Peter's Easter
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on Sunday the 22nd April 2007 by Rev Dr Angus Morrison
Readings: Isaiah 61: 1-3 and John 21:1-19
Sermon:
Forgiveness, rehabilitation, new beginnings, new life: these are central and wonderful themes of the Christian Gospel - themes of abiding and deep relevance for us all. Nowhere, maybe, do they find more telling illustration than in John chapter 21, this PS to John's Gospel, with its dramatic and prolonged encounter story. Other disciples are involved, but central in the encounter is Jesus and Peter: climaxing in a face-to-face conversation between the Lord who was betrayed, and the disciple who denied him three times. Peter now standing before his risen Lord to be forgiven, restored and re-commissioned for service. A narrative that speaks still of our similar need and of the continuing, overwhelming love of our Saviour.
It¿s a story of new beginnings significantly set at the breaking of dawn echoing at various points the story of the first call of Peter and a few other fishermen some three years earlier to become fishers of men. Things had gone horribly wrong. They had forgotten their script, and now they all especially Peter had to learn it all over again, though in a very new way. Jesus, as ever, has gone ahead to meet them, to serve them, and to send Peter and the rest out on mission 'Jesus' mission' for the blessing of the world.
It began with a fruitless and frustrating night's fishing. Peter initiated this fishing trip and for some reason it has frequently received harsh judgement at the hands of the commentators. 'A scene of total apostasy' is the less than kind assessment of one. Nearer the mark, I suspect, is the judgement of another who says: 'Even though Jesus be crucified and risen from the dead, the disciples must still eat!' At the same time, clearly absent from that scene is any sense of real purpose, of joy, of awareness of the mission Jesus had already committed to them, when in chapter 20 he said: 'Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.' Peter and his colleagues are still coming to grips with the reality of the resurrection. They have still to reckon fully with the profound truth Jesus had stated in his farewell discourse: 'Apart from me you can do nothing' (John 15:5).
John makes clear, I think, that it was the Lord's intention that Peter and the rest, experienced fishermen though they were, would catch nothing at all that night. He wants us to see a special lesson in this simple event a lesson of deepest importance for all in Christian service. Involvement in Christian mission brings to us at times an experience of failure and frustration. You try to accomplish something, something positive and worthwhile; you expend much energy and utilize many resources and it comes to nothing. Failure can be a deeply demoralizing thing. But in Christian service, painful as failure is, it is never final. The really big question, then as now, is 'What can the risen Lord do with our night of failure?' Three years earlier in the parallel story (Luke 5), Jesus had taught them through an unforgettable miracle that he (he alone) had the power to fill the nets which they were soon to cast all over the world. That miracle marked the starting point of their journeying with Jesus. And now something happens to make it all come rushing back. In the dawn light, a dimly-seen figure stands on the shore. 'Any fish?' he calls. Their curt, monosyllabic response says it all: 'No.' 'Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some,' the stranger responds; and in complying with the instruction, to their utter astonishment, a huge haul of fish is pulled ashore. 'Apart from me you can do nothing,' he had said. It's a graphic reminder that the absence of Jesus entailing only failure and frustration; the presence of Jesus bringing success and fruit and joy.
That emphasis on the need for total dependence on the Lord continues in the narrative. Coming ashore, they see a charcoal fire, with fish on it, and bread. The aroma is wonderful. Breakfast for seven is ready and waiting. Jesus, no longer a stranger on the shore, but fully recognized as the risen, living Lord, has Himself been the cook. He did not require to wait for them to bring fish from their catch before making breakfast. By their own efforts they had caught not a tail in any case. No, when He summoned them to breakfast, everything was ready everything. He had prepared it all. And at one level of the narrative we are to see enacted in this scene the core message of the Gospel: the living, loving Lord inviting all without exception to a wonderful meal - a 'feast of fat things', for the preparation of which He has sole and entire responsibility. And now to all and sundry the invitation goes out: 'Come and dine and come just as you are.' In Christian salvation and in Christian mission alike, all we have comes from the hands of infinite love. From first to last we operate entirely by His grace.
But through that grace we are also called to work, to play our part, to put to good use all the hours, all the resources, God has given us. 'Bring some of the fish that you have just caught,' he instructed them. The mission in which we are engaged in the church is Christ's mission and in the fulfilling of His mission our high privilege as His followers is to be fellow-workers with Him. That really is what the Bible story-line is all about, rendering as it does, in the words of Dr Chris Wright, 'the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation.' And that mission continues. The media may convey the impression that everything of any importance that happens in the world happens in its seats of government or in the boardrooms of the big multi-national corporations. Rather, as someone well said, 'The spreading of the word of truth, the opening of people's eyes to the realities of life, the understanding of our humanity, labouring with God to put aside the destructive, dehumanizing forces of earth that is the work that is important and exciting in this day.'
Peter and his friends hauled ashore a catch of fish, precisely numbered at 153. A PhD waits to be written on the fantastic interpretations, through the centuries, of the symbolism of this number. It is generally agreed that some symbolism is intended. Two interpretations are particularly interesting. First, Augustine of Hippo noted that 153 is the sum of the numbers 1 and 17, and is a triangular number because 153 dots can be arranged in an equilateral triangle which has 17 dots on the base line. The number 17 itself is made up of the sacred numbers 10 and 7. The number 153 would therefore represent the sum total without remainder. It speaks of the completeness and the unity of the great catch which is the goal of Christian mission. Another Church Father, Jerome, thought that ancient writers on natural history claimed there to be exactly 153 species of fish. He is almost certainly wrong in that assumption, but if this was a widely held view in the first century, we can see how the number could be a symbolic way of saying something that remains true: the Christian Gospel is a universal Gospel; it is for everybody without exception, no matter their background, colour, culture, education, or whatever. The Good News of Jesus has never been, and never will be, out of place and the embrace of the church must be as universal as the love of God in Jesus Christ.
Breakfast is now over and one loose end remains to be firmly tied up. Simon Peter has on an earlier occasion already met the risen Jesus. He has been forgiven his failure. But it is one thing to be forgiven, another to have deep wounds of the spirit healed. For Peter, a sense of guilt and of shame remained, threatening to prevent his taking up the task to which Jesus had called him and for which Jesus had trained him. Healing was needed at a deep level, and the narrative now tells us how Jesus brought this about. Gently, but searchingly, though without saying a word about it, Jesus brought to Peter's memory the sad episode. There had been a charcoal fire in the original setting; Jesus' three-fold questioning of Peter ('Do you love me?') echoes the thrice-repeated denial; the specific question, 'Do you love me more than these?' recalls Peter's well-intended but self-reliant and hollow boast that while the other disciples might well fail the Master, he (Peter) never would.
Jesus' questioning was hard for Peter to endure, but necessary - a severe mercy. Peter's response shows that the all-important lesson had been well-learnt now. His confidence is not any more in what he finds in himself, but in what he knows Jesus sees and finds in him: 'Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.' Peter knows himself to be profoundly loved in this confrontation. It is only love that made it possible, and in that love he stands forgiven and is set free and called again for mission and discipleship. Like Peter, in the love of Christ we can face the truth about ourselves and our world, and in facing it in the presence of the living, loving Christ, to discover new hope, new purpose, new joy in service.
And so, like Peter, we hear again the call which maybe we heard first years ago, but needing to hear it again: 'Follow me.' The call that echoes the Master's words: 'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me' (Matt. 16:24). He allocates to his followers individually the specific kind of cross that He wants them to bear, measuring carefully the burden of suffering and pain that will serve to conform them to his intended pattern for their lives.
Through the prediction of Peter's martyrdom we are reminded of the overwhelming nature of the cross that some are compelled to bear. Bonhoeffer reminded us years ago that when God calls a man (or woman) he bids them come and die. The Martyrs' Monument, on which I looked as I drew my bedroom curtains this morning, and the spot so near us where Patrick Hamilton died a violent death, serve to remind us of that fact. Many of our fellow Christians in the world right now are suffering acutely for His sake. Martyrdom is a contemporary, as well as a historical, reality. Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador once said, 'As a pastor, I am obliged by divine command to give my life for those whom I love and that is for all Salvadoreans, even for those who may assassinate me. If the threats should come to pass I offer God, for this very moment, my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.' Shortly after that utterance, he was assassinated, while celebrating mass in the cathedral.
The sign that we are forgiven lies in the task we are given to do. 'Feed my lambs'; 'Tend my sheep'; 'Feed my sheep'. Ours is the privileged calling of sharing in the mission of the Good Shepherd, of loving Jesus and demonstrating that love by looking after His sheep.
We are commissioned to be God's agents of renewal and change in this world. And to fulfil this high calling, the astonishing story of God's own suffering, yet triumphant, love for His world must become the ground-plan of our life as well. The Bishop of Durham expresses the point well:
When Jesus calls us to bear the cross throughout our lives he calls us to share in his work of drawing out and dealing with the evil of the world; by loving our neighbours, both immediate and far-off, with the strong love that sent him to the cross; and by working out the implications of that love in our own vocations, whatever they may be, in our social and political action, in our relationships (and particularly our marriages and families), and in our caring for those in our midst who need the healing and restoring love of God most deeply. With the cross as the underlying story of our lives, validated by the resurrection and then implemented by the fire of the Holy Spirit, we can have the confidence to take on the world with the sovereign love of God.
'To take on the world with the sovereign love of God'. What a calling! What a challenge! And as the risen, living Christ continues his redemptive, healing mission to our world in our time, he has for us all, as for Peter, just one simple, all-demanding word: 'Follow me.'