Day: April 19, 2015

“Come and have breakfast”

An odd text for Evensong, I suppose, but then time and sense often seem no more when we are dealing with matters of eternity. It is one of the more delightful resurrection appearances of Jesus. It takes place on the seashore, “by the sea of Tiberias.” It is, I suppose, a fish story but one which goes to the heart of the proclamation of the Resurrection. St. John’s breakfast-with-Jesus-on-the-beach story is “the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.”

Two themes present themselves. First, that the Resurrection entails “the resurrection of the understanding” and secondly, that the Resurrection involves “the reconstitution of the human community” into fellowship with God after the disarray and disintegration of our humanity, individually and collectively, in the pageant of our betrayals of God made so heartrendingly visible in Holy Week.

In Luke’s Gospel, too, Jesus appears to the disciples and asks them whether they have any food before opening to them the Scriptures. “They give him a piece of broiled fish, and of an honey-comb.” Here Jesus-on-the-beach has a charcoal fire and bids them “bring some of the fish that you have caught”. “Come and have breakfast” means come and have bread and barbecued fish.

What’s with the fish, broiled or barbecued? Nothing, really, other than the remarkable ordinariness of the extraordinary thing. Nothing, really, except an aspect of the reality of the idea of the Resurrection. That, of course, is everything. The Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, themselves the fons et origo of the Gospels have a simplicity and unadorned directness about them. They compel, I think, by the quality of their quietly restrained narrative that remains remarkably understated.

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“For ye were as sheep going astray”

Sometimes known as Good Shepherd Sunday, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is set before us today as part of the Easter season. It is, most tellingly, an image that connects the Passion and the Resurrection. As Isaiah says in a passage that belongs to our Good Friday liturgies, “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Peter picks up on this image in this morning’s epistle. “For ye were as sheep going astray,” he says, “but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls,” on the one hand, echoing Isaiah, and, on the other hand, seeing the image of sheep and Shepherd through the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

God as the Shepherd of his people is a powerful Old Testament image. It is further intensified and made visible in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. He goes “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us and with us, an image which in the Passion and Resurrection takes on a greater depth of meaning and suggests the greater gathering of our lives to God.

Christ identifies himself with the Old Testament images of God as the Shepherd of his people. “I am,” he says, “the Good Shepherd.” He makes explicit what that means. In other words, he teaches us who he is for us in this image. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,” he says. We are the sheep; he is the shepherd. What that means is signaled in the events of the Passion recalled for us in 1 Peter. “Christ also suffered for us” and in his suffering we find ways to face the sufferings of our own lives, sufferings that arise from our own sins and follies or sufferings that happen to us as a consequence of the actions of others, sufferings that in some sense or another belong to the general disorder and disarray of our humanity, like sheep going astray, indeed.

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