KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 1 May
Come and have breakfast!
The accounts of the Resurrection in John’s Gospel are most intriguing. They provide much in the way of specific detail. They all turn on the idea of how we come to know and show us that process of a dawning awareness about how we come to see things in a completely new way that illumines the past and sets us in motion.
First, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb seeking a body and encounters the Risen Christ whom she mistakes as the gardener! She is told by Christ not to touch but to go and proclaim to the others that “I am ascending to my father and your father, to my God and your God,” words which echo Ruth’s sense of the universality of God as the counter to a merely tribal or personal attachment to a deity or principle. Hence, don’t cling to me, Jesus is saying to her. She is to know him in a new and more universal way that doesn’t negate the personal but enlarges it.
Second, Christ appears behind closed doors and makes himself known to the disciples and especially Thomas, to whom he says “touch and see!” In other words, the mystery of the Resurrection is made known to us in ways that correspond to the different ways of our knowing, ways that honour our individuality and embodied experiences. Peace and forgiveness flow out of the Resurrection of Christ; they are the forms of the Resurrection in us even in the places and circumstances of fear and uncertainty. It is peace and forgiveness now and not by and by.
Third, Christ appears to the disciples on the beach while they are fishing. This last scene is particularly intriguing. It begins with the disciples not recognising Jesus who bids them cast their net on the other side of the boat where they enclose a great number of fishes, indeed, one hundred and fifty three. An awful amount of ink has been spilt in various speculations about the significance of this very precise number. For mathematicians it holds interest as the triangular number of seventeen but what is its symbolic meaning remains unclear. When they do recognise him, he invites them to breakfast; a barbecue on the beach with Jesus. “Come and have breakfast!”