Christ Church Riverdale

3 Easter April 25, 2004 Acts 9:1-19a; Psalm 33:1-11; Revelation 5:6-14; John 21:1-14

In St. John’s gospel, Jesus has breakfast with the disciples by the shore of the Sea of Galilee. As in the other resurrection appearances, the disciples don’t recognize him at first. According to John, he had already appeared to them and breathed on them the Holy Spirit while they were still in Jerusalem. What in the world are they doing back in Galilee fishing? I would have thought they would immediately go on a mission to preach the good news. But home they are, and Peter says, almost casually, “Let’s catch some fish.” He has become a leader, and they follow him into the boat. But they’re still catching fish, not people. Even in catching fish, they have no luck.

They seem to have wandered back into their former lives with no perceptible purpose. But the Spirit won’t let them be. Jesus is there on the beach, waiting for them. When he suggests that they cast the net in another place, and a large haul results, the disciple whom Jesus loves understands. “It is the Lord,” he exclaims.

There were many stories of Jesus circulating in the earliest years after the resurrection before the first gospel was written. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and others whose gospels didn’t get into the New Testament, took the stories they found most helpful, and used them. We owe this one to John. We learn of Peter’s leadership as he makes the decisions and the others follow. We understand that discipleship doesn’t follow a straight path; sometimes we fall back and go fishing. We get lost in our own survival concerns, like the disciples casually going back to the only work they know. This would make sense, if there were nothing else for them to do. But Jesus had said, “I will make you fishers of people.”

When they gather for grilled fish, they realize that their friend, in some wondrous way, is with them, spurring them on. And find the real reason for this appearance. Jesus says to Peter, in the passage that follows today’s gospel, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more that these?” And Peter says, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” To which Jesus says, “Feed my lambs.” Similar language occurs two more times: “Tend my lambs.” And “Feed my sheep.” Jesus indicates that following him will end in suffering. Peter, we know, is strengthened to the task. According to John, this is the final appearance needed to send them off to teach and preach.

Much has been made, for good reason, about the threefold nature of the question of Jesus, “Simon, do you love me.” Simon Peter had betrayed Jesus, denying him not once, but three times. In confronting Peter, Jesus asks three times if Peter truly loves him, and gives him a task, in a way a kind of penance, “feed my sheep.” But isn’t it really less a penance than a way to show love.

In Wednesday’s New York Times, there was a story about the writer of an autobiographical monologue, “The Tricky Part.” As a boy, the author was molested, and his life was changed by the crime. The monologue delves into the complex fabric of emotion and guilt and pain suffered by the victim, but it does this in a way that is neither a diatribe nor a political statement. Shockingly, the victim describes the perpetrator as both his first love and as a manipulative abuser. His honesty shatters the stereotypes by going to the heart of human emotion. Writing the monologue was therapeutic, and part of the healing occurred when the writer sought out his abuser to confront him. On an impulse, he called him, and was stunned when he called back. He visited the man, a diabetic in his 60’s, hospitalized in Southern California. He tried to reconcile his feelings. He writes in the play of waving to the man from the hospital parking lot. Here’s what he writes, “And when Bob raises his arm to wave back, I’m filled with the strangest, strongest feeling, that this very goodbye was contained in the first moment I ever laid eyes on him. Is it possible that what harms us might come to restore us?”

The play is about searching and continuous discovery. In reflection, the author says, “What I’m really trying to say is ‘My God, look at this, this is human,’ and isn’t it profoundly, bottomlessly mysterious?”

In the Four Quartets, TS Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Peter’s guilt was on a different plane from the guilt of an abuser or the confused guilt of a victim. But it was to him a burden of tremendous pain. Was going fishing an act of denial, a way to pretend that nothing had happened. What Jesus offered at breakfast by the lake was the opportunity of continuous discovery, a kind of confrontation, a way of arriving where he had started in order to know it for the first time. To know who he was, and what he stood for, and who he loved and what that meant. To have a reason to live and a reason to die, in the presence of what is, and always will be, profoundly, bottomlessly mysterious.

God never ceases to come to sit by our side, offering a chance, asking, “Do you love me,” feeding us with forgiveness, and sending us out, saying, simply, “Feed my sheep.”

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