Do you remember when I asked you on Palm
Sunday for your “one question to God,” questions that I promised to preach on
each week after Easter? I want to thank you for your wonderful participation,
and I will print all of the questions in the May Words so that you can think about them along with me. Today’s
readings invite me to address a set of questions that greatly moved me as I
read them, deeply spiritual and painfully personal questions: “Why can’t I really know in my heart how
much God loves me?” “How do I keep a loving heart?” “Why do I feel so
incompetent?” In other words, “How can I live in the world of Easter and in
the world of sin and death at the same time?” “How does Jesus’ resurrection
affect my regular, everyday life?” Simon Peter and the disciples help us to
understand that we are not alone in this struggle, and they provide us with a
story that can become our guide.
Have you ever been away to summer
camp perhaps, or to a far-away country, where life looks and feels so different,
that it is almost impossible to remember what your home is like when you are
there and almost impossible to remember that place when you are home? For me,
my life in Europe fades to flat picture-postcards while I am in America, but when I go back to Europe for a
vacation, that world pops back into reality, as if by magic, and it is my life
in Louisville
that seeps into shades of misty gray. It is as if both places cannot exist at
the same time. My memory is just somehow insufficient to capture such different
worlds at once. I believe that is how
Simon Peter and the disciples must have felt right after Jesus’ crucifixion—as
if their lives with Jesus had never existed, as if they were back where they
started, cut off from God and each other, as if both realities couldn’t exist
at the same time.
In our Gospel reading, the disciples
have been thrust from their world with Jesus back into the world of their
former lives—fishing in Galilee. Their
memories of their time with Jesus probably seem unreal. Their messiah has
been crucified, defeated by the Roman powers, and the systems of meaning that
they built while listening to Jesus’ teaching have suddenly come toppling
down under the shadow of the cross. To top it off, Simon Peter now not only
drifts aimlessly on the Sea in which he once found purpose and livelihood;
he must be especially ravaged by guilt. Whenever he thinks fondly of
Jesus--his friend, his Lord--he must remember his own betrayal of Jesus,
the crowing of the rooster, and the acrid smell of the charcoal fire that was
burning in the courtyard where he denied being a follower of Jesus, not once,
but three times. Having rushed to shore to meet Jesus, Simon Peter encounters
that dreaded fire once again. And he is no longer called “Simon Peter,” the
Rock on whom Jesus will build his church. Jesus calls him, “Simon son of John,”
the unknown, insignificant fisherman whom Jesus met at the beginning of his
ministry. Jesus may be raised from the dead, but Simon Peter still wanders in that
empty space in between our everyday world and our “world with God,” a space
filled with regrets and failures.
But look at what Jesus does: He
invites Simon to join him in his reality—in his new Easter reality—by feeding him and by giving Simon a chance to
repent, to undo his cowardly act. Just as Simon denied Jesus three times--three
times, Jesus asks Simon if he loves him. Three times, Simon says that he does.
Then three times, Jesus offers Simon his new identity: as one who feeds and
tends Jesus’ sheep, one who feeds and tends Jesus’ people, and thus feeds and
tends Jesus. Resurrection, as Rowan Williams points out, is not only a raising
of Jesus’ past identity but also a raising of the past identities of those who
have been with him.[1] The Good
News for us, we who suffer inadequacy and insecurity, is that Jesus, the victim
who loves instead of condemning, invites us into a new world of meaning and
forgiveness as he raises us up with
him. Being raised with him, being brought into his new reality, we are no
longer forced to choose between distant and opposite shores.
So how exactly
does this work? First, we recognize Jesus in a miraculous abundance of life
around us. For the disciples, there is suddenly a huge catch of fish, yet their
nets don’t break under the load. In that moment of abundance, the disciples
know that Jesus is present with them. We, too, are invited to grasp the
abundance of the risen Christ in fleeting yet powerful, singular moments: in a
satisfying abundance of love that washes over us-- hugs and kisses, cards full
of well-wishes, the company of friends. Or we grasp it in a sudden abundance of
grace that carries us through a trial—forgiveness that we don’t deserve, meals
brought to us when we are sick, debts forgiven. We even grasp it in the breath-taking
abundance of beauty in nature—a sunset, a field of spring flowers, dogwood
trees bent over with blossoms. God is always present in glorious abundance. “God’s
love” in general is hard to grasp, but we can’t deny the momentary weight of it
in our hands, like a net full of fish.
Secondly, like Simon Peter, we might
need to jump in and swim before the two realities can be bridged. Commentators
scratch their heads over Simon Peter being naked and then getting dressed to
jump into the sea. But Raymond Brown points out that the Greek phrase can mean
that Simon Peter just belted up his fisherman’s smock so that it would not
impede his swimming as he rushed to get to Jesus.[2]
Simon Peter leaves the nets full of fish; he leaves the boats—all he wants is to
get back to Jesus’ world. When we see the risen Christ, we are compelled to tie
up whatever gets in our way, and leap. Yes, there is always leaping involved,
and we aren’t usually able to push some kind of magic pause button while we
ponder the risks.
Thirdly, Peter and the disciples eat
with this Jesus who appears to them. They allow him to feed them breakfast,
just as he fed them before his death, all those many times. The meal on the
beach is of course the Eucharist, the same meal that Jesus offers us today.
Each time we share in the Eucharist, we, like Simon Peter, put one foot into
the flat, shadowy world of guilt and inadequacy, as we partake of his body and
blood that was given for us. Yet at
the same time, we are restored by the forgiveness of the One whom we have
condemned. The Easter community is both guilty and restored as it gathers in
the name of the one who is both crucified and raised. The Eucharist is an
activity that opens up the space between our world and the Easter world and
holds them both together. As we share the bread and the cup, we enter a place
in which that strange disjunction between two worlds is bridged, a place in
which the old comes together with the new, in which the world that killed Jesus
meets the world filled with Jesus.
Finally, once we have been fed, Jesus
asks us, as he asks Simon Peter, to feed his sheep, to tend the people of God.
They are not our sheep to do with as we would like; they are not somebody
else’s sheep for us to ignore, but they are God’s sheep, and our purpose, our
meaning in this post-Easter world, is to care for them. The way to keep a
loving heart is to feed God’s sheep. Our new identity is to follow Jesus—to
follow him in his self-giving love for others, no matter where it leads.
The young Barbara Brown Taylor,
tortured by a sense of vocation that she didn’t understand, was caught once in
a place of meaninglessness and lack of purpose. She kept asking and asking God
what she was supposed to do with her life, and all that she heard back was
silence. But then one night, she heard God’s voice: “[Do] [a]nything that pleases you,” God said
to her. “And belong to me.”[3] It
doesn’t matter where our wanderings take us in this ordinary world—whether we
are fishermen or priests or teachers or lawyers or moms or scientists, when we
are raised with Christ into his post-Easter reality, then we belong to him. In
Christ, our ordinary lives are not tossed aside but are sanctified; our
memories are not erased but are cleared of guilt; and we are made whole to
follow Christ wherever he may lead us. Just like Europe will exist across the
Atlantic, whether I am feeling disconnected from it or whether it has been
momentarily made present by a phone call from an old friend, our new life and
wholeness in Christ exists beneath our doubts and lapses, reemerging as we feed
and are fed.
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