KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 May
Breakfast with Jesus?!
The accounts of the Resurrection all turn on the idea of how we come to know and show us that process of a dawning awareness in which we come to see things in a completely new way that illuminates the past and sets us in motion.
Here Christ appears to the disciples on the beach while they are fishing. It begins with the disciples not recognising Jesus, among them Peter, who it seems has returned to his former labor as a fisherman. But they had “caught nothing” until Jesus bids them cast their net on the other side of the boat wherein they enclose a great number of fishes, indeed, one hundred and fifty three without the net breaking! Only then does Jesus say, “come and have breakfast!”
Why 153 and why the unbroken net? Simply another fish story? Exaggerating the size and number of the fish caught? Mathematicians might note that 153 is the triangular number of seventeen but its symbolic meaning is open to interpretation. The Early Church Fathers in various imaginative ways see the number and the broken net as symbolizing the totality of salvation, namely, all who are enclosed in the unbroken net of the Gospel. This leads to a barbecue breakfast on the beach with Jesus. Not so much the last supper as the first breakfast! A strong affirmation of the bodily reality of our spiritual lives, we might say. And another image of our being gathered to God out of our confusions and disappointments. But fish? Well, in the later Christian imaginary, Christians identified themselves by the sign of the fish. Fish in Greek forms an acrostic: ICTHUS (ιχθυς), meaning “Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour,” a prayer and an expression of faith.
All of this suggests 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 forget 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”. They are a critical feature of all religions. Something invisible and spiritual is made known through what is material and visible. This is the counter to our gnostic and technological flights from the world and the body as if it were evil.
