None Dared Ask

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
Third of Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 21:1-19

1 After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. 2Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. 3Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. 4Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. 5Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” 6He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. 7That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. 8But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off. 9When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. 10Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” 11So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. 12Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. 13Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. 14This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. 15When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” 19(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

There’s a Far Side cartoon that stuck in my head several years ago, two men are in a fishing boat on a lake. There are mountains in the background, and looming over the mountains is the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. The caption is what one of the men is saying to the other man: “What does this mean? I’ll tell you what this means, Bob! It means no limits and no license requirement!’

There’s a part of us that longs for normalcy – especially when we’ve been through some event that is so totally ABNORMAL that it just completely throws us out of whack. Knocks us off our routine, unsettles us. That’s been our experience this week, hasn’t it? Even though we are hundreds of miles away, and thankfully have suffered no immediate loss in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, we are still overwhelmed by the tragedy. Our world has been shaken. And our hearts go out to the families of ALL those who died on Monday.

The disciples’ world has been turned upside down for the last three years, what with hanging out with Jesus and all, slowly oh so slowly, beginning to learn what Jesus meant when he told them that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, or that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and just in the last couple of WEEKS, they’ve gone from sharing in a triumphal entry into Jerusalem to denying that they even KNOW Jesus in order to save their own skins.

And here they are, contemplating what their lives have been and what they are to become. Jesus had sent word to them through Mary Magdalene at the tomb that they were to return to Galilee, and he would meet them there. And here they are. It’s not exactly spelled out how long it’s been. But it’s been long enough for the reality to sink in that Jesus IS no longer dead. That he REALLY IS resurrected.

So the disciples are faced with figuring out what that means for the rest of THEIR lives. They would have been familiar with the concept of resurrection, but only in a specific context – the one that goes with life after death – the heavenly resurrection, if you will.

Jesus is confronting them with what it means to be resurrected to new life while there is life all around them.

And isn’t that what we are faced with every day? Isn’t it the same dilemma we have to figure out as we continue to live out our earthly existence after our rebirth into life in Christ?

What do we do? We go back to the ordinary, to what we know best. We go back to what it is that gets us from morning to evening throughout the day. For Simon Peter and six other disciples, that was fishing.

On one level, it seems that they were retreating, doesn’t it? Running home to the routine, away from the crowds and the Roman forces, and the high-powered leaders in Jerusalem, back to their backwater lakeside town in Galilee. But on another level, maybe it wasn’t so much that they were running away as it was that they were running TO what Jesus had called them to to begin with. What Christ called them to was to realize the holy in the daily. It might not have been a conscious, intentional move on their part, but more of a gut reaction to what they had been through.

For all the jump we can get from an especially powerful retreat, or from a mountaintop experience, or from … even from a good set of messages from former pastors during a spring revival, we don’t live out the dailyness of our faith by what nourishment we receive from those interspersed events, but rather, from what we do on a daily basis.

The meal Jesus shared with his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that morning was nothing special in and of itself; broiled fish and bread. Eugene Petersen has Jesus calling them to the table like any self-respecting cook would – “breakfast is ready!!” Aside from the fact that Jesus, who by the way, had only recently been scourged and beaten, crucified and killed, was serving the meal, the meal was just that – a meal. It was the first meal of the day. After a hard night’s labor on the boats, the men would have been pretty hungry. I know on the few occasions we’ve gone out fishing or just riding in a boat, something about being out on the water does make you hungry. I can only imagine how loud the disciples’ stomachs would have been growling after spending the whole NIGHT out on the water trying to catch some fish.

The miracle catch foreshadows what the disciples would soon begin to experience as they began to share the gospel message of the risen Christ – and began to gather more and more followers.

Isn’t it interesting that John remembers exactly how many large fish they caught that morning: one hundred and fifty-three? The distance the boats were from shore – no more than a hundred yards. Again, it’s that sort of detail that makes the Gospels believable – the little details that don’t have anything necessarily to do with the main point of each story, but which are thrown in anyway.

Why is it that the disciples at first didn’t recognize the Lord in his resurrection appearances? Why is it that they still did what he told them to do? The text says ‘because they knew it was the Lord’. And I’m sure they DID know … but I wonder if part of them was wondering if it really TRULY was the Lord – yes, he LOOKED like him, and he TALKED like him, but … am I REALLY HERE WITH JESUS, or am I dreaming? Will I wake up and find that he is still in the tomb?

I think they were still adjusting to the new reality – the resurrection reality – that they were going to be living in for the rest of their lives, and the question of ‘who are you?’ just seemed unnecessary to them. And yet, John uses the word ‘dared’ ask … as if they were afraid to know who Jesus REALLY was… they knew him to be their teacher for the last three years, but they were seeing and experiencing a Jesus they had only seen a PART of, now in his fullness.

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

What does it mean to say that it is important to find the Holy in the daily? What does it mean to say that it was around meals that Jesus made so many of his points to his disciples?

It means that for whatever we endeavor to accomplish in the name of Christ in the broader stage of our world, whether we end up going on a mission trip to the gulf coast or even beyond, whether we touch the life of a whole community in Chile, or Spain, or Mexico – and as a family of faith we are called to DO that – to reach beyond our local community and somehow touch the world for Christ – we are still and always called to do what can SOMETIMES be the much harder thing to do – to witness to the very people who know us best, who’ve seen us at our worst, who’ve seen us in moments of weakness and disregard, who knew us before we knew Christ, perhaps, who have the stories to tell that we would rather not have known. It is into that dialyness of existence that we are called to live our NEW life.

It’s easy to live as someone without a past when you are surrounded by people who don’t KNOW your past. It’s entirely something else to try to live a resurrection life among people who knew you before you died to yourself and began to live for Christ.

Let’s pray.