way I was taught to preach it. English only gives us one word for the whole range, so I went looking for hidden compartments in the Greek (agape and phileo) to feel like I was being faithful to the text, and I found commentators to support me. Loving pizza and loving my kids can’t be the same word, right? Preaching in an international community eventually taught me something I didn’t expect. The problem was never that English was too thin. It was that I kept forcing a hierarchy into the Bible that was never there to begin with.

Agape and Phileo

Here’s the sermon most of us have heard. Agape is the noble love, the word John reaches for when he wants to describe God, unconditional, selfless, the love that goes all the way to a cross. Phileo is the smaller love, warm and human, the kind you’d use for a good friend or a favorite meal. Then someone points you to the beach in John 21, where the risen Jesus asks Peter three times whether Peter loves him, and the twist arrives like a magic trick. The first two times Jesus uses agape. Peter, still gutted from denying Jesus three days earlier, can’t claim that lofty a love, so he answers with phileo instead. Only on the third question does Jesus supposedly lower himself to Peter’s level. Grace meets him where he is.

It’s an easy story to dissect love into levels. I’m not sure it’s what the passage is doing nor whether it’s the main point. Modern scholars like D.A. Carson have helped me see the false hierarchy. Reading the Scriptures in an intercultural community have opened my eyes to the deeper meaning of love in John’s writing.

I don’t see John making a distinction between agape and phileo. A few chapters earlier, John writes “the Father loves the Son” using agape in 3:35, and the same phrase using phileo in 5:20. Same Father, same Son, same eternal relationship, two different words. When Lazarus falls sick, the message to Jesus reads “he whom you love” (phileo). John tells us plainly a few verses later that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus (agape). Then at the tomb, the crowd says “see how he loved him” (phileo again). Same friendship, same grief, same Jesus. It turns out John was a writer who liked variety, not a theologian hiding a hierarchy in his vocabulary. In that same beach conversation he also swaps “lambs” for “sheep” and “feed” for “shepherd,” and very few pastors preach a hidden meaning into that.

So if the hierarchy isn’t really there, what was I supposed to be looking for in the text instead?

I think the better question was never what love means linguistically, but how love was shown. The question the text begs is how a person knows love is actually present. By reading the Bible with other cultures we see love not as a hierarchy, but as a multifaceted gift from God.

Some cultures notice love mainly in loyalty, someone keeping a promise long after it stopped being convenient. Others notice it in sacrifice, in hospitality offered to a stranger, in a friend staying present through suffering instead of looking away, in someone confronting you honestly instead of only agreeing with you, in a person’s honor being protected rather than spent, in a failure restored out loud instead of quietly. None of that changes what the Bible says about love. It reveals facets of it that my own culture was never going to notice on its own.

An Example from the Arab World

The first time I went to an Arabic Easter celebration, I learned a new facet of God’s love that I hadn’t read in any Greek word study. My Jordanian friend Roger and his family had spent days cooking mansaf, a Jordanian dish of lamb, rice, and yogurt, for the occasion. I showed up the way my own culture had trained me: arrive on time, clean your plate, leave once you’ve eaten. So I arrived on time, but it was ninety minutes earlier than anyone else. I ate four full plates of food gorging myself, but Roger gently mentioned I was supposed to leave food behind on my plate to signal I was full. I tried to excuse myself three separate times before the tea had even been poured. By the end of the night, I had broken every rule of hospitality I didn’t know existed, and Roger never once let on. He just kept refilling my cup, waving off my apologies, quietly making sure no one outside our circle knew how badly I’d fumbled. That is what love looks like there. It isn’t only a richer vocabulary. It’s a whole language of covering, so a guest never has to carry the shame of getting it wrong.

Classical Arabic actually has a graduated vocabulary for love involving many words, let’s look at two of them. “Hawa” names the first pull toward someone, before you’ve decided anything, and giving it a name teaches you not to build a life on it. “Wudd” names the steadier, more deliberate affection a marriage is meant to run on, the kind you choose again on purpose rather than wait to feel. It isn’t by accident that Al Wadud, the Loving One, is one of the traditional names for God in Islamic tradition, built from that very root. A love that keeps showing up is exactly what worshippers there are asking God for. If you grew up with words like these, you would never have needed a sermon trick to convince you that steady, covenant love and a friend’s warm affection aren’t competing with each other. You would already have the vocabulary, and the expectation, to hold both. If we need a good sermon illustration on the different facets of love, we don’t have to create a false hierarchy in Greek. Why not explain love accurately and learn from our Arabic speaking brothers and sisters?

Love and Restoration on the Beach

Which brings me back to the beach, because I don’t think that scene is really about Greek synonyms at all.

In a lot of cultures, mine included, we treat restoration as something private, one on one, between the person who failed and the person they hurt. South African Ubuntu philosophy assumes something different. Desmond Tutu leaned on it heavily while running South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the conviction, often summarized as “I am because we are,” that a person only becomes fully who they are through other people. So when one person is restored, the whole community is part of that restoration too. Neither instinct is wrong. But if restoration only ever counts when it happens in private, we may walk right past the moments Scripture is showing us it happened in public.

Notice where Jesus stages this conversation. Not off to the side, not in private, but in front of the other disciples, over a shared breakfast, in daylight. Peter isn’t only forgiven quietly inside himself. He is publicly put back in front of the very people who watched him fall apart weeks earlier. And notice who is doing the restoring. Jesus is standing there resurrected, holding more authority than at any other point in the Gospel, fully able to let the failure stand as the last word on Peter. He doesn’t. He uses the greatest power he has ever held to restore Peter instead of to shame him.

Then there’s the detail I love most. John tells us the disciples are gathered around a charcoal fire. The Greek word for that charcoal fire shows up in exactly one other place in his entire Gospel: the courtyard where Peter warmed his hands the night he denied Jesus three times. John uses that word twice, and both times Peter is standing in front of it about to say something that will define the rest of his life. The first fire is where Peter fell apart. The second is where Jesus rebuilds him, three declarations answering three denials, in front of the same friends, by the same kind of flame.

Peter isn’t being tested on vocabulary. Jesus is not gauging his level of love with words in order to have Peter earn forgiveness. Peter is being restored, personally, relationally, and publicly, all at once, by someone who had every right to walk away and chose not to.

I think that is what the myth about agape and phileo let me avoid all those years. Arguing about which Greek word carries more weight is a comfortable distance from the actual fire, the actual failure, the actual people watching. The real text won’t let us stay there. It asks whether we are willing to go back to wherever our own charcoal fire is, wherever our guilt, shame, or fear is, in front of the people who saw what happened, and let something different be true there.

Jesus didn’t need better vocabulary to restore Peter. He used a fire, a shared meal, and a community that needed to watch it happen. Maybe that’s worth sitting with longer than any word study. What has your own culture trained you to notice as proof that love is really there, and what might it have quietly trained you to miss?

Published August 30, 2026

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