“Jesus said to them, “Come have breakfast.” (John 21:12)
Two weeks ago, the Lord called home Mother Angelica, and in
the wake of her death, I was watching some of the highlights of her show. During one particular Bible Study she turned
to her audience and said as only Mother Angelica could: “Have you every noticed
what terrible fishermen the disciples were? They only caught fish when Jesus
was around!” This is totally true as we
hear about another miraculous catch, but this time after the resurrection. There is so much going on in today’s gospel
that I leaned on our dear friend Father Benedict, as he likes to be called
these days (you may also know him as Cardinal Ratzinger or his most famous
name, Pope Benedict XVI). When I entered
seminary, my parent’s gave me a book written by Cardinal Ratzinger and I must
admit that I didn’t know who this cardinal was at the time. Yet I was transfixed by the reflections in
this book, particularly his reflections on today’s gospel which he calls a
morning of Easter joy for the disciples: “The freshness of the morning by the
sea of Galilee gives us some inkling of the morning joy of the emerging Church
in which everything is a matter of departure, beginning, and hope.” Peter decides to go fishing, which brings him
full circle (we’ll come back to this later), and the disciples join him not
knowing they would all have an encounter with the Risen Christ. Our former pope focuses on two aspects of
this narrative: “First is the encounter with Jesus after the long night of
wasted effort. He stands on the bank; he
has passed through the waters of time and death, and now he stands on the bank
of eternity, but it is precisely from there that he sees his own and is with
them. He asks the disciples for something
to eat. This is part of the mystery of
the Risen Christ, of the humility of God:
he asks men and women for their contribution. He needs their assent. The Lord asks us to set out for him. He asks us to become fishers for him.” That is the beauty of our God, the humility
as Pope Emeritus Benedict puts it, that he wants us to cooperate with him in
the work of salvation. Just like he
wanted to the Virgin Mary’s assent, he asks for ours as well as he sends us out
to be fishers of men.
“But then something remarkable happens,” Pope Emeritus Benedict
adds. “When the disciples return Jesus
does not need their fish. He has already
prepared breakfast and now invites the disciples to eat it, he is the host who
provides them with food. The gift is
mysterious but nevertheless not too hard to decipher. The bread is he himself. `I am the bread of
life.’ He is the grain of wheat that dies…Jesus is the bread, and he is also
the fish that for our sake has gone down into the water of death to look for us
there and to find us. This is the lesson
of the breakfast to which Jesus invites his own on the borderline of time and
eternity, the eucharist. `Come and eat,’ he says to us and thus enable us
already to cross the boundary of time and death.” Again, so many things happening in this
gospel: discipleship, gathering of fish, recognition of the Lord, and
ultimately participation in the Divine which we experience every Sunday: the
Eucharist.
I promised I would come back to Peter’s full circle journey,
so here we go. Remember that a few
months ago in the gospel, Jesus used Peter’s boat to teach the crowds and then
asked the reluctant fisherman to put out into deep waters for a catch after
another wasted night. Peter protested
but he obeyed and the result was the first of the miraculous catches. Jesus assured him that he would soon be
fishing men, which brings us to today.
Post-resurrection Peter is emboldened.
He sets out to fish on his own even though it is fruitless, yet Jesus
makes it fruitful. “Follow me,” Jesus
says at the end of the gospel as almost to remind Peter that the fishing will
only be bountiful if he follows in the Lord’s footsteps. This emboldened Peter is seen in the first
reading when he stands up to the Sanhedrin who orders him and the apostles to
stop preaching about Jesus. Peter who
just two weeks ago denied he even knew the Lord and was afraid when we gathered
to hear the gospel on Easter morning, is now standing up to the authorities:
“The God of our ancestors raised Jesus, though you had him killed by hanging
him on a tree (Act 5:30).” So Peter goes
from the cowardice of Good Friday to the boldness of Easter in proclaiming that
Jesus is Lord. This is what love
does. This is what being asked, “Do you
love me?” three times does to a man. It
takes Peter’s denial, his redemption and affirmation of his love for Jesus by
the lake this morning to bring him to the boldness that he exerts in the first
reading where he is willing to risk his life to proclaim the Risen Lord.
This is the boldness that all of us need as we gather to
have breakfast with Jesus this morning.
He needs us. He counts on us. Yet
so many times we have those pre-Resurrection moments like Peter where we deny
that we even know the name of the Lord.
May this breakfast set us down the journey of true discipleship where we
follow Jesus even where we “do not want to go.”
We need the courage, the boldness, and the love that Peter expressed
during that fateful breakfast on the shore.
Let me ask Father Benedict to bring it home for us: “We want to ask the
Lord that he will grant us to be in the shoal of the hundred and fifty-three
fish of his unbroken net. We want to ask
him to grant us to let ourselves be bound and led by him even against our
will. We want to ask him that our eyes
may be opened and that like Peter we recognize him and learn to say, full of
joy: `It is the Lord.’ Amen.”*
*(“Ministers of Your Joy” by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
1988, pp.55-66)
