Easter 3 C - John 21:1-19

 

John 21:1-19

By the third appearance the disciples have gone back to what they know. “I’m going fishing,” is what you do when your world has been turned upside down and inside out and even though you’ve come through it without a scratch you retreat to the security and comfort of the familiar. The rhythm of casting out and hauling in, casting out and hauling in, casting out and hauling in, even if you don’t catch anything, is simple and satisfying and safe. But Jesus just can’t leave them alone and appearing again turns the catch into an object lesson. Cast on the other side even though you’ve been fishing all night with nothing to show for it. Recognition comes with the catch. John wants us to know there were 153 large fish but the more important detail is that the net isn’t torn which is just another sign that what you should expect in the new reality is the unexpected. After breakfast it’s Jesus who goes fishing for the answer that is really a confession. “You know I love you” three times on the beach reverses “I do not know the man” three times in the courtyard and the curses Peter called down upon himself are lifted with the charge to feed and tend and feed. His fishing days are over and what will become familiar in following Jesus will be suffering and death. God still interrupts the familiar of our everyday with the extraordinary in chance encounters that after the fact are encounters clearly not by chance. God enters our everyday in the help and healing of one enduring with another sorrow and suffering so that courage is renewed, hope restored. We see God present in the flock that feeds and tends those whose welcome place of worship has been torn apart by dissension and strife. In all of this we are invited along with Peter to stretch out our hands and be bound to something beyond our own doing and in that experience even the familiar is always something new.

The Feast of the Passion Year C - Philippians 2:5-11

Philippians 2:5-11

The operative word in having "the mind of Christ" is "let" as in allow or permit. Or maybe a better way to think of it is to welcome or invite the mind of Christ to "dwell in you richly". (Colossians 3:16) It is not something that comes naturally to us as our minds resist being conformed to a way of thinking that would willingly let go of power (especially equality with God) for the sake of those who are always seeking to exploit even the illusion of power. It is out of vain ambition that our minds are occupied with all manner of self serving thoughts and subsequently destructive ways of being. We even think of God that way and imagine that after Jesus went back to wherever he came from he never again did such a foolish thing as empty himself. But if the mind of Christ reveals the mind of God then the exaltation of Jesus is to be continually emptied. I don't mean that Jesus is crucified again and again but that the power that God in Christ wields is the infinite capacity to love which never proceeds from a position of power. So God in Christ is emptied in order to be one with humanity, hell bent on filling itself up, in the Divine hope that we would grow weary of our futile way of being and let the mind of Christ do the thinking.

The Feast of the Passion Year C - Isaiah 50:4-9

 Isaiah 50:4-9

The word that sustains the weary is that the teacher himself was wearied by beatings, insult and spitting. Wakened by the word, "the Lord God will be my help at the break of the day" the student who is at the same time the teacher set his face like flint and gave his back to the whip, his head to thorns, his hands and feet to nail. The suffering and sorrow of God is the word for those who are wearied by life contending against them, confronted by inconsistency, struck by down by grief, insulted by trouble. The Lord will be my help at the break of day because the Lord was broken for all my days. To waken to this word despite all that would weary the soul and crush the spirit is to be opened to the distant song of vindication that is always near. It is not an easy answer, a simple solution, a wish fulfillment. It is a Word that inhabits flesh and blood, yours and mine, for when one is wearied by weeping and too tired to sing, when the difference between giving up and continuing on hangs in the balance, we become for each other in shared sorrow and suffering the Word that sustains until the day when all weariness will be a thing of the past.