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For Easter Friday
Christ
raised his beloved friend Lazarus from the dead.
Shortly
thereafter came Christ’s messianic Palm Sunday procession into the nation’s
capital.
Then,
his Last Supper, arrest in Gethsemane, interrogations by the nation’s High
Priest, elders, Roman governor, King Herod, his crucifixion and now his resurrection!
After
that whirlwind of dramas, suddenly in today’s Gospel we see what starts out as
the return of something relatively ordinary in the lives of the apostles.
The
apostle Peter decides to go fishing.
He
used to make his living doing so.
After
his rabbi rose from the dead and turned out to be not merely the Messiah but
the Lord God himself, Peter going fishing seems banal and anticlimactic.
Was
it an accident that he caught nothing at all that whole night, or was that
God’s plan?
No
matter what the case might have been, what followed at dawn was no accident.
The
Risen Christ, whom Peter and his fellow disciples do not recognize, calls out
to them from the shore.
He
does not call out to them as “men” or “friends” or “brothers.”
Rather,
he calls out, “Children....”
With
the knowing stance of Lord God and Father, he calls to them as to children.
This
Gospel will continue tomorrow and show us the fatherly plan Christ has for the
vocation of Peter.
For
now, Christ asks these fishermen, “Children, have you caught anything to eat?”
“No.”
So.
their plans and efforts have failed again— their earlier messianic aspirations
about Christ, and now their plan to go back to ordinary fishing— all their
plans have failed.
Now
Christ takes over their lives once more.
He
commands them where to cast the net, and he states as a fact that they shall
have a catch.
They
obey without speaking.
Right
away they pull in an overwhelming catch.
It
wakes up one man, the disciple whom Christ had touched with his love.
Waking
up, he says to Peter, “It is the Lord.”
When
they get to shore, they find Christ has no need for their miraculous success,
because he already has fish cooking on a fire, and he has bread.
Nonetheless,
he commands them to bring over some of their catch.
They
obey in silence.
The
Gospel reports no words as they watch him prepare and cook the fish for them.
Also,
it seems they stand away from him, because the Gospel reports he “came over” to
give them the bread, and that he did so again to give them the fish he cooked.
Among
them is Thomas, who had put into words the knowledge they all have now: “My
Lord and my God!”
On
the day he rose from the dead, their Lord and their God fed them the Holy
Spirit with his own breath.
Their
Lord and their God, risen from the dead, is now cooking their breakfast for
them and serving it to them.
Perhaps
they remember now with shock that at his Last Supper with them their Lord and
their God had washed their feet.
Their
own ideas and plans about him failed.
Their
own ideas and plans about ordinary fishing have failed.
Now
they let him ask the questions, they let him take command, they let him go into
action, and they wait for him to speak.
He
called them “children.”
He
knew they needed him to be a father.
They
need everything he does.
Apart
from him they can do nothing.
That’s
what he said to them at his Last Supper in this Gospel [15:5] on the
night one of their own betrayed him.
Apart
from him they can do nothing; but abiding in him, and he in them, they can bear
much fruit or net an overwhelming catch.
The
overwhelmingly successful catch they have made is due not to their own efforts
in the dark of night, for on their own they have failed.
They
owe their miraculous success to the dawning of his presence, fatherly concern,
command, and their childlike obedience even without being awake to his presence
and identity.
Christ
will go on to command more from them, beginning with Peter, more than their own
plans and their own strength can conceive and realize apart from childlike obedience
to him as their father.
He
himself, Christ, called his own resurrection an act of obedience to a mission
he received from his Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.
He
said so in his first words to them after his resurrection [20:21-22].
“As the FATHER has SENT me,
even so I SEND you.”
And when he had said this, he breathed on
them, and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Christ
rose from the dead because the Father sent him in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Like
his own Father, Christ also sends his “children” in the power of the Holy
Spirit.
Only
the work and the will of Christ with the power of the Holy Spirit that he
himself, like a father, prepares and feeds to them in his Body and Blood, only
that can bring from their childlike obedience a mighty catch and abundant fruit
where mere human plans and efforts are doomed to fail.
On
the day we recalled the resurrection of Christ, how right and necessary that we
renewed the promises of the Baptism most of us received as children.
May
we abide committed to him as he abides committed Bodily to us in the Blood and
Spirit of the new and everlasting covenant.
Turn. Love. Repeat.
