TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my message from this weeks Lectionary reading. As always, you can also listen to it on Metro Christian Centre’s YouTube page, just click here.

READING: JOHN 21:1-14

FISH FINGER BUTTIES

This scene in chapter 21 is definitely one of my favourite scenes within John.

At the risk of sounding irreverent, the reason it’s a favourite is because it’s ‘quirky’. Simply put, the story makes me smile—it tickles me. At the same time though, I find the story moving; there’s something powerful to see here, if we’re prepared to see it.

The story begins with Peter deciding to go fishing and with the other disciples saying that they’re coming along (which we’ll come back to). So they go. They spend the whole night fishing. And they catch nothing. As they make their way back at dawn, a stranger on the shore calls out to them, “Hey lads! Have you caught anything?”

John, writing sometime after the event, introduces this mysterious figure as Jesus. But in the half-lit shadows of the early morning twilight, the disciples aren’t sure who this is. They just shout back, “No”. It’s a purposely short answer; they’re not in the mood for a conversation. But undeterred by this ‘no’, the stranger keeps talking and tells them to cast their nets on the right-hand side. They do so, and wham: a net heavy with fish.

All of this, by the way, is an echo of a fishing trip that happened almost three years before this one (which you can read about in Luke 5).[i] And so at this point, John—who was at that earlier fishing trip—shouts out, “It’s Jesus!” as the penny drops about this stranger’s identity. Hearing this, Peter jumps into the water and swims to shore, leaving the other disciples with the hard task of dragging this huge catch into the shallows (I bet they “thanked” him later for that).

When they all finally arrive on shore, they make an amazing discovery: Jesus has a fire on the go, with some fish frying and some bread already baked. Jesus invites them to sit for breakfast, and then he—the Lord of all creation, the resurrected King—waits on them; serving them the bread and fish with his nail-scarred hands.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there: John then leads us into that beautiful and sensitive conversation between Jesus and Peter. But this humble act of service is important. Look what Jesus does with power!

He’s just defeated death and darkness on the cross; he’s just risen from the dead; as John has been hinting at in his Gospel leading up to the cross, Jesus has entered into his glory. There’s no one as powerful as the living God. And yet, here is God, making fish-finger butties for his disciples.

Jesus had previously taught his disciples that, in our world, Kings are tyrants who lord it over the people, but that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. ‘Among you’, Jesus said, ‘greatness is serving.’ (Mark 10:42-45). When Jesus says that, he’s not imposing some random rule on his followers; he’s trying to get them to see that for humanity to reflect God—to have the Father’s Face—then they must also learn to empty themselves. So here is Jesus, still showing his disciples the nature of God; still presenting to them the likeness that humanity was called to reflect as God’s image bearers.

Post-resurrection, it may be tempting for his disciples—and tempting for us—to believe that God just doesn’t behave that way anymore. It may be tempting to think of the incarnation as God putting on a human straight-jacket; as God restricting himself and temporally taking on the role of someone who is humble, of someone who lays themselves down.

In short, we can be misled into believing that God ‘faked it’ until the resurrection, and now that God has shed that skin he’s gone back to ruling in some domineering fashion. And if that’s the case—if that is how we imagining God ruling—then we will behave in a similar way and excuse our behaviour by saying that we are merely demonstrating God. But God’s not a tyrant and a bully: God is still laying down his rights and cooking breakfast for mere humans.

Jesus is setting the example. ‘Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever’, as the writer of Hebrews would later put it (Hebrews 13:8). And so, the Christ who represents God exactly (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15) demonstrates to us that the God who denied his rights and became a servant, and who humbled himself further by dying on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8), continues to be, and has always been, a God who lays down power and serves. God is a humble, self-emptying God.

Jesus doesn’t ‘lord it over’ his disciples; he doesn’t command them to make the breakfast and serve it to him. Instead, Jesus takes the time to cook and bake for them, and invites them to sit together and eat the meal that he has already prepared.

Again, this story makes me smile. Think about it: whilst these disciples fruitlessly toiled in the darkness and cold of the night in the middle of Sea of Galilee, unknown to them, Jesus was on the shore getting a dawn breakfast ready.

God knows what we need, and when we need it. As the Psalmist put it, ‘Tears may linger for the night, but with dawn come cries of joy.’ (Psalm 30:6, CJB)

Even though I don’t like the taste and the texture of fish, there’s something in me that would have loved to have been present at this beach breakfast.

However, it’s important we don’t jump to the spectacular at the end of the story whilst missing what is so spectacular at the beginning. Because what led to this amazing experience was a pivotal few words at the start:

Peter says, “I’m going fishing”. And the other disciples reply, “We’ll come, too”.

WE’LL COME, TOO

Peter, over the years, has been given a chunk of grief for this decision to go fishing. There are numerous commentators who look at this passage and see this as a failure: that Peter, instead of pursuing Jesus’ call on his life, just returns to his old life as a fisherman. It’s also been preached that way. Not only does Peter apparently fail, but the others do too, because they volunteer and go along with him. And their failure is evident, so we’re told, because they work all night and catch nothing. Thus endeth the lesson.

But that’s rather unfair. Peter is not doing anything wrong by going to work. And it’s not that the disciples would have sensed some call to be the pioneers of a new religion called Christianity, or that they felt called to go and plant what we would call churches. So they’re not turning their backs on “God’s plan for their lives.”

These guys would have still seen themselves as Jews; Jews who have seen God’s promises and purpose—the hopes of the Old Testament—simultaneously fulfilled, initiated and re-centred around Jesus, and they’re still making sense of what this all means; especially in the light of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. It’s a disorientating time for them.

To think of it another way: it’s like waking up from a long term coma.

I read a story recently about a woman waking up after being in a coma for thirty years, and I keep trying to imagine how confusing that would be.[ii] Because in many ways, the world hasn’t changed that much from thirty years ago; it still looks more or less the same as it did at the end of the 1980’s and not like some alien, futuristic civilisation with flying cars. We still look human. We still drive cars along pot-hole covered roads. And some of us are still wearing what we wore in the eighties. But at the same time, 2019 is a very different place from 1989. The world has changed in dramatic ways. So in this place that appears to be the same, this lady will have to slowly come to terms with how different things really are.

A similar thing is happening within the disciples.

After Easter, the world is a different place. Death has lost its sting. The power of sin has been broken—God has acted to restore the broken image-bearers called humanity. There’s a New order of things—a New Creation—that has been launched right into the midst of the Old order of things. The Kingdom of God has come! The world looks the same, but something has also dramatically changed.

The disciples have just woken up in this world. They’re part of the first people to realise that something has changed and that something is changing, and they’re slowly coming to terms with the reality that they now find themselves in. They’re not certain about what is next.

But one thing is certain; they have changed: They want to be together.

That might not sound impressive, but hold on a minute.

They’ve spent three years with Jesus—three rollercoaster years. Throughout that time, Jesus was their core. He had to be, because these guys were a mismatched, oddball assortment of personalities and temperaments. Without Jesus, they would have been explosive; these people would not have gotten on together, and neither would they have been drawn to each other. And even with Jesus around to cool their tempers, they still had their fair share of arguments.

So you would think that without Jesus there to stop them and to hold them together, things would have naturally imploded and they would’ve gone their separate ways. And yet, the opposite is happening; they’re starting to practice what it means to be one.

Yes, the resurrected Jesus appears to them from time to time, like he does within this story. But even when Jesus is not physically present, their unity—their desire to be with one another—is an expression of the fact that the life of Jesus is still present within them.

You see, this isn’t a story about Peter and the others going back to their “old ways”; it’s a story of this rag-tag bunch moving forward into a new way. By saying, ‘We’ll come, too’, the disciples aren’t giving up on the life Jesus called them to. On the contrary, they’re putting it into practice; they’re laying down their rights for the sake of unity. And the evidence of their unity is that Jesus is made manifest among them.

Peter says, “I’m going fishing”. And the rest say, “We’ll come, too.” That’s a powerful sentence—one that’s so easy to read over.

COMMON-UNITY

There’s an important lesson for us here, church.

These guys are sharing life, even though they are a mess.

The disciples don’t have it altogether. They don’t have a vision for what’s next. They don’t have a catchy mission statement, or a tag-line slogan that they can quote in unison together. They don’t have all their theological-ducks in a row, either; they’re going to spend the next decade, at least, still figuring this out and they’re not always going to agree with one another. In addition, there’s still friction between them (as the next scene in John 21:14-23 shows us)—it wasn’t a happy ship!

However, they don’t need any of that in order to be one. We think we do! The modern tendency of any group is to believe that we need a clear mission statement, a vision and a set of shared values that we can gather around. Without those things, the world at large, not just the church, finds it difficult to get anybody to say, “We’ll come, too!”

The only other way to get people to utter those words is by appealing to their self-interest. But, I believe—maybe naively—that the church can be better than that; that the church should be better than that. If we’re going to mirror God’s likeness, as I mentioned before, self-interest has got to be replaced with self-emptying.

I’m not saying those things (mission statement, vision, shared values) aren’t important, they have their place. But the disciples had none of those things. All they had to gather around was the life of Christ and the meal that he had prepared for them; and that was enough.

Sadly, we often try and do it the other way around; our values take centre-stage and so the meal Jesus gave us becomes the end goal, ‘the reward’, at the end of a long process of negotiations. What I mean by that is that we say to people, “Only when you share our vision and our values will we then allow you to share in the Table.” But, to paraphrase Tom Wright, “The meal Jesus gave us ought to be the thing we’re already doing that provides the arena for us to share and grow towards richer unity.”[iii]

The table is not the end-goal; it’s the place we start from.

Church, there’s only one real source of our common-unity: Jesus. It’s not that we share the same theology. It’s not that we can spout out a tag-line. It’s not that we always get on or that we share the same interests. If we got rid of the church name, scrapped the tag-line, stopped providing child-care, coffee and biscuits, and we met in a tool-shed—what should draw us together is still, and only ever should be, the life of Christ and the meal he has prepared for us.

Especially in the midst of the pain and the loss that we’re currently experiencing as a church—whilst we’re still confused, tired and hurting; as we toil through this present darkness—our centre, more than ever, has got to be Christ and nothing else. As a friend of mine recently said; “It’s still radically about the one who’s standing on the shore in the darkness when we haven’t got it all figured out.”[iv]

DRAWN

I’ll be honest with you; I often want to leave church. I’m not just talking about Metro Christian Centre; but church generally. If all it was about was the style of music, or the coffee, or some vision, or the odour of the room, I would have run away years ago. Irrespective of how good or bad those things were, they would not have kept me, and they still don’t.

But I’m drawn to this person of Jesus. He’s at work in me—and part of that work is recognising that he’s living in and at work in others, too. So I’m drawn, despite my resistance, to others. And I’ve found, like John presents it in this story, that whenever believers walk together for no other cause than the life of Christ, then Jesus always shows up in the midst and prepares a meal for us to eat together.

I don’t want the distractions. I couldn’t care less about the gimmicks. I want what Jesus has for us. And really, that’s all we need.

This is the point I think John wants us to see in this story. John’s an artist, by the way, and in this passage he’s given us a portrait of what the church is and how it’s supposed function: It’s a community that is bounded by a shared life, on one side, and a shared meal, on the other. And in the midst of those bookends—those crusts—is the disturbance and filling of Jesus’ presence. It’s like a sandwich, so to speak.

This is all we need. And with this sandwich, as you will see when you turn over the page and move into the book of Acts, Jesus will turn the tastebuds of the known world upside-down.

ENDNOTES:

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[i] I also touched on this story a number of weeks back. See my blog post, “Do Not Fear”.

[ii] You can read this story here: https://apple.news/A_1ojykExRae1QabuXVOZFw

[iii] Tom Wright, The Meal Jesus Gave Us: Understanding Holy Communion (SPCK, 2014), p.85. Original quote is, ‘Sharing Communion together between Christians of different denominations ought not to be the goal at the end of a long process of unity negotiations. It ought to be the means, the thing we already do, that will create a context in which we will be able to understand and respect one another, and grow towards a richer unity.’

[iv] My good friend, Pastor Tom King, shared this with me during one our ‘Coffee (and Cake) and Theology’ chats, on the 24th April 2019, as I shared the heart of this message with him.