Scripture: John 21: 4-19
I’m continuing today to reflect on the stories of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and his encounters with the disciples. These stories are all part of the larger Easter story, and to tell you the truth, they are more interesting to me, and they speak to me more, than the actual stories of the discovery of the empty tomb. This is where the resurrection makes a difference, where Jesus encounters people as a living presence and where as a result those people—Peter, Mary, biblical disciples, you, me—are sent out into the world with things they need to do. Without these stories—forgive me, I don’t mean to sound too harsh about the Easter story itself—but without these post-resurrection stories, the stories about the first Easter morning and the discovery of the empty tomb don’t amount to a hill of beans. Last week we dealt with the story of Thomas, which appears in the gospel of John. This week I thought I’d just follow that story through as it appears in John. It’s a story I always find suggestive.
It’s suggestive, for one thing, because it speaks of beginnings and new beginnings—and there’s always some way I can relate to that, either directly in my own life or in my prayers for other people. This is a story we are all familiar with in one way or another about coming out on the other side of some very difficult time and taking up life again—as I say something I have experienced and that I often pray for others.
As we pick up the story for this morning, the disciples have gone back to Galilee, back to where their adventure with Jesus started, back to the place they called home, where they had been born, where they had grown up, took up the fishing business, until one day they were called away from it by Jesus. I didn’t plan it this way, but this is a story that is really quite appropriate for a day when we have people from hospice with us, because the disciples, in my reading of the story, are still grieving, even though they have presumably heard the news of the resurrection and have had other experiences with the risen Jesus around Jerusalem. Still, they are grieving in the sense of being overwhelmed by his loss and wondering what life is going to be like without their teacher and friend, the kind of reality that is part of the daily experience of Mary and Faith and Pam, and that is often enough part of experience for all of us. So the disciples have gone home…to be in familiar surroundings maybe, to be among loved ones, to be in a place where the memories are good, and to try to take up life again.
So that’s what this story is about. New life. It takes place at daybreak. It talks about the barrenness the disciples feel, symbolized by their not catching any fish, and how it turns to excitement and abundance as Jesus appears and their nets are filled with fish. It talks about the joy of a meal that is shared again among friends, a meal that is sometimes referred to as the “first breakfast”, as opposed to the Last Supper, and thus a meal that symbolizes beginnings and not endings. It talks about a process in which the disciples were involved in remembering things, but not just remembering where they came from, things that had happened, reminiscences, all good and human things to do, but also remembering, gradually, who they were and what they were about—not who they had been and what they had been about, but who they still are and what they are still all about and therefore what the future might look like, first of all that there is a future and second what it might look like.
What I see happening in this story is a kind of reorientation of the disciples as to what their lives are to be about now, as Christians. I hear Jesus saying to the disciples: Remember the sharing of meals, not for the sake of nostalgia but because that is who you are. Remember when I called you to follow me, not for the sake of nostalgia but because that is who you are. Remember when I asked you to step out of the boat (take some risks), not for the sake of nostalgic remembering, but because that is who you are. This business of being a Christian is not just about telling people that I, Jesus, was crucified and then raised from the dead. We’re back here in Galilee to remember what we’re about. We’re about feeding, and healing. We’re about maybe swimming toward Jesus (symbolically) or finding him in our midst or knowing ourselves called by him. We’re about gathering around the campfire and we’re about telling stories. We are not simply here to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, though in our own ways we may do that too. All of this is what I hear being said in this story of Jesus and the disciples going home. It is what I hear that story saying to me.
The lessons here can come in the form of clichés. On the other side of death and of grief, there is life, not just for Jesus but for survivors of every description. In every ending there is a new beginning. Every hardship can become an opportunity. Or the cliché the United Church of Christ is using these days: “Never place a period where God has placed a comma,” which is a statement the UCC attributes to Gracie Allen. Sorry for the clichés. They’re not very attractive, not to me, because my own experience tells me that when you’re going through a time of real difficulty, the last thing you want and the last thing that will help is to have clichés thrown at you. Nevertheless, the reason clichés become clichés, at least in some cases, is that there is a truth there that enough people have experienced and tried to express that the same sentiment gets said over and over and so truth gets turned into a cliché. But there is also truth there, lingering in the background. However, we want to say that truth, the disciples were experiencing it, and the story is meant, I believe, to point us toward those truths in our own lives. So that is one whole area in which the passage speaks to me, speaks to me about the rhythm of people who know that loss is real and grief is real but so is God, and who with God’s help discover that loss is part of a larger story, that the story, any one person’s story, and the story we are all involved in together, that the story includes loss, but it does not end with loss.
And then there is this business of Jesus telling Peter to feed his sheep. The story is suggestive to me here in lots of ways, but always because it asks me to think about what it means to feed—and to be fed. Part of me says this is not a very hard thing to grasp. Feed my sheep in one sense is pretty simple. If we know something about friendship, if we know something about love, if we know something about compassion, if we know something about what it means to walk with someone through a difficult time, then we know more than something about what Jesus means by telling us to “feed my sheep”. Granted that what we know of such things is not all there is to know, and granted that our actions are never perfect and never enough, still following Jesus’ mandate to “feed his sheep” may require of us nothing more than being attentive, on just a basic human level, to the people around us, the world around us, and what our own hearts and spirits call us to.
But of course that notion of being attentive is not one-dimensional. When Jesus says “feed my people”, I hear him saying that in a literal kind of way, that where there are people who don’t have enough to eat, we need to respond in some way. I hear him saying also that there are other kinds of needs and other kinds of feeding to be done. I hear him saying: feed those who are hungry because they are lacking in food or money or power or self-respect or dignity or fair treatment or basic recognition of their humanity. Feed my people, in my hearing of it, means all those things and more. It means responding compassionately in a one to one kind of way to people who are in need. It means being generous and giving in ways that will help people we don’t know. It also means justice, because that too is what people are lacking.
I’ve been feeling the need to say something more than in a brief announcement sort of way, feeling the need to say something ex cathedra if you will, about the living wage campaign that has been going on at UVA. There have been announcements made about it. Mo has collected signatures. There have been prayer concerns raised. I know Hilda has been among the demonstrators at the time some students were arrested. Perhaps others have too. Feed my sheep means direct personal acts of caring, and it means generosity. It means hospice and it means One Great Hour of Sharing and it means the Jefferson Area Food Bank and it means the Living Wage Campaign. Not, in my book, because $9.37 is not a living wage and $10.72 is. Not because $9.37 is evil personified and $10.72 is goodness personified. Not because paying everyone at least $10.72 an hour will end poverty in Charlottesville or in even one household. Not because anyone is really very clear about what we mean by a living wage. But because, as a basic matter of justice, it should be a very high priority for the University of Virginia to raise the wages of its lowest paid workers so as to provide as best they can a decent living to people doing decent and honorable work. I am quite sure in my own mind and heart that they are not doing the best they can by their workers now. And so, while I know that there is room for good people to disagree about such matters, I am compelled by conscience to say that I believe the living wage campaign is also what Jesus means by “feed my sheep”.
But then beyond any specific task, beyond any charitable appeal or summons to justice making, I believe when Jesus says “feed my people”, he is calling us in a more basic sense to what I am going to call an attended way of life. It’s not so much about meeting needs in any simple sense, as in when a person is hungry and you meet their need by giving them food—that kind of feeding. Sometimes we can do that. Sometimes we should do that. But that’s not all there is to it. Sometimes it is not within our power to feed in that way, to satisfy a hunger or meet some need. Sometimes all we can do is share it. Sometimes that’s the most important thing we can do.
We can’t take away the loneliness another person may feel; we can occupy that space with them, share our own loneliness with them. We can’t very often take away the grief another person may feel. In my experience that doesn’t work very well, and if someone is obviously trying to cheer me up, it usually just makes me resolve not to be cheered up. We can share our various griefs with one another. Sometimes what feeds us is paradoxically being filled with a hunger for things that are worth being hungry for. We can only pray to be hungry for justice, hungry for peace, hungry for a beloved community, hungry for God. We can only pray for companions who share that hunger with us. That is some of what feeds me. I think it just may be some of what Jesus meant by feeding too.
Of course we are limited in this kind of feeding too. For one thing we are going to fail as human beings do, for no particular reason other than not being sufficiently thoughtful or attentive. And we can’t attend to everyone, everywhere, all the time. There’s just too much attending to be done, and the attending we are able to do will seem small. And sometimes we need to attend to ourselves, otherwise we won’t be able to attend to anyone else. All that is true. But even with all the disclaimers and qualifications, Jesus’ words continue to address us: feed my people, tend my people, let your living be an attended living. It is not a command so much as it is a promise of a blessing that awaits us. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 30, 2006