A Reflection for Friday in the Octave of Easter
You can find today’s readings here.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples for the third time after being raised from the dead. The story goes that some time after Jesus’ resurrection, a group of his disciples go fishing on the Sea of Tiberias, but they don’t catch anything all night. Just after dawn, a stranger calls out from the shore: “Children, have you caught anything to eat?” “No,” they reply, and the stranger tells the disciples to cast the net over the right side of the boat.
If I were a disciple, I might already be pretty frustrated after fishing for hours with nothing to show for it, watching the sun rise in that taunting way it does after a sleepless night. Then, some stranger calls out with unsolicited (and seemingly obvious) advice. Of course, the right side of the boat, why hadn’t we thought of that? Peter, a fisherman by trade, might be especially peeved. Who is this guy to tell me how to do my job?
Nevertheless, they cast the net again and when they do, it is so full of fish that they cannot haul it back into the boat.
Surely, this miracle should be the impetus for the disciples to recognize Jesus. We know that many of them have already encountered the Risen Christ not long before this moment. Surely it would click for Peter, who knew Christ so intimately during his ministry and who saw his empty tomb. Jesus had once washed his feet—wouldn’t Peter at least recognize him?
Nope. Ever slow on the uptake, Peter only recognizes Jesus after a nudge from the disciple whom Jesus loved: “It is the Lord!”
At this point, Peter jumps into the water to swim ahead to Jesus while the other disciples take the boat and with it, the fish, toward the shore, finding little help from the actual fisherman among them. They climb out to meet Jesus, who has a charcoal fire set up on the shore, but he sends them back: “Bring some of the fish you just caught.” And, jumping back into the water, Peter goes to retrieve the fish.
The whole episode makes me wonder if the Risen Christ, in all his abundant, perfect love, ever rolled his eyes at the disciples, if he ever had a friendly laugh at their human follies. You, my closest friends, don’t recognize me the THIRD time I appear to you after RISING from the DEAD, then I perform a whole MIRACLE for you people, and you can’t even bring back the fish for our breakfast?
Jesus serves the disciples breakfast afterward, and I imagine the scene is filled with laughter.
In my eyes, today’s Gospel is of a genre we might be hesitant to recognize in Scripture: comedy. It seems almost ridiculous that the disciples do not recognize Christ a third time. But like most comedy, it is funny because it speaks to a broader truth: The world is suffused with the glory of the risen Christ, but in our human weakness, we often struggle to recognize his presence made manifest in our everyday lives.
We are never so far from an encounter with the Risen Lord, even when the only thing on our minds is how we will get our next meal. Especially for Peter, nothing would have been more ordinary than a night like this spent fishing with his friends. Maybe Peter didn’t recognize Jesus because he was already back in the slog of his routine; maybe it was all a bit too normal.
Only days after the Resurrection, we see the disciples begin to confront this great challenge of Christian life: Just because we know intellectually that Christ is risen does not mean that we allow that great promise to animate our lives. How quickly do we drop the joy and wonder of Easter Sunday to go back to our regular day-to-day?
But maybe if, like Peter, we can listen to those nudges around us and move past our petty, quotidian frustrations, we might recognize God’s presence, too, even after the Easter glow has seemingly lost its luster. We never know when Christ might call out to us. Will we be attentive enough to hear, even on our weary, sleepless nights? Will we have the eyes to recognize the Risen Lord in the strangers we encounter, the poor, the marginalized? And when we do hear God’s call, will we have the courage to jump head-first into the proverbial water so that we may encounter him?
