Biblion Bible Commentary
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What Is That to You?
John 21:20-25
20 Then Peter, turning around, saw a disciple following. This was the disciple whom Jesus loved, the one who had also leaned on Jesus’ chest at the supper and asked, “Lord, who is going to betray you?” · WEB
Peter asks about somebody else's future and is told to mind his own — and the book signs itself.
Then Peter, turning around, saw a disciple following. This was the disciple whom Jesus loved John 21:20.
He has just been told how he will die and the first thing he does is look over his shoulder.
The writer identifies himself here with the fullest description in the book — the one who leaned on his chest at the supper and asked who the betrayer was John 13:23–25 — which is his way of authenticating what comes next without giving a name.
"Lord, what about this man?" John 21:21.
The question is entirely natural and it is the first symptom of the disease the previous paragraph just cured. A man given a hard assignment immediately wants to know what the other man's is, and whether it is comparable.
"If I desire that he stay until I come, what is that to you? You follow me" John 21:22.
The answer is not unkind and it is not soft. The hypothetical is left standing, unanswered — he does not say what the other man's future is, which is the point. Another disciple's calling is none of Peter's business.
And the pronoun in the last clause is emphatic: you follow me. It is the same instruction from three verses earlier, reissued to a man who had already found a way to look sideways.
This is the last recorded word of Jesus in this Gospel, and it is worth registering what it is. Not a doctrine, not a commission, not a promise about the end. Two men on a beach, one of them comparing himself with the other, and the correction is to keep his eyes where they belong.
This saying therefore went out among the brothers that this disciple wouldn't die. Yet Jesus didn't say to him that he wouldn't die John 21:23.
The correction of a rumor, and it is one of the reasons this chapter reads as an addition. A community had turned a conditional into a promise, and the man it was about is still alive to say they got it wrong — and quotes the sentence exactly to show where the error entered.
It also tells the reader something about when this was written. Nobody corrects that rumor until the disciple is old and people have begun to wonder.
This is the disciple who testifies about these things, and wrote these things. We know that his witness is true John 21:24.
The book signs itself, and it does so in the two voices it has used throughout. He wrote; we know — a community putting its endorsement beside his testimony, which is how a document was authenticated.
And the claim made is the one the whole Gospel has rested on since the prologue said we saw his glory John 1:14: not that he reasoned it out, but that he was there.
There are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they would all be written, I suppose that even the world itself wouldn't have room for the books that would be written John 21:25.
The last verse is a deliberate exaggeration and the writer flags it — I suppose — so nobody mistakes it for a measurement. It is what a man says at the end of a long life spent trying to get one person onto a page.
And it closes the book where it opened it. The Word through whom all things were made John 1:3 cannot be contained by the world he made, and twenty-one chapters were never going to be enough.
settled What this mark means