John 21:22

22. If I will Our Lord here assumes to be Lord of man’s destiny. Though he permit, yet nothing can take place without his permissive will. Now the Lord’s answer to Peter’s question is purposely pregnant with two or three admissible meanings; nevertheless of the two or three possible meanings but one is the true one. Tarry [on earth] till I come That is, remain living to the judgment day, be the same a longer or shorter period. If that were Christ’s will, what is that to Peter? Commentators of all ages falter and vibrate around, and then from, this plain meaning. Jesus does not say that John will live to the Second Advent; but he does most truly say that it is none of Peter’s business if he does. At the same time he intimates that if John’s future be not this, it is something so much like it that it may be shadowed under these words. If, firstly, the word come be taken in the sense of John 14:3, then the sentence is that John shall not, like Peter, be bound and violently slain; but shall quietly and peacefully tarry until the Lord shall please to come at the hour of death and take him to himself. Or, secondly, if the Lord shall in his own time vouchsafe to John individually a Christophany, that is, a special parousia or coming to him alone what had Peter to say to it? John did tarry until the Lord in that Christophany did come. Revelation 1:12-20. And this last was, perhaps, the true meaning at which the Lord so enigmatically hinted, and which justifies the indicative I will in the Greek.

Follow thou me In token of that future spiritual or historical following which the bodily act represented, Peter now follows his departing Lord. To what direction and result? No one knows; for John there leaves them; and the whole scene seems to vanish like a morning dream. But even at this late age of the world let us venture, from the nature of the symbol, to conjecture how our Lord finished this interview. If we may suppose, then, that, as Peter followed, Jesus suddenly vanished in an upward splendour, the symbolic action would then express a complete and required meaning. Follow me, Peter during thy whole future earthly life without swerving, historically as now corporeally, even through suffering and death, and thy path shall end, as mine now merges, in ascending GLORY. It will be seen by this view, that the rebuke of Peter’s sidelong question about John is less severe than commentators generally make it. It was a rebuke, in symbol, which signified that Peter’s future following his Lord ought to be unvarying, regardless of all incidental considerations.