Peter's Denial in John's Gospel: A Small Observation

I was reading the end of the gospel of John and noticed something interesting which I had never really picked up on before.  Picking up in John 18:18, Jesus has just been arrested.  The first interesting detail is that apparently no one knows Peter.  It is recorded that "the other disciple with them" was known to the High Priest and so he went in with Jesus.  Apparently though, Peter is not known as one of Christ's disciples--at least not overtly known as one.

John records that the night was cold, so that some of the officials stood around a fire to keep warm.  Peter too moves to the fire to keep warm, having already denied Christ once along the way.  Here in essence we see two movements of Peter attempting self comfort: moving toward the fire away from Christ's persecution; and again even further from Christ's persecution by denial of association. After the scene quickly changes  to Jesus, and then back to Peter, John records the specific detail that Peter is still warming himself by the fire (18:25).  At first glance this appears incidental.  Incidental or not, it is around the fire that Peter denies Christ three times.

Moving forward to John 21, when Christ appears post-resurrection at the sea of Galilee while his disciples are unsuccessfully fishing: when they recognize who he is they rush to Christ.  And when they get close they discover near Christ...a fire.  And it is around this fire that Christ asks Peter three times: Peter, do you love me?

Now a lot of people get caught up at this point on the distinction of agape and phileo in the exchange.  Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter agapes Jesus, while Peter responds three times with phileo.  Yet here they are being used as semantically equivalent.  Some even theorize that this difference--if not merely for the sake of breaking up literary monotony by a sixfold repetition of agape--is a formal rhetorical structure so that the agape-phileo is actually just convention.  Regardless the key point does not lay here, and serves to distract from the details.

The point here seems to be that Peter never had a chance to repent before Christ, to say he was sorry.  Yet because of Christ's resurrection he has exactly that chance.  Not only that, it almost appears that we get a picture of recapitulation: Christ has recreated in essence the scene of Peter's denial of Christ in order to give him a second chance, so that it might be subsumed in a successful response of "yes."  Even more, where in what at first Peter was using for self-comfort by moving away from Christ, here Christ himself provides the comfort.  Christ provides the fire; Christ provides a new opportunity to declare love for Him.  The resurrection is in essence the "yes" to our no, a yes which jumps the interval of our rejection to create the condition of our own "yes" to the Lord.

And afterward after Christ has recapitulated Peter's failure he tells him: feed my sheep.  Thus in this one literary movement which I had never really noticed before John has painted a beautiful scene: Christ's resurrection is the possibility of seemingly impossible reconciliation.  Moreover, it is the hope that whatever our past failures, God can transform them into an opportunity for not only success, but a success which creates the possibility that we might be given the honor to mediate this reconciliation of God to others, that we may "feed God's sheep."