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!”
More interesting, I think, is how the accounts of the Resurrection bring out a feature common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam as well as other religions and philosophies, a feature which we have forgotten at our peril. It is about a sacramental understanding.
A sacramental understanding has very much to do with the relation between Word and Sacrament and with the way in which the things of the world belong and contribute to our life of faith and to the forms of our participation in the life of God in Christ. In the Christian sense, the sacraments are “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. Yet, in a way, they are a critical feature of all religions. Something invisible and spiritual is made known through what is external and visible.
It is a feature of Judaism that the world reveals the glory of the Lord. A sacramental understanding necessarily connects us to creation. To speak of creation is to speak about a relation to a Creator who by definition is not created. That connection between God and the world and between God and our humanity as created beings is essential to our thinking sacramentally. The things of the world become the vehicles and vessels of our spiritual life. As Paul wonderfully puts it in Romans, the invisible things of God are made known through the visible things of creation. At once, the scriptural ground for what will be known as natural law, it also belongs to a sacramental understanding.
The beginnings of a sacramental understanding are found in the very idea of creation. The world and our humanity within the world are created by and for God. The sacraments right from the outset are a critique of the mistaken idea that in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic view, the world is made for us, a view that has led to no end of destruction and abuse of nature and ourselves. To the contrary we are inescapably part of the created order and exist in a knowing relation to the Creator. The sacraments are about our honouring that relation explicitly. To speak of creation is to speak of the world not as a random accident but as an ordered whole, a cosmos, in which we, too, find our place. The sacraments remind us that the world exists for God.
And it changes us too, literally reconstitutes us in the love of God which is the principle of life and reality. This scene is followed by Jesus asking Peter three times “do you love me?” and commanding him “to feed my sheep.” Peter who betrayed him three times is reconstituted in love. Such is the redemptive power of the Resurrection. It is new life.
In this way, our lives are profoundly sacramental which is to say that in every way our embodied lives in the world are connected to our life in God and to our participation in the divine life. To think sacramentally changes our whole orientation and way of thinking about nature. It counters explicitly our manipulative and destructive relationship to the natural world in which we reduce the world to just stuff which we presume to manipulate to our ends. To think sacramentally recalls us to God and to the world in God. To recover a sacramental understanding of the natural world is our challenge and our necessity. It has very much with how we see and think things, how we know and how we act. It can take very simple forms like having breakfast with Jesus on the beach. We are opened out to his presence through his engagement with the things of the world. Nature becomes sacramental when we are alive to God as Creator and Redeemer.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy