Breakfast
John 21:1-19
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Our text this morning reminds me of an after-credits scene. Do you know what I’m talking about? The first after-credits scene that I can remember seeing was in the 1986 John Hugh’s classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. If you sat through the all the credits that roll at the end of the movie, there was Ferris Bueller in his bathrobe. Throughout the movie Ferris would look straight into the camera to narrate or comment on the events unfolding on screen. This time he asks, “you’re still here? It over. Go home.” Since then, and particularly in what’s been come to be known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there can be multiple scenes thrown in as the credits roll to tease the next movie, or story to be told.
Reading the end of the 20th chapter of John’s gospel feels like the end of the story. They come to the tomb, it’s empty. Mary sees Jesus, he tells her, “don’t hold on to me.” She tells everyone she’s seen him alive, even though they were all pretty sure he was dead. Then he shows up and tells them, “Peace be with you.” Only Thomas isn’t there and he doubts, but then Jesus comes back and he believes. And John writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these things 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.” The end. Well, it doesn’t say, ‘the end,’ but that sure sounds like the end, doesn’t it? But then we get this after credits scene. Because there are some unanswered questions that haven’t been entirely resolved.
So, we cut to Galilee. Clearly some time has passed. Who can say how much? For John, the point of the stories he shares about Jesus aren’t quite so much about when, or how they happened, as they are about what they mean; the new reality to which they point. If you count the names, you’ll see that this isn’t the whole crew, or even (as was the case with Thomas) eleven minus one. It’s Peter, James and John. Thomas and Nathanael, and two unnamed disciples. The first three we know from the other gospels as fishermen. That’s where Jesus first found them- fishing from the shore, repairing nets on their father’s boat- and called them to follow him. Now here they are back in Galilee and Peter wants to go fishing. That is, after all the drama, after the humiliation of his own denial, the pain of watching Jesus executed by the Roman state, the confusion of the empty tomb and thrilling appearance of the risen Jesus behind locked doors; after all that Peter is spent. He’s ready to go back to Galilee. He’s ready to go back to fishing.
In his work on the two halves of life, Father Richard Rohr talks about when the project of the first half of our life fails. What he means by the project of the first half of our life is the container of who we are. In the Genesis story about the tower of Babel, one of the expressed goals of the people who propose building such a tower is that they will, “make a name for themselves.” So you might say, the first half of life encompasses all the things that we do to make a name for ourselves. They are all the things that we do to succeed on the world’s terms- get the degree, find a spouse, build a career or a practice, start a family. The first half of life is the time we spend acquiring all the things that signal to others our value and worth, our place in the pecking order. To switch gears for a second, we have the perfect example in our first reading about Saul’s dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus. In his own words, written later in a letter to the church in Philippi, he recites his first half accomplishments. “If anyone has reason to be confident in the flesh,” he writes, “I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” This was the result of the first half of Saul’s life, and it was impressive as those things go.
Like Saul, Peter went by another name before Jesus got a hold of him. His parents, his brother, all his friends in Galilee surely knew him as Simon, son of Jonah, and a fisherman. And while he went off with Jesus, leaving his nets behind on the shore of the lake, Peter’s discipleship was an extension of the first half of his life. When Jesus encountered a rich young man who only lacked the willingness to sell all that he had and give his money to the poor, and then noted that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into what God’s was up to in the world, it was Peter who balked. “Look,” he tells Jesus, “we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” That is a first half of life question. What do I get out of this? What’s in it for me? How does this diversify and strengthen my portfolio, increase my property values, or improve my standing? And when Jesus suggests on the night of his arrest that his friends will fail him, Peter protests. Peter protests because such a suggestion runs contrary to what Peter thinks they’ve built, the Messianic project they’ve been working on. What Jesus predicts doesn’t fit with Peter’s understanding of how the whole thing is supposed to work. So that when it all comes to pass just as Jesus said, and Peter denies three times that he knows Jesus, the whole thing comes crashing down. It isn’t just that the Jesus movement that he’d spent the past three years of his life comes crashing down. Peter’s sense of himself, who he thought he was and what he had to contribute to that movement also came crashing down. The first half of life comes to an end the day that we come face to face with the fact that who we are is not in fact the name we have made for ourselves, the thing that we have built, the achievements we have unlocked. The first half of life ends the day your marriage or your business fails. It ends the day you are confronted with a termination notice and learn that the job you gave your life to does not, in fact, love you back. Or it ends when the last kid leaves home for good and it’s time for them to start their own building project.
And what Rohr says is that what sometimes happens when that day comes- a kind of judgment day if you will- is that we can either fall upward into the second half of our life, or we can recoil from the judgment of that failure only to circle back and double down on all those same first half of life efforts. Peter says to his friends when they return to Galilee, “I am going fishing.” Because when we don’t know what to do, we often revert to doing what we know, what we’ve always known.
Some things in life just tend to make everything better. For Peter that is fishing. For Jesus, it is breakfast- or any meal, it would appear. I’ve never been much for fishing myself, but I can definitely get behind breakfast.
But notice what happens when Peter goes back to what he knows. Notice what happens when Peter returns to double down on his first half of life. He comes up empty. Literally. Here’s a guy who most likely grew up on the shores of Galilee and had been fishing since he could throw a net. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what he was doing. He was doing what he knew. But he caught nothing. All night. Nothing. And then some yahoo on the shore starts shouting advice (remember they didn’t know it was Jesus at first, if there’s one common thread across the Gospels it’s that the risen Christ isn’t always easy to spot, or recognize). “No fish,” this stranger asks, “try casting the net on the other side.” Like that will make a difference. What is Jesus really saying? No luck doing the same thing you’ve always done? Try the other side. Or to use Rohr’s language, maybe, “try moving into the second half of your life.” In the second half of life, we stop living according to our own will, our own building projects, our own catch and we adopt a willingness to do, and live, and act at God’s invitation and suggestion. When they realize who it is that they’re talking to, Peter doesn’t waste any time. He throws on his clothes and jumps out of the boat to get to Jesus. He leaves the fishing behind to get to breakfast.
It’s at breakfast that we get to the heart of what this whole encounter is about. On that first day of the week we heard about Peter seeing the empty tomb. And later when Jesus showed up behind locked doors to the ten, and then the eleven, there wasn’t any mention of Peter. It’s almost as if he’s hiding in the back. Resurrection is strange enough, but it had to be awkward for Peter, running into Jesus after everything that had happened before the cock crowed on that fateful Friday morning. In order for Peter to move into the second half of life, he’s got to face up to the failure that brought the first half to a crashing halt. Calling him by his old name, Jesus asks, “do you love me more than these?” Who knows what these are? These fish, maybe, that represent all that he’s spent his life trying to acquire and achieve. Do you love me more than the life you’ve tried unsuccessfully to build for yourself, the one that looks good on paper, or to the neighbors, but is secretly as empty as those fishing nets? Do you love me more than these? Three times he asks the question, and three times Peter answers that he does. “You know that I love you,” he tells Jesus. And with each answer Jesus tells him, “Feed my sheep…feed my lambs…feed my sheep.” This is what it means to embrace and be embraced by the power of resurrection, to move into new life, or the second half of life. It means that how we have failed is never more important than who we love, and what we do to express that love in the world. Let me say that again. How we have failed is never more important than who we love, and what we do to express that love in the world. “When you were younger,” says Jesus, that is, in the first half of your life you did what you wanted and went wherever. “But when you grow old,” he continues, that is, when you move into the second half of your life your life will no longer be your own. It belongs to God, and if you are willing, God may take you places you wouldn’t pick for yourself. But in going, in moving forward and not back, you will discover the life you never could make for on your own, not in a million years.