John 21:1-19
If I had a degree in literature, I
might look at this passage from John and say, “Wow! This is one big series of allusions!” That’s “allusions” with an ‘a’, references;
not “illusions” with an ‘i’, dreams. I
might be tempted to draw up two columns, and in one note details from John’s
story of Jesus’ beach breakfast with the disciples and in the other note events
of their time together before the Resurrection.
And since I was, in fact, an English major, I did that.
The Sea of Tiberias John 6 Jesus
teaches by the sea of Tiberias, Site of the feeding of the 5000
Thomas called the Twin John 11:16 “Thomas, who was
called
theTwin, said to
his fellow-disciples,
‘Let us also go, that we may die with
him.’”
John 14:5 “Thomas said
to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’”
John 20 The “Doubting
Thomas” incident
Nathanael
of Cana John
2 The Wedding at Cana
The sons of Zebedee Only
mention of them in John, but
in other Gospels they are fishermen
to whom Jesus said,
“Follow me and
I will make you fish for people.”
The disciples in a
boat; Peter jumping out John 6 Jesus walking on water;
in other Gospels but not in
John,
Peter steps out of the boat to
walk
toward him.
The disciples fishing but catching nothing In other Gospels, but
not in John, the disciples are shown failing to perform the miracles that Jesus
does.
Fish
and bread John
6 The Feeding of the 5000
A charcoal fire; Asking
Peter “Do you love me?” John 18
Peter’s Denial of Jesus
three times
“Follow me” John
1:43 “The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He
found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’”
John 10:27 “My sheep hear my
voice. I know them, and they follow me.”
John 13:36 “Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, where are
you going?’ Jesus answered, ‘Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterwards.’”
In other Gospels, but not in John,
“Follow me and I will make you fishers of people.”
Enough is enough, so I’ll stop
there. My point is that in that one
scene, John shows Jesus reaching back into the disciples’ memories of their
experiences with him and the words that he spoke that first brought them into
his circle, and waking a whole swarm of thoughts and feelings.
It
wasn’t just Peter for whom this would have happened, although the references in
his case are clearer and maybe a little bit sharper. You can hear in that give-and-take between
Jesus and him a whole lot of guilt and a whole lot of love mixed up together.
“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.’” [John 21:17]
Surely,
all the other disciples would also have had their own guilt about fleeing when
Jesus was arrested, or about not believing when they were first told he had
risen. They would have had their own
deep confusion about what to do with that news when they came to believe it,
even (in the case of Thomas) when Jesus was standing in front of him saying,
“Go ahead and touch me and see if I’m real or not.” They would have remembered how he had taken
five loaves of bread and two fish and fed 5,000 people and maybe asked
themselves, “Okay, that was two fish and here we are with – how many? – one
hundred and fifty-three.
If 2x = 5,000
then x = 2,500.
So … x
times 153 = 382,500.
Oh,
no! Are we supposed to feed that many
people with this catch?” For some of
them, the words, “Follow me,” were an
echo of a call they had answered when they left home to follow Jesus three
years earlier. For others they were a
warning that following would mean following Jesus in death as in life.
You cannot have breakfast with Jesus
without that sort of thing happening.
You cannot grow close to him and not begin to accumulate a whole lot of
your own memories and experiences of the life of a disciple. Some of those are warm and fuzzy and some are
embarrassing, even painful. Some of them
you might feel free sharing and some of them you don’t want anybody to know
about. They include victories and they
include miserable failures. The good
news is that it all goes together and Jesus stays with us through thick and
thin. He’s the kind of friend who knows
all about us and loves us anyway.
There’s a book by David Gregory that
was published about ten years ago, that expresses it very well. It’s called Dinner with a Perfect Stranger.
The storyline is that a man whose life is incredibly normal, which is to
say full of good and bad stuff at the same time, gets an invitation out of the
blue that says, “You are invited to a dinner with Jesus of Nazareth – Milano’s
Restaurant – Tuesday, March 24 – 8 o’clock”.
Thinking it was either a gag or an advertising gimmick, the man goes
anyhow and finds himself at a table having a one-on-one discussion over an
Italian dinner with somebody who says he’s Jesus and who talks to him about his
life as if he really, really, really knows him.
He says things like,
“‘You’re bored,
Nick. You were made for more than
this. You’re worried about God stealing
your fun, but you’ve got it backwards.
There’s no adventure like being joined to the Creator of the
universe.’ He leaned back off the
table. ‘And your first mission would be
to let him guide you out of the mess you’re in at work.’”[1]
I
should add that the book’s publication page has a note saying, “The events and
characters (except for Jesus Christ) in this book are fictional.”
That real Jesus is part of our real lives, not just the ones
that are polished up for facebook or the high school reunion. Whenever you sit down with Jesus over
breakfast or over dinner or in the quiet of your car in a parking lot, he’s
going to tell you things about your life that are good and that are bad, but he
will also stick with you and help you out where you need it most. He did that by telling fishermen where to
look for fish, which was welcome to them.
He also did it by telling Peter that if he really loves him he should
show it by loving the people Jesus loves and serves, which was the challenge
Peter lived for the rest of his life.
Jesus reaches out to us wherever we are and in whatever circumstances we
find ourselves and one way or another, by whatever means he can use, points the
way to get from where we are to where we ought to be if we just follow him.
[1]
David Gregory, Dinner with a Perfect
Stranger: An Invitation Worth Considering (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook
Press, 2005).
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