“I’m going fishing,” Peter said. What else do you do when you’ve lost
everything, but go home? What can you do when the way is blocked, the future
dark? You go home, back to what you know, or what you knew, or what you thought
you knew. “I’m going back home, back to
fishing.”
Peter hadn’t read Thomas Wolfe’s novel or he might have known, “You can’t go
back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to a young man’s
dreams of glory and of fame…back home to places in the country, back home to
the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are
changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” (Wolfe)
You can’t go home again, not really. But who could blame Peter for trying? “I’m
going back to fishing, back to what I know, back to where I know or where I
knew or where I thought I knew who I was and what I was doing.”
And the others with him: Thomas (the Twin), Nathanael (from Cana), the Thunder
Brothers-James and John (the sons of Zebedee) and two others said, “We’ll go
with you. What else have we got to do? What have we left to lose?”
Jesus, their rabbi, their teacher, was gone. Jesus, their friend, was dead.
Killed in a grisly execution. And the three years that they’d followed him were
gone. All that time lost. Wasted. So they went, or tried to go, back home, back
to Galilee, back to fishing, back to the smell of the wet wooden boat, and the
wind off the water, the smell of leather aprons and the fleshy smell of fresh
caught fish. They went back to hands calloused by flaxen nets (Hanson) and
muscles sore from the repetitive motion of throwing out and drawing in the
heavy sodden nets.
And there on the Sea of Tiberias (an overblown name if ever there
was one for that lake, 13 miles long, 8 miles wide and less than 200 feet deep)
Peter and his friends spend a long night fishing. They fished at night because it was cool, and
throwing and drawing the nets was hot, sweaty work. They fished at night because
that’s when the fish were more active and more easily caught. (Brown 1069)
But perhaps they also went fishing at night because it was dark. Because it was
easier to hide. They could hide in the dark out on the lake the same way that
they had hid in that closed and locked room in Jerusalem, hiding in fear of the
Jews. Hiding because maybe they knew, without having read Thomas Wolfe’s novel,
they couldn’t go home again. Maybe they were familiar with the Greek
philosopher
Heraclitus’ cryptic utterance, “Ever-newer waters flow on those
who step into the same rivers." -
No man ever steps in the same river twice; no one ever fishes in the same lake
twice. Everything changes.
Would there have been a chorus of “I told you so” greetings from former friends
and family members they had left three years prior to follow that itinerant
rabbi from Nazareth? Would there have been scorn and mockery? “Here come the
ones who thought they would change the world? What happened to all your
idealistic talk about peace, and love, and the Kingdom of God?” Would there
have been, perhaps, a measure of fear as well?
After all, if their rabbi and master had been arrested and executed as a
common criminal, what could be said of these, his followers, skulking back into
town?
So Peter and the others went back to what they thought they knew, back to
Galilee and back to fishing, back to calloused hands and tired backs and spent
the night fishing on the lake in the dark. But, as sure as you can’t go home
again, Peter and the others couldn’t go back to fishing. Not really. They
fished all night and they caught nothing. Nothing. Not a thing. Each and every
time they threw out the net they hauled it back into the boat empty. They
blistered their hands and strained their muscles for no reward.
Perhaps it should be noted that we never actually read in
any of the four canonical Gospels of the disciples catching any fish except with
Jesus’ help. (Brown 1071)
I usually try to refrain from using clichés in my sermons,
but sometimes they prove helpful. The proverbial statement that “it’s always
darkest before the dawn”
isn’t exactly true scientifically; it is darkest at the midpoint between dusk
and dawn, when the half of the earth experiencing night time is facing 180°
from the sun. It may not be physically true, but it
feels right. In a metaphoric, poetic sort of way it is true. Things
just can’t seem to get any worse for Peter and the other disciples. Everything
is lost and broken; the past is gone and the future is dead. But then comes the
dawn. Then comes the light of the rising sun, an appropriate symbol for the
risen Lord.
Dawn finds our dejected disciples about to give up. There’s nothing left for
them, not even fish. It’s then that they are hailed by a strange figure on the
shore, his features obscured by distance and early morning fog. “Boys, you haven’t
any fish, have you?”
The disappointed disciples answer, “No.” And the stranger on the shore, a mere
one hundred yards away, told them to throw their net on the right side of the
boat, that there they would find a large catch of fish. This isn’t necessarily
a miracle. It was common practice for fishers on the Sea of Galilee in their
boats to use a spotter on the shore to help point out large schools of fish.
The disciples, as exhausted as they were, threw the net out one more time, on
the right side and, just as the stranger said, they found the fish. The nets
were full and straining, but did not rip. They were unable to pull the net into
the boat they caught so many fish.
This may not have be a miracle, in the same way that water was turned to wine,
or the way the royal official’s son was healed in Capernaum, or the paralytic
was healed at Bethsaida, or the crowd was fed on the Galilean hillside. It may
not have been a miracle in the way that Jesus walked upon the waves of the sea
of Galilee or the blind man was made to see at the Pool of Siloam, but
something in this event, something in the unexpected catch of fish triggered in
“the disciple that Jesus loved” a sudden recognition: “It is the Lord!”
The risen Jesus is strange and unrecognizable Lord. Even when seen he is
unseen, unrecognized. Mary Magdalene in the garden early Easter morning saw
him, spoke to him even but did not
see him.
Not until he called her by name. Then a sudden recognition came to her. And
again sometime later, as the disciples prepared to come ashore with nothing in their
nets and nothing in their lives, they saw and spoke to the risen Lord, but did
not
see him. Not until the sudden
catch of fish. And even then they’re not really sure.
On the shore they share a meal with the Lord of fresh cooked fish and bread,
cooked over a charcoal fire, but even they as they are sitting at his feet,
sharing a communal meal with their rabbi, their Lord, they still not quite see
him for who he is. This is so strange that none of them dared to ask, “Who are
you?” because they knew it was the Lord. They saw, but couldn’t see. They knew
but couldn’t understand. “They recognize him, but are puzzled and unsure. The
Jesus they knew has undergone transformation in becoming the risen Lord” (Brown
1076).
This is how the darkness is broken and dawn blooms over the horizon, how light breaks
in and spills over the lake and their lives. It is a sudden recognition, a
sudden (but still incomplete) understanding. Jesus meets with his confused and disconsolate
disciples with an intimate meal on the lakeshore. They’d shared a meal of bread
and fish with him on alongside this lake once before (John 6: 1- 15). He’d
shared with them the bread of life, the bread that came down from heaven. He’d
shared with them the kingdom of God and as he shared that simple meal on the shoreline
with them they slowly began to understand.
The light of dawn does not come all at once, it grows in intensity and
brilliance till the morning is bright and clear. And an understanding of the
Kingdom of God – with peace and joy and confidence – does not come all at once to
the disciples (or to us), it grows in intensity and fullness. It comes in fits
and starts, with the occasional sudden realization-an a-ha moment (It is the
Lord!)-and with slow gradual understanding (They dared not ask him, “Who are
you?”).
Moments of darkness and doubt and confusion, long dark nights of the soul when
all seems like loss, and waste, and death will be part of our Christian life.
This is unavoidable. We will have times when, despite all our effort, we come
up empty and unfulfilled. We may want to give up and go home, go back to what
we thought we knew, and who we thought we were. But the way (and we are
followers of the Way) is forward through the dark, toward the dawn, from loss
and despair to renewed joy and comfort in the risen Lord.
Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John xiii-xxi:
Introduction, Translation and Notes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and
Company, Inc. 1970. Print.
Wolfe, Thomas. You Can’t Go Home Again. New York:
Harper and Row. 1940. Print.
