Missing something important John 21:1-19
Have you ever had the feeling you’ve missed something important? The writer of John or
the community from which this gospel came clearly did for here – just after everything has
been wrapped up nicely at the end of chapter 20 - Now Jesus did many other signs in the
presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you
may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing
you may have life in his name. – they remember one more thing – one more story about
Jesus and the disciples and so they add the passage we are reading today.
I had the feeling I was missing something important Monday night. After the deacons
meeting I went looking for my Bible. It wasn’t in the bag I’d taken to the Benedictine Abbey
on the weekend. It wasn’t in the pile in my bedroom Miriam with her Spartan aesthetic had
stripped from the lounge to entertain her friends during the day and it wasn’t in the study. I
tried to visualise putting it and my notebook and a book of Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermons
into my suitcase, but all I could see was a small pile of books beside my chair on the porch of
our cottage, looking out over the field of cows and the ridge of Illawarra escarpment.
There’s not much you can do at 11:45pm about having left your Bible 200 kilometres away,
so I fretted. I fretted about the cleaners taking it, about rain coming in, about it disappearing
into the Abbey guest library and I fretted about everything it holds; letters, locks of my
children’s hair, notes I’ve made, verses I’ve underlined, the names of those I’ve baptised
beside the verses I chose for them, and records of the moments I have cast myself again –
and again – onto the love of God – so around midnight I finally said, “Aron, can we pray
about my Bible?” which we did and went to sleep.
The next morning I rang and it was found and will be kept safe till I collect it next week.
It was during a similar evening – an evening of fitful sleep, of trying to visualise what had
gone wrong, of trying to make sense of what was happening – but a hundred time worse
that Peter decided he’d had enough and was going fishing! That he’d been riding this
rollercoaster of grieving and rejoicing, of execution and resurrection, of death and people
exclaiming “I have seen the Lord,” long enough. That he’d been thinking and feeling so
much that it was time to do something. To distract himself. “I must keep busy,” we say to
ourselves, and that is what Peter did.
There were others of course. They had made the trip together back to Galilee. Why make
themselves an easy target for the temple priests by hanging around Jerusalem and there
just didn’t seem much point staying. Thomas was there and Nathanael and Zebedee’s sons,
James and John. And two disciples who aren’t named. Perhaps for the sake of the story they
could be you and me. You can be the ‘beloved disciple’ if you like. Perhaps that’s the point
of this curious device in John?
And it feels good to go fishing, to have a plan, to get out of the house where we’ve been
laying low for days, to have a plan (have I mentioned that?) to finally feel like we know what
we’re doing as we drag the boat from above the water line, slipping across the damp sand,
and then lurching and lifting as it’s taken by the water. Then it’s all hands on deck, as they
say, and it’s as though the last three years never happened. You, the beloved disciple, grab
an oar with three of the others, and I ready the cast net with Peter and John.
And for the first hour or so there’s relief as we focus on the task, letting our muscles do all
the remembering at last; developing a cadence, the drag of the water, feeling blisters form
on skin that used to be calloused, the stretch in our arms as the net is released, the sharp
pull on the foot rope and then readying ourselves to haul… Only, every time John and Peter,
now stripped to the waist, dive in to secure the foot rope, weighted to sink to the bottom,
there is nothing worth securing in it.
And then, as they do, in the coldest and darkest hours before the sunrise, the fears and the
thoughts return. And what starts to go around in our heads is that our failure to catch a
single fish is symptomatic, is a sentence, on all the other ways we have failed in recent days.
“Follow me,” is what he said to us, but flee from him is what we did. It’s Peter who blames
himself most. And yet unlike you or I he did follow Jesus, all the way to the high priest’s
house. It’s there it got tough. The questions started coming, one after the other, and it’s
hard to know what a crowd will do in a certain mood. Peter did what I would have done in
that courtyard I suspect. He denied being part of the whole thing.
There’s a pale glow on the horizon now and the exhaustion, of this night and all the previous
nights, sinks it. We turn the boat for home.
A moment or so later we hear someone shout out from the beach, “Morning boys! How are
the fish biting?”
“Not a thing, “we shout back. “Nothing. All night!”
“Try casting on the right hand side,” the bloke calls, “You’ll find some there.”
It’s worth a try. Sometimes we do that. Have someone spotting, looking for shoals of fish,
from the land. The sea can look glassy, blank and black, from above. So we shift positions,
ready the nets, and ready ourselves to try the unfamiliar motion of throwing right, and then,
suddenly, it’s like the sea is boiling, fish, good sized fish, tilapia (St Peter’s fish you call them
now) filling the net, leaping over the sides. There’s a scramble as those on oars drop them to
help the rest of us tugging madly on the foot rope. And you look up – you’ve always been
good at putting two and two together, knowing that signs of grace mean the source isn’t far
away – “It’s the Lord!” you say.
Peter is just about to dive, to secure the foot rope and the catch. He has one foot on the
gunwale, but he checks at the sound of your voice. “Chuck me my my shirt!” he mutters,
“It’s the Lord! Can’t greet him half naked.” And he’s barely pulled it on before when – just
like the net a moment before – he casts himself into the sea.
We call ourselves disciples. Is it just a way of telling the story or do we know what it means?
For Peter this moment – the moment his feet left the gunwale, those seconds of surrender
in space, and the entry –nothing pretty about it – splashing into the bracing embrace of
God’s love – this was his moment of following Jesus. His ‘yes’ to the call he’d heard and
responded to and now heard again. His ‘yes’ to being a disciple. His ‘Jesus you’ve got me hook, line and sinker.’
You’re there, too, you know. One foot on the edge of boat. Readying yourself for the dive.
“Do you love more than these?” he asks and it’s up to you. You can cast yourself into the
water, abandon yourself to the love of God, leave the boat and the oars and the net and
those 153 fish (who bothered counting them?) behind. Or you can hang onto your boat and
your net and your life as you know it, saying no. This is enough. Leave me with the familiar
stuff. The stuff I’m good at. I don’t want to get out of my depth. “Why would we throw the
net to the right? It’s always thrown to the left.” “And what do we know about sheep?
Fishermen need sheep, they say, like fish need bicycles!” Or you can dive, confident deep
deep down that everything good in your life has always been God, and discover what
happens when you can cast yourself into the ocean of God’s love.
“Do you love me?” Is the answer ‘yes’ because ‘yes’ means finding out that there is no last
supper or even last breakfast, but we are called to go on sharing fish butties on the beach,
to go on bringing the fish we have just caught, to go on sharing our food and finances and
facilities and friendships because there are sheep - sheep as far as the eye can see - that
need feeding.
“Do you love me?” Are you hurt, too, that he keeps asking? Do you have a sense of déjà vu,
strengthened by the warmth of the fire on your feet, with another time – with all the other
times – when you’ve shown yourself eminently unsuitable to be a disciple, eminently unable
to leave your fears behind. Do you, too, want to say with Peter, “Look Lord, you know all
things. You know how much I love you. You know how much I fail to love you. Will you have
me? Will you take me as I am?”
And then comes his answer, “Feed my sheep,” and the reminder that the love of God is as
abundant as good wine at weddings, as bread left over at picnics, as fish in the sea, as signs
too many to be included in this book; that the call of God to be loved and to love – to be fed
and to feed - for that is what it is to be a disciple - will keep coming and keep coming and
keep coming until we gather our courage, stand on the edge of the boat, bend our knees
and jump! Let’s not have the feeling we missed something important either as individuals or
as the congregation of Canberra Baptist Church, but let’s together cast ourselves into the
ocean of God’s care.