It’s been two weeks since Easter. It was such a great Sunday around here. There were flowers everywhere. The pews were packed. Many got dressed up. Many paused to take pictures in front of the flowered cross. There was brass, organ, and choir. The band filled the chancel. So much effort goes into that Sunday because it’s the most important day of the year for the church. It’s a mountaintop experience.
How have the last fourteen days felt? Are you still on the mountaintop? Did life just bring you back to earth really fast? Is resurrection hope the first thing on your mind when you wake up?
It feels to me like Easter was already a couple of months ago. I got right back to work. I went to seminary board meetings in Louisville. I did lots of laundry. I went to meetings at church, led classes, and answered emails. I can tell you that resurrection hope was not the first thing on my mind when I woke up. It was probably coffee. Then Wordle. Then crosswords. Then walking the dog. Then the gym.
The problem with mountaintops is that you eventually have to leave them. You come back to earth. You get back to your normal rhythms, and while what happened on the mountain matters, translating it into everyday life is hard.
Now, imagine with me that you were one of those first disciples. You’ve been with Jesus for three years — talk about a mountaintop experience. You’ve heard his teachings, seen his miracles, and trusted him with your life. You believed that he was God’s Son, capable of anything and everything.
Yet, you watched it all come crashing down. You saw him get arrested. You overheard the sham trial, where no one was really sure what to charge Jesus with. Was it blasphemy? Sedition? No matter. His being alive was disturbing the peace, so you watched him get tortured and hung on a cross. You watched his agony from a safe distance. You witnessed the sky darken and heard him cry out to God in his pain. You saw him breathe his last, get pulled down from the cross, and be hastily laid in a tomb.
Your whole world came crashing down. Still, there are rumored sightings of Jesus here and there, but let’s just be honest here. Dead people don’t leave their tombs, and so it’s hard to believe your eyes when you see Jesus. It’s him, but he’s somehow different. He comes and goes. He’s not present with you all the time. Never tell me the odds, you’d think, but it’s really hard to believe this has actually happened.
What do you do when you come down from the mountaintop? You go home and get back to normal life.
That’s what’s happening in our passage from John. Seven of the eleven remaining disciples have made their way back home. They were fisherman by trade, so they went back to what they knew.
I’ve never been a fisherman, mostly because I don’t have the patience for it. My mind and body crave activity, and I’ve never found that with a fishing pole in my hand. Plus, I never liked touching the fish, so there’s that. I know there are many different ways to fish, but I bet none of our folks who like to fish did so like the disciples did.
New Testament scholar Gary Burge has done a deep dive into Galilean fishing practices, so here’s what those seven were up to. I know this is true for a lot of fishing, but in the Sea of Galilee, the prime time to fish was in the early hours before sunrise. So, they’d push their boats out in the dark of night. They’d work in teams, with two boats using trammel nets, which are long nets that have corks on one end for floatation and either stone or metal sinkers on the other end.
Fishing boats in that time were around 27 feet long by 7 feet wide. A boat from that era actually sunk and was in the sea floor for centuries. It was unearthed in 1986 and now can be seen at a museum in Israel. John’s text actually uses two different words for the boats in our text. One of the boats was smaller than the other, further giving us a picture of how they were fishing.
So, these boats worked in tandem with the trammel net to surround a school of fish. They would draw the net tighter around the school, and I can only imagine the fish thinking, “It’s a trap!” (It turns out that aquatic beings are good at noticing traps at the last minute, which is precisely what Admiral Ackbar does as he commands the rebel forces.)
As the net closed around them, the men would throw ten-foot wide cast nets that had lead sinkers weighing them down. These cast nets would either be emptied by a swimmer or pulled into the boat with all the other fish snared by the net wall. So, it’s likely Peter was in the boat 100 yards from shore, and he was stripped down to his skivvies as the swimmer, diving into the sea to check the nets.
So, after a frustrating night of fishing — and, let’s be honest, a few weeks where life had felt upside-down — in the early morning darkness, they hear a voice call out to them from the seashore. “Children, have you caught anything to eat?”
Have you ever been in a frustrating situation where someone asks how things are going? I have, and I’m always tempted to say something snarky. “Have I caught anything? Are you kidding me? If I had caught something, I’d already by heading to shore. What are you going to do about it from there? Seriously, some people…” It’s a good thing I wasn’t in the boat, because I think Jesus would have found my lack of faith disturbing.
The disciples, however, unable to see who is on shore, simply answer, “No.” So, Jesus offers them advice. “Cast your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some,” he says. “Do or do not. There is no try.”
You just heard all about surrounding the fish with a net between the boats, and now he’s telling them to do something that goes against all fishing expertise. Go apart from your experience and trust me. Toss a cast net outside and see what happens. Folks, doing this is like buying a single Powerball lottery ticket and expecting to win. It’s so unlikely that they’ll catch anything.
Yet, to their credit, the disciples listen to this mysterious man on the shore and give it a shot, and their catch is miraculous — so many fish that they couldn’t bring them into the boat. One of the disciples puts two and two together and proclaims, “It’s the Lord!”
Peter, who has been in and out of the water trying to catch fish, tucks his clothes into his belt so he can get to shore as fast as possible. The others follow in the boat. Jesus has Peter fetch some of the 153 fish they caught in one net so he can cook breakfast. This number — 153 — has led to all sorts of speculation about its meaning down through the ages, but I’m partial to these two. First, it’s a good indication of an eye witness report to the catch. Second, it’s reflective of how listening to Jesus — even when his message defies our logic — can lead to results that defy our expectations.
So, Jesus gathers the seven fisherman on the beach for a meal of bread and fish. He took the bread and broke it for them, and it was in the breaking of the bread that his resurrected presence was confirmed for them. Isn’t it interesting that these folks who spent so much time with Jesus had difficulty recognizing him? Even they struggled to see who Jesus was and how he was changing their lives. Yet, he was there — this his third appearance to them — and communing together restored them and affirmed who he was.
Throughout its history, Christianity has been symbolized with a fish. The Greek word for fish is ichthus. They used fishing as a symbol for how Christ through the church was miraculously catching more and more into the net of God’s love. They also used the word ichthus as an acronym to teach Jesus’ identity. Iota was the first letter for Jesus. Chi was the first letter for Christ. Theta and upsilon were the first letters for Son of God, and sigma started Savior. Ichthus. Jesus Christ. God’s Son. Savior.
Christianity has not always been welcomed in society, particularly not when it was just getting going in the Roman Empire. There are stories that early Christians would find out who was a sibling in Christ when they met someone on the road by drawing one half of a fish and the other finishing it off. The fish became of a symbol of shared faith and purpose. It gave them strength for the journey of following Jesus. These rebellions are built on hope.
Jesus met the disciples on the seashore. Soon thereafter, they witnessed his ascension to the sky, returning to his heavenly home. Sea and sky — Jesus was there in both. He was there on the mountaintop and on the cross. And he’s still here, present to us as we share in this meal he has prepared.
