Third Sunday of Easter
May 4, 2025
After these things Jesus showed himself
again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, and he showed himself in this
way. Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin,
Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his
disciples. Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him,
“We will go with you.”
They went out and got into the boat, but
that night they caught nothing. Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach,
but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them,
“Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” He said to
them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So
they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so
many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When
Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he had
taken it off, and jumped into the sea.
But the other disciples came in the boat,
dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about
a hundred yards off. When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there,
with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that
you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore,
full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them, and though there were so
many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now
none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was
the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them and did the same
with the fish.
This was now the third time that Jesus
appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. When they had
finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love
me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of
John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon son
of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third
time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you
know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell
you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever
you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone
else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”
(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.)
After this he said to him, “Follow me.”
*****************************
When
something awful or maybe something wonderful – let’s just say something
“momentous” – has occurred, there often follows a longing for “normalcy”. You just want things to slow down or to be at
least slightly predictable for awhile.
Big changes are exhausting.
Important events demand a lot of attention. Sometimes you just want to turn on a baseball
game and sit on the couch with a bag of potato chips, or take a walk in the
park. You need time to make sense of
things, maybe, or to figure out what has happened. Emily Dickinson described the feelings this
way:
“After
great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The
Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The
stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And
‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The
Feet, mechanical, go round –
A
Wooden way
Of
Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless
grown,
A
Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This
is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered,
if outlived,
As
Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First
– Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – ”
I wonder if there wasn’t a little bit of that going on
for Peter following the resurrection of Jesus.
Peter
had been through all the events of Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem, in the course
of which he had sliced off someone’s ear trying to defend Jesus, then a short
while later turned around and denied that he even knew him. Then he went and hid with the friends who had
heard him brag about how he would never abandon Jesus. Who knows whether he despaired more of Jesus
or more of himself. Then came news from
the women that when the coast was clear for them to go and give Jesus’ body a
proper burial, it was gone. Peter and
John ran to see the empty tomb, and saw for themselves, then went home.
Please,
no more surprises.
But
wait! It turns out that this was not
some ghoulish desecration of a corpse, which, though horrible, would be
something you can wrap your head around, like the news that Judas had killed
himself. No, Jesus himself starts
showing up whenever the remaining disciples get together – and how do you make
sense of that? That is not going to
happen overnight.
Please,
no more surprises, even good ones.
Normalcy! Enough with Jerusalem!
Peter
somehow made his way home, and his hometown friends went with him, back to
where they had been three years ago, when Jesus has walked into their lives and
said, “Follow me!”
“Gathered there together were Simon Peter,
Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and
two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’
They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’” [John 21:2-3]
Just to top it off how things were finally heading
toward normal, the Bible tells us
“They went out and got into the boat, but
that night they caught nothing.” [John 21:3]
That’s disappointing, but normal.
Or is
it? There’s normal without Jesus and
there’s normal with Jesus.
Think
about the things Peter had experienced with Jesus around – even just things
that had to do with boats or fish. The
story is not told in John’s gospel, but appears in the other three [Matthew 8:23-27, Mark 4:35-41, and Luke
:22-25] how it was there on the Sea of Galilee that there
had been a storm that threatened to overturn their boat except that Jesus told
the storm to knock it off, and the storm just stopped. John tells a version of this story where the
disciples are in the boat facing heavy weather when Jesus, whom they had left
on land about four miles back, came walking straight toward them across the
water
“and they were terrified. But he said to them, ‘It is I; do not be
afraid.’ Then they wanted to take him
into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were
going.” [John 6:19-21]
John places that right after the only miracle that is
found in all four gospels, where Jesus feeds thousands of people with five
loaves of bread and two fish. Matthew
tells a story about how Jesus once sent Peter to catch a fish that would have a
coin in its mouth that could be used to pay their taxes. [Matthew 17:24-27]
None
of these things are exactly normal, except with Jesus in the picture. Now, with Peter thinking that life will be
business as usual again, someone shows up on the shoreline and shouts to the
fishermen to tell them that after working all night with nothing to show for
it, all they have to do is to switch their nets to the other side [John 21:6]
and when it worked, John realized the man on the beach was Jesus.
For
his part, Peter realized that there was no going back. The new normal was not the old pre-Jesus
normal, but the life-with-Jesus normal that would include all the inexplicable
and surprising and confusing and even weird things that happen when Jesus turns
things around. For Peter that would mean
having to come to terms with having failed Jesus in a major way, but still
being loved and called, which is hard for a lot of people to comprehend – Jesus
doesn’t care about his followers being “good enough”, but cares about the love
that leads to a life lived the way Jesus lives.
That lesson would begin
to sink in onshore, after breakfast, with an exceedingly awkward, bluntly
honest, but incredibly grace-filled one-on-one reminder of what had gone before. That, too, is part of the new normal. Peter would have to learn that following
Jesus would, indeed, involve following Jesus in exactly the way that he had
feared in the hours that Jesus was on trial.
But here was Jesus, having undergone all of that, and still holding out
his love and his friendship and even his trust.
John’s
gospel doesn’t wrap up any loose threads.
None of the gospels do that, but each in its own way shows Jesus telling
his friends to keep on going, because the story of Jesus himself has never
ended and will never end.
“But there are also many other things that
Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose the world could
not contain the books that would be written.” [John
21:25]
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