June 30, 2013 Fifth Sunday After Trinity
Growing (Painfully) in Grace
Ecclesiastes 2:1-11, 18-23, Psalm 34, 1 St. Peter 3:8-15a, St. Luke 5:1-11
The ichthus is more than a bumper sticker.
We’ve all seen it, the fish symbol Christians use to proclaim their faith automotively. And we’ve seen the reply from the evolutionists, the fish with feet that has “Darwin” where “Ichthus” should be.
At this point, I feel obliged to issue a pastoral admonition. If you find yourself behind one of these folks, keep your foot off the gas and your hand off your pistol. Our Lord commands us to love our enemies, and that includes those who worship amphibians.
First and foremost, of course, the ichthus is the symbol members of the ancient church used, in time of persecution, as a secret sign to identify meeting places and tombs – and one another.
When a traveler thought someone he encountered along the way might be a follower of the Way, he etched an arc in the dirt. If the other completed the fish profile with a second arc, each knew he was in sanctified company.
The sign has another use I discovered in studying for this sermon. We’ll return to it.
Fish swim in schools through the pages of the New Testament, nowhere more prominently than in our gospel lesson from St. Luke’s fifth chapter. St. John’s 21st provides a bookend to it.
Fishermen are common folk, utterly dependent on the uncertainties of the sea for their living. The sea that feeds them can also kill them. Like farmers, they brood over what the creation will offer up to them from day to day and year to year.
Folk such as they feel keenly their need for the favor of the One who presides over nature to preserve and sustain them.
Once again, the gospels teach us that the “poor” are the poor in spirit. While the well-to-do and the powerful are strutting like besotted peacocks, drunk on their ability to establish their own righteousness, they who have the least are the ones willing to “forsake all” to follow Jesus. They confess their need for a Savior.
They know intuitively that He is all-in-all and the only way to gain all is to surrender all, which is to lay down their lives and take up His. As our Lord will say to His disciples, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”
But even the poor in spirit need revelation and teaching. For these whom Jesus calls as apostles, revelation comes in a brilliant flash that drives Peter to his knees. A sinful man, he hauls in so many fish that he can only explain the catch with the confession that he is in the presence of One who does what a sinner cannot do.
Revelation flashes like lightning over the night sea but instruction grinds on like a stretch in prison, a harrowing process that compels him to search his soul and confront all the doubt and fear that fester there. He will bellow like a young bull of his faithfulness to his Lord. When he has a chance to prove it, he will scurry away like a startled chicken.
In the end, he will return to the faith he betrayed, but not because he draws on a well of courage that had gone untapped. Far from it; his Lord heals him by extracting from him the threefold affirmation that wipes away his threefold denial.
After that happens, St. Peter thunders the name that is above all names. In the second chapter of Acts, we find a lion preaching ferociously to a multitude that might arise and tear him to pieces. He indicts them for crucifying the One who was both Lord and Christ.
Beaten and imprisoned, he never wavers. Tradition tells us he chose to be crucified upside-down so as to suffer a death crueler than his Lord’s. Might we all be as faithful as St. Peter.
Now think of the progression of his faith as we turn back to the ichthus. The Greek word for “fish” begins with an iota, our I, standing for Inssous. That’s easy enough. Next comes chi, our ch, which represents Christos, which translates the Hebrew masshiah. Inssous is the Messiah who is the Christ.
Then follows theta, or th, for Theou, the possessive form of Theos, God, which shows up in English words such as “theology” and “theophany.” Next is upsilon, our u, for uios, son. Finally we have swtnr. Savior.
Put together, it goes like this: “Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior.” Now, look at the unfolding of St. Peter’s faith. He sees the Lord first as Jesus, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth. Then He is the Christ, or Messiah.
This is probably the recognition that comes to Peter when Jesus calls him as an apostle in our lesson in St. Luke 5. But that word was more fluid in St. Peter’s day than in ours.
The Old Testament applies the term “Messiah” to various prophets, priests and kings. Usually those kings are regents of Israel, but Isaiah calls Cyrus, the pagan king of Persia, “Messiah.”
The word refers to an “anointed one,” set apart for God’s purpose. And so Cyrus is, because he will fulfill that purpose by sending Israel back from Babylon to the land of promise.
Next, St. Peter recognizes Jesus the Christ as God’s Son: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Anyone who can restore life to the dead must surely have come from God, the giver of life.
But it is only after the Lord’s resurrection and ascension that he and the other apostles awaken to the truth that Jesus is the Suffering Servant whom Isaiah foretold, the Savior who would give His life to remove the blight of sin and the plague of death from the world.
The ichthus spells out the order in which Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior reveals Himself to His apostles.
At last they know Him as the Living Word, the One who imaged the Father perfectly and returned to Him after He completed His work on earth. They walked with Him for three years; finally, after His departure, they know Him for who He is.
Their witness is the promise of the Hebrew Bible, an intimate relationship with the incarnate Lord and the coming in power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Our witness is the Holy Spirit and all of Scripture.
Some say, “If only I could see Jesus . . .” But God does not leave His image-bearers spiritual paupers. The poor in spirit have wealth beyond measure in the Holy Spirit and the word.
Like the five brothers of the rich man in the Lazarus story who would not believe if one returned from the afterlife to warn them, many today would spurn the Lord if He came back to show them the nail holes in His hands and feet.
So the ichthus represents more than a secret sign. It shows us the blossoming of the apostles’ apprehension of who this carpenter’s son – and a carpenter Himself – truly is.
Now, I pose the question: Would a fisherman instruct a carpenter on how to build a trestle?
The fishermen have come in from their fruitless day’s work and are washing their nets. Jesus gets into a boat and asks Simon Peter to put out a little way so that all in the crowd might hear Him. When He has finished, He tells Peter to go back out and lower his nets again.
In his reply, Peter refers to Him as “Master.” The Greek word, used nowhere in the New Testament outside St. Luke’s gospel, designates anyone in authority.
Peter complains that they have been out all night, the best time to fish, and caught nothing. But as any master sergeant will tell you, agreement is not necessary for obedience.
After the miraculous catch, Peter falls at Jesus’ knees and calls Him “Lord.” This word may be no more than a term of polite address, but in the Greek translation of the Old Testament it refers consistently to God.
One theologian observed that it is the Master who must be obeyed, the Lord whose holiness causes moral anguish in the sinner.
So it has done in Peter.
Obedience alone is difficult enough. A little boy cooped up in a hospital for far longer than he liked built a reputation as a pint-sized wrecking crew. A volunteer thought she had the answer. Standing at his bedside, she said, “If you behave yourself all week, the next time I come I’ll give you a dime.”
When she returned a week later, she stood in the same spot and said, “I’m not going to ask the doctors and nurses. I’m asking you, ‘Do you deserve the dime?’”
After a small pause, a small voice crept out from between the sheets: “Gimme a penny.”
Revelation is bearing down on Peter at the gallop. He is the first to see this Jesus of Nazareth as someone far different from him and his mates, from all the self-proclaimed prophets and messiahs who traipse through Palestine, from anyone he had ever known or dreamed of knowing.
This much is certain: At the time Jesus calls him, He has seen the Father work through this “Anointed One.”
James and John, Peter’s partners, are equally astonished, but the Lord addresses Peter only when He says, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men.” At that point, all of them “forsook all and followed Him.”
These are the first disciples. The disciple’s reward is to have God. His work and his joy are to represent God. According to his Lord’s commandment to go forth and make disciples, the disciple becomes a discipler. The 12 apostles are the first of them.
In the Old Testament, any who find themselves in God’s presence shudder with fear, but Jesus immediately puts Peter and the others at ease. From now on, He tells them, they will catch men. They have stumbled into the climax of life on earth; they are followers of Immanuel, God With Us.
“All things come of thee, O Lord.” We say it. Do we mean it? In that moment, the truth of those words breaks over Peter like the light of dawn over the eastern cliffs. A poor fisherman had nothing, an empty net. Now he has treasure in his boat.
Yet seeing afresh through sanctified eyes, he knows everything for what it is: nothing. This great gift shrivels into a mud puddle in the presence of the Giver. To have Him is to have everything. Peter forsakes his fish and takes up the ichthus. It’s more than a bumper sticker.
Catch a fish, clean a fish. Catch a man, clean a man.
Catch a fish, sell a fish. Catch a man, buy back a man from Satan.
Catch a fish, eat a meal. Catch a man, join the Lord at His eternal banquet.
The superabundant haul of fish points toward the haul of men they will “catch.” Men who are fishers become fishers of men. The word for “catch” adorns the story. It is familiar in Greek literature but used only twice in the New Testament. When applied to men, it means “take alive.”
The other occurrence is in 2 Timothy 2, where St. Paul instructs his disciple Timothy in the way of service to his Lord. If the servant corrects the wayward ones with gentleness, God may grant them repentance that brings them to the truth.
The goal is that these sinners come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil after having been “taken captive by him to do his will.” In the passive voice, “taken captive” is the same word St. Luke uses for “catch.”
Satan has caught them not to kill them but to shanghai them into his service. Jesus wants to catch men to enlist them in making more disciples who will lead ever more who are made in God’s image into the loving embrace of the Father in heaven.
And the Lord has already given His first apostles an object lesson in making disciples. As He sat in the boat before the crowd, He taught them.
These three have taken their best catch ever, so many fish that the weight of them almost sends their boats to the bottom – but they abandon all to follow Him. They enter a new life. Having forsaken all, they may now gain all.
It is their obedience, this radical commitment, that marks them as disciples. The fisherman Peter accepts the commandment of the carpenter Jesus. The Carpenter is his Messiah.
A few others have followed this path. Amy Carmichael was an Irishwoman who suffered from a nerve disease that drove her to bed for weeks at a time. She went to India and founded an orphanage; she served there for 55 years without a furlough. And she wrote “Make Me Thy Fuel”:
From prayer that asks that I may be
Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,
From fearing when I should aspire,
From faltering when I should climb higher,
From silken self, O Captain, free
Thy soldier who would follow Thee.
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakening,
Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified,
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.
Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay,
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire,
Let me not sink to be a clod:
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian, grew up in a wealthy family. When he decided to follow the Lord, like St. Peter and the other apostles, he went all in. In “The Cost of Discipleship,” he assailed “cheap grace,” the disease that had infected the church in his place and time --and ours.
It makes God a cuddly uncle who forgives us anything and everything and makes no demands on us.
Bonhoeffer stayed the course. Shortly before the end of World War II, the Nazis executed him for plotting to eliminate Hitler. Bonhoeffer died to free millions from the horror Hitler rained down on them. He paid the cost of discipleship.
These are heroes of our faith who abandoned all to abandon self to discipleship. But the philosopher Dallas Willard found something he believes carries a higher price than discipleship.
“Nondiscipleship,” Willard wrote, “costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil.
“In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring . . . The cross-shaped yoke of Christ is after all an instrument of liberation and power to those who live in it with him and learn the meekness and lowliness of heart that brings rest for the soul . . .
“The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane.”
In his final chapter, St. John gives us the other bookend. Peter and some other disciples go fishing again and again they come up empty. Their resurrected Lord stands on the shore but they do not recognize Him. They require revelation anew.
He provides another miraculous catch and they regain their senses. They cook fish on a fire He has laid and eat their last meal with Him.
Jesus drags out of Peter the threefold confession of his love for his Lord, restoring the one who has denied Him three times. He concludes with the words, “Follow Me.” He has told His disciple to “feed My lambs” and “feed My sheep.” In other words, to carry on the making of disciples the Lord has begun. A true disciple can be no other than a discipler.
At the first miraculous catch, they followed Him like a troupe of jesters in a traveling salvation show. Now, as He prepares to depart from them, He commands them, “Follow Me.” He has taught them. Soon, the final piece will fall into place. They will know Jesus Christ Son of God as Savior.
When revelation flashed, Peter was humbled. Going on, he has grumbled and bumbled and stumbled. Now, because of what God has done, he will sing out true as the gospel the glory of the risen Savior. Again I say, may we all be as faithful as St. Peter.
The poor in spirit have forsaken all. Jesus’ work on earth is finished; theirs is just beginning. So is yours and mine. Amen.
.
.
Growing (Painfully) in Grace
Ecclesiastes 2:1-11, 18-23, Psalm 34, 1 St. Peter 3:8-15a, St. Luke 5:1-11
The ichthus is more than a bumper sticker.
We’ve all seen it, the fish symbol Christians use to proclaim their faith automotively. And we’ve seen the reply from the evolutionists, the fish with feet that has “Darwin” where “Ichthus” should be.
At this point, I feel obliged to issue a pastoral admonition. If you find yourself behind one of these folks, keep your foot off the gas and your hand off your pistol. Our Lord commands us to love our enemies, and that includes those who worship amphibians.
First and foremost, of course, the ichthus is the symbol members of the ancient church used, in time of persecution, as a secret sign to identify meeting places and tombs – and one another.
When a traveler thought someone he encountered along the way might be a follower of the Way, he etched an arc in the dirt. If the other completed the fish profile with a second arc, each knew he was in sanctified company.
The sign has another use I discovered in studying for this sermon. We’ll return to it.
Fish swim in schools through the pages of the New Testament, nowhere more prominently than in our gospel lesson from St. Luke’s fifth chapter. St. John’s 21st provides a bookend to it.
Fishermen are common folk, utterly dependent on the uncertainties of the sea for their living. The sea that feeds them can also kill them. Like farmers, they brood over what the creation will offer up to them from day to day and year to year.
Folk such as they feel keenly their need for the favor of the One who presides over nature to preserve and sustain them.
Once again, the gospels teach us that the “poor” are the poor in spirit. While the well-to-do and the powerful are strutting like besotted peacocks, drunk on their ability to establish their own righteousness, they who have the least are the ones willing to “forsake all” to follow Jesus. They confess their need for a Savior.
They know intuitively that He is all-in-all and the only way to gain all is to surrender all, which is to lay down their lives and take up His. As our Lord will say to His disciples, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”
But even the poor in spirit need revelation and teaching. For these whom Jesus calls as apostles, revelation comes in a brilliant flash that drives Peter to his knees. A sinful man, he hauls in so many fish that he can only explain the catch with the confession that he is in the presence of One who does what a sinner cannot do.
Revelation flashes like lightning over the night sea but instruction grinds on like a stretch in prison, a harrowing process that compels him to search his soul and confront all the doubt and fear that fester there. He will bellow like a young bull of his faithfulness to his Lord. When he has a chance to prove it, he will scurry away like a startled chicken.
In the end, he will return to the faith he betrayed, but not because he draws on a well of courage that had gone untapped. Far from it; his Lord heals him by extracting from him the threefold affirmation that wipes away his threefold denial.
After that happens, St. Peter thunders the name that is above all names. In the second chapter of Acts, we find a lion preaching ferociously to a multitude that might arise and tear him to pieces. He indicts them for crucifying the One who was both Lord and Christ.
Beaten and imprisoned, he never wavers. Tradition tells us he chose to be crucified upside-down so as to suffer a death crueler than his Lord’s. Might we all be as faithful as St. Peter.
Now think of the progression of his faith as we turn back to the ichthus. The Greek word for “fish” begins with an iota, our I, standing for Inssous. That’s easy enough. Next comes chi, our ch, which represents Christos, which translates the Hebrew masshiah. Inssous is the Messiah who is the Christ.
Then follows theta, or th, for Theou, the possessive form of Theos, God, which shows up in English words such as “theology” and “theophany.” Next is upsilon, our u, for uios, son. Finally we have swtnr. Savior.
Put together, it goes like this: “Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior.” Now, look at the unfolding of St. Peter’s faith. He sees the Lord first as Jesus, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth. Then He is the Christ, or Messiah.
This is probably the recognition that comes to Peter when Jesus calls him as an apostle in our lesson in St. Luke 5. But that word was more fluid in St. Peter’s day than in ours.
The Old Testament applies the term “Messiah” to various prophets, priests and kings. Usually those kings are regents of Israel, but Isaiah calls Cyrus, the pagan king of Persia, “Messiah.”
The word refers to an “anointed one,” set apart for God’s purpose. And so Cyrus is, because he will fulfill that purpose by sending Israel back from Babylon to the land of promise.
Next, St. Peter recognizes Jesus the Christ as God’s Son: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Anyone who can restore life to the dead must surely have come from God, the giver of life.
But it is only after the Lord’s resurrection and ascension that he and the other apostles awaken to the truth that Jesus is the Suffering Servant whom Isaiah foretold, the Savior who would give His life to remove the blight of sin and the plague of death from the world.
The ichthus spells out the order in which Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior reveals Himself to His apostles.
At last they know Him as the Living Word, the One who imaged the Father perfectly and returned to Him after He completed His work on earth. They walked with Him for three years; finally, after His departure, they know Him for who He is.
Their witness is the promise of the Hebrew Bible, an intimate relationship with the incarnate Lord and the coming in power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Our witness is the Holy Spirit and all of Scripture.
Some say, “If only I could see Jesus . . .” But God does not leave His image-bearers spiritual paupers. The poor in spirit have wealth beyond measure in the Holy Spirit and the word.
Like the five brothers of the rich man in the Lazarus story who would not believe if one returned from the afterlife to warn them, many today would spurn the Lord if He came back to show them the nail holes in His hands and feet.
So the ichthus represents more than a secret sign. It shows us the blossoming of the apostles’ apprehension of who this carpenter’s son – and a carpenter Himself – truly is.
Now, I pose the question: Would a fisherman instruct a carpenter on how to build a trestle?
The fishermen have come in from their fruitless day’s work and are washing their nets. Jesus gets into a boat and asks Simon Peter to put out a little way so that all in the crowd might hear Him. When He has finished, He tells Peter to go back out and lower his nets again.
In his reply, Peter refers to Him as “Master.” The Greek word, used nowhere in the New Testament outside St. Luke’s gospel, designates anyone in authority.
Peter complains that they have been out all night, the best time to fish, and caught nothing. But as any master sergeant will tell you, agreement is not necessary for obedience.
After the miraculous catch, Peter falls at Jesus’ knees and calls Him “Lord.” This word may be no more than a term of polite address, but in the Greek translation of the Old Testament it refers consistently to God.
One theologian observed that it is the Master who must be obeyed, the Lord whose holiness causes moral anguish in the sinner.
So it has done in Peter.
Obedience alone is difficult enough. A little boy cooped up in a hospital for far longer than he liked built a reputation as a pint-sized wrecking crew. A volunteer thought she had the answer. Standing at his bedside, she said, “If you behave yourself all week, the next time I come I’ll give you a dime.”
When she returned a week later, she stood in the same spot and said, “I’m not going to ask the doctors and nurses. I’m asking you, ‘Do you deserve the dime?’”
After a small pause, a small voice crept out from between the sheets: “Gimme a penny.”
Revelation is bearing down on Peter at the gallop. He is the first to see this Jesus of Nazareth as someone far different from him and his mates, from all the self-proclaimed prophets and messiahs who traipse through Palestine, from anyone he had ever known or dreamed of knowing.
This much is certain: At the time Jesus calls him, He has seen the Father work through this “Anointed One.”
James and John, Peter’s partners, are equally astonished, but the Lord addresses Peter only when He says, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men.” At that point, all of them “forsook all and followed Him.”
These are the first disciples. The disciple’s reward is to have God. His work and his joy are to represent God. According to his Lord’s commandment to go forth and make disciples, the disciple becomes a discipler. The 12 apostles are the first of them.
In the Old Testament, any who find themselves in God’s presence shudder with fear, but Jesus immediately puts Peter and the others at ease. From now on, He tells them, they will catch men. They have stumbled into the climax of life on earth; they are followers of Immanuel, God With Us.
“All things come of thee, O Lord.” We say it. Do we mean it? In that moment, the truth of those words breaks over Peter like the light of dawn over the eastern cliffs. A poor fisherman had nothing, an empty net. Now he has treasure in his boat.
Yet seeing afresh through sanctified eyes, he knows everything for what it is: nothing. This great gift shrivels into a mud puddle in the presence of the Giver. To have Him is to have everything. Peter forsakes his fish and takes up the ichthus. It’s more than a bumper sticker.
Catch a fish, clean a fish. Catch a man, clean a man.
Catch a fish, sell a fish. Catch a man, buy back a man from Satan.
Catch a fish, eat a meal. Catch a man, join the Lord at His eternal banquet.
The superabundant haul of fish points toward the haul of men they will “catch.” Men who are fishers become fishers of men. The word for “catch” adorns the story. It is familiar in Greek literature but used only twice in the New Testament. When applied to men, it means “take alive.”
The other occurrence is in 2 Timothy 2, where St. Paul instructs his disciple Timothy in the way of service to his Lord. If the servant corrects the wayward ones with gentleness, God may grant them repentance that brings them to the truth.
The goal is that these sinners come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil after having been “taken captive by him to do his will.” In the passive voice, “taken captive” is the same word St. Luke uses for “catch.”
Satan has caught them not to kill them but to shanghai them into his service. Jesus wants to catch men to enlist them in making more disciples who will lead ever more who are made in God’s image into the loving embrace of the Father in heaven.
And the Lord has already given His first apostles an object lesson in making disciples. As He sat in the boat before the crowd, He taught them.
These three have taken their best catch ever, so many fish that the weight of them almost sends their boats to the bottom – but they abandon all to follow Him. They enter a new life. Having forsaken all, they may now gain all.
It is their obedience, this radical commitment, that marks them as disciples. The fisherman Peter accepts the commandment of the carpenter Jesus. The Carpenter is his Messiah.
A few others have followed this path. Amy Carmichael was an Irishwoman who suffered from a nerve disease that drove her to bed for weeks at a time. She went to India and founded an orphanage; she served there for 55 years without a furlough. And she wrote “Make Me Thy Fuel”:
From prayer that asks that I may be
Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,
From fearing when I should aspire,
From faltering when I should climb higher,
From silken self, O Captain, free
Thy soldier who would follow Thee.
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakening,
Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified,
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.
Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay,
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire,
Let me not sink to be a clod:
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian, grew up in a wealthy family. When he decided to follow the Lord, like St. Peter and the other apostles, he went all in. In “The Cost of Discipleship,” he assailed “cheap grace,” the disease that had infected the church in his place and time --and ours.
It makes God a cuddly uncle who forgives us anything and everything and makes no demands on us.
Bonhoeffer stayed the course. Shortly before the end of World War II, the Nazis executed him for plotting to eliminate Hitler. Bonhoeffer died to free millions from the horror Hitler rained down on them. He paid the cost of discipleship.
These are heroes of our faith who abandoned all to abandon self to discipleship. But the philosopher Dallas Willard found something he believes carries a higher price than discipleship.
“Nondiscipleship,” Willard wrote, “costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil.
“In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring . . . The cross-shaped yoke of Christ is after all an instrument of liberation and power to those who live in it with him and learn the meekness and lowliness of heart that brings rest for the soul . . .
“The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane.”
In his final chapter, St. John gives us the other bookend. Peter and some other disciples go fishing again and again they come up empty. Their resurrected Lord stands on the shore but they do not recognize Him. They require revelation anew.
He provides another miraculous catch and they regain their senses. They cook fish on a fire He has laid and eat their last meal with Him.
Jesus drags out of Peter the threefold confession of his love for his Lord, restoring the one who has denied Him three times. He concludes with the words, “Follow Me.” He has told His disciple to “feed My lambs” and “feed My sheep.” In other words, to carry on the making of disciples the Lord has begun. A true disciple can be no other than a discipler.
At the first miraculous catch, they followed Him like a troupe of jesters in a traveling salvation show. Now, as He prepares to depart from them, He commands them, “Follow Me.” He has taught them. Soon, the final piece will fall into place. They will know Jesus Christ Son of God as Savior.
When revelation flashed, Peter was humbled. Going on, he has grumbled and bumbled and stumbled. Now, because of what God has done, he will sing out true as the gospel the glory of the risen Savior. Again I say, may we all be as faithful as St. Peter.
The poor in spirit have forsaken all. Jesus’ work on earth is finished; theirs is just beginning. So is yours and mine. Amen.
.
.