+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
We have some members away from Pilgrim this weekend, and a few of them may be doing some fishing. I expect that when they return, we might even hear some carefully recounted, detailed fish stories. On this Third Sunday of Easter, our Third Reading gives us a carefully recounted, detailed fish story, but not in the sense of one that is made up or not true. And, the story in our Third Reading is not primarily about the fish, but, as the theme for this sermon puts it, the Third Reading is primarily about “The Resurrected Jesus Revealed”.
Today’s Third Reading comes in St. John’s divinely‑inspired Gospel account immediately after the Gospel Readings of the past two weeks: Easter Day’s telling of Jesus’s appearing to Mary Magdalene at the tomb Easter morning, and The Second Sunday of Easter’s telling of Jesus’s appearing to the disciples in the locked upper room, both on Easter Evening and one week later. Thus, today’s Third Reading gives us St. John’s third account of the resurrected Jesus’s revealing Himself to a group of His disciples, in this case to a majority of them, including some of the ones more-prominently mentioned in St. John’s account. This time Passover is over, and the disciples are back in Galilee, where they had been told Jesus would meet them—told the night Jesus was betrayed by Jesus Himself and told the day Jesus was resurrected, by the women’s relaying the message given them by both an angel and the resurrected Jesus Himself.
So, imagine that you are one of the eleven disciples. With your fellow disciples, you have seen the resurrected Jesus at least twice, and, instead of going to Disney World, you have gone back to Galilee as He said. What do you do now? You seem to be without a leader. Sometimes Jesus is with you, as His appearances have shown, and yet other times He seems not to be with you, or at least not with you as He was before, or not with you as when He appears. You have not yet received the promised Holy Spirit, and so you really are just waiting. What do you do while you are waiting? We know what Simon Peter did on this occasion, he went fishing, and with him went the others, some of whom had not even been commercial fishermen before Jesus called them, like Peter had been, on that same sea. (There is no need to see the disciples’ fishing as their returning to their former way of life permanently, but rather, on this occasion, they were undertaking some activity and perhaps even hoping to provide for themselves while they were waiting for Jesus.
While waiting for Jesus, the disciples went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore, yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Admittedly, we do not know for sure why the disciples did not know that it was Jesus, though a number of explanations are offered. For example, day was just breaking, and they were about 100 yards off from shore, so maybe they could not see too clearly that far in the dim early light. Maybe Jesus’s resurrected body looked different; remember, Mary Magdalene at first had thought He was the gardener. Or, maybe Jesus prevented them from recognizing Him by sight, perhaps so that they would recognize Him in a different way.
In a manner of speaking, Jesus similarly stands on the shore in our lives, but do we always recognize Him? Think of how in the wake of events such as the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, people always ask where God was. Do we know that Jesus is there in the midst of the troubled lives of those whom we know and love? Do we know that Jesus is also present in our own afflictions?
In today’s First Reading (Acts 9:1-22), the resurrected Jesus revealed Himself to Saul on the road to Damascus, dropping him to his knees and, in a literal way, making him realize his spiritual blindness. Like the disciples, Saul did not recognize or know the resurrected Jesus. The resurrected Jesus brought Saul to repentance, and He does the same for us. We may not be breathing threats and murder against the Lord’s disciples, as Saul was, but we by nature are just as sinful. By nature, we, too, are spiritually blind, and even we who have been converted to faith continue to sin. We continue to sin in thought, word, and deed, by what we do and by what we do not do. We continue to sin in ways some people see, and we continue to sein in ways known only to us and to God. We need to live every day with sorrow over our sin, with faith that God forgives our sin, and with the desire to do better. When we so repent, then God forgives us our sin. He forgives us our sin of not knowing He is there in the midst of our own afflictions. He forgives us all our sin, and He even forgives us our sinful natures. He forgives us by grace through faith in the resurrected Jesus.
In today’s Third Reading, we find “The Resurrected Jesus Revealed”. St. John’s two previous revelations of the resurrected Jesus certainly were sufficient, as we heard last week, for us to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and by believing to have life in His Name. Yet, in his “epilogue” of a sort, St. John gives us this third revelation of the resurrected Jesus. In this third case, to disciples who did not know that it was Him, Jesus reveals Himself in a miraculous catch of fish—a miraculous catch of fish similar to and yet noticeably different from one that happened earlier on that very same sea (Luke 5:1-11). In this case Jesus did not simply “spot” the fish for the disciples from the shore or tell them to fish from the “lucky” side of the boat, but He provided the fish for them as in the previous case, and so He revealed Himself. God in the flesh, the man Jesus Christ had been revealing God’s name and works throughout His life. Yet, the appearances of Jesus resurrected from the dead specifically show His glory and triumph over sin, death, and the power of the devil for us. As today’s Second Reading (Revelation 5:8‑14) put it, He is the Lamb once slain Whose blood ransoms us for God.
The only other time St. John mentions the Sea of Tiberias (also called the Lake of Gennesaret and the Sea of Galilee) is when, near its shore, Jesus with five loaves and two fish miraculously fed more than 5-thousand people. In that same locale, Jesus taught about Himself as the bread from heaven, the bread of life, and Jesus said that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood we have no life in us. In today’s Third Reading, Jesus not only provides the disciples a miraculous catch of fish, but He also apparently serves them a miraculous breakfast: on the charcoal fire that miraculously appeared on the shore apparently were laid out one fish and one loaf of bread, hardly enough otherwise for the seven disciples and Jesus. Admittedly we are not told whether or not they ate the fish the disciples just caught and brought, but, regardless, Jesus served the disciples by providing the bread. And, from this altar He miraculously serves us bread that is His body and wine that is His blood, and so thereby He gives us the forgiveness of sins that He won for us with His death on the cross and His resurrection from the grave. We who are necessarily baptized, as was Saul in today’s Second Reading, likewise carry and confess Jesus’s Name; we receive individual Holy Absolution after privately confessing to our pastor the sins that trouble us most, and then we partake of this holy meal for the forgiveness of our sins, and so also for life and for salvation.
This time imagine that you are one of the seven disciples who had been working hard all night and are frustrated by not catching anything and then further exhausted dragging the net full of fish to shore. Imagine how good that fresh broiled fish and fresh bread Jesus provided would have tasted! As the Lord blessed the disciples’ work and provided for them, so He blesses our work and provides for us. Never in the Bible do the disciples catch anything without the Lord’s help. Similarly, without His blessing, our most-persistent and most-persevering efforts and seeming successes are without value. Through His blessing our callings, our vocations, He provides our daily bread and takes care of our physical needs. We need not be foolishly anxious but only wisely faithful. As we sang in today’s Psalm (Psalm 30), He has brought up our souls from hell and restored us to life; we give thanks to Him forever.
Those of us who have seen in magazines such as National Geographic still pictures of commercial fish catches or watched such video on The Discovery Channel might not think that one un-torn net full of 153 large fish is all that great, even if greater than our own personal fish stories or the fish stories of others. To the disciples, however, the catch was notable and preserved not only for those reasons but also chiefly for its revelation of the resurrected Jesus. As they brought forward the fish that the resurrected Jesus had miraculously given them, they came to know and recognize that He would be with them wherever they were, in the midst of whatever they were experiencing. His power would flow through them for the benefit of His Kingdom, even for us today. Likewise, we who live each day with repentance and faith know and recognize that the resurrected Jesus is with us wherever we are, in the midst of whatever we are experiencing. And, we know and recognize, as we will pray in today’s Collect, that He will grant us perpetual gladness and eternal joys.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +