John 21:
1-19
Third Sunday after Easter, 14th April 2013
This is such
a visual text, John 21, with Jesus appearing along the lake shore, the disciples
hard at work fishing, the risen Jesus beside a charcoal fire cooking for his
friends. "Come, have some
breakfast." They're surprised to see him; happy to see him again. They gather around the fire and eat and talk
and enjoy one another's company, rich fellowship, deep sharing. The story is so real, concrete, and tactile. You can almost smell the fish as it cooks on
the fire and taste the warm bread.
The author of the gospel is
masterful in his attention to detail, which helps provide a sense of realism to
it all. This attention to detail is more
than just a literary device, more than a tool used to craft of good story. It is a tool of course, but John's attention
to detail serves a theological end. Everything
in John's gospel carries a meaning; almost every word carries significance and
points us toward a deeper reading of the story, something seemingly
insignificant is central to the story and its meaning—something so seemingly
insignificant such as charcoal.
Did you see/hear the reference to
charcoal in John 21? Jesus was cooking
around a charcoal fire. It stands
out. Why charcoal? You have to go to a Bible concordance to find
the answer. Look up every place where the word charcoal is used: three
times. Once in Proverbs (26:21), and
twice here in John's gospel. Where
precisely in the gospel? We heard it on
Maundy Thursday: "Now the slaves
and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were
standing round it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and
warming himself" (John 18:18). It's
around this same charcoal fire that Peter denied having anything to do with
Jesus, not once, not twice, but three times.
And so we are around another fire
and after breakfast Jesus gets down to business. It's time to talk—to talk with Simon
Peter. "Simon, son of John, do you
love me more than these?"—meaning, more than the other disciples? "Do you love me?" Not once, he asked, not twice, but three
times, each time giving Peter an opportunity for confession as if to undo each statement
of denial. Jesus never says to Peter,
"Hey, why did you deny me?"
Or, "why did you abandon me back when I was on the
cross?" Jesus doesn't return to
judge or condemn, but ultimately to restore the broken relationship, for Peter
to know that he's been forgiven, that he's still loved by Jesus, and given an
opportunity to begin again. Yet, each
time Jesus asks the question, Peter gets a little frustrated and testy. Peter pushes back a little. Was it out of guilt and shame? Jesus never mentions the denial, but Peter
knows it. Jesus knows. Peter knows.
If you love
me, then "feed my sheep."
"Follow me."
John's Gospel was written for his
community of faith, it's a text that tells the story about Jesus; but it’s more
than history, it's written to encourage the people in his church to participate in Jesus' story and move the story along. Participate in the story and we discover that
there's a bit of Peter in all of us. We
are all like Peter to one degree or another.
We have all denied Jesus; we all deny Jesus; and we all will continue to
deny Jesus—because following him is difficult.
Yes, the denial produces guilt and shame in us. But it needs to be stressed here that guilt
and shame are rarely ever the best ways to encourage someone to do something.
We might choose to do something out of guilt and shame, but there are other
ways, healthier ways to get us to act, to follow. Jesus never says anything nor does anything
to engender guilt or shame. Nothing.
Instead, he moves the conversation toward something else, toward
love. And he asks Peter—asks us—Do you
love me?
It's love
that motivated Jesus' life. It's a love
for God that defined Jesus' ministry.
It's his love for humanity that called him and sent him and put him at
odds with the religious and political authorities of his day. It's love that led him to a cross. And it's love that brought him back to his
friends because he wanted his friends to know he was—and is—about love.
It's all
about love. It's that simple,
really. And, so difficult. That's the Gospel. Even the Beatles get it: "All you need is love. Love is all you need." But it's easy to sing about love—and there
are countless songs that prove this point.
Putting love in action, that's something else.
Do you love
me?
What's striking here is that
throughout Jesus' ministry he rarely talks about love in the abstract. He doesn’t talk about love in general. It's
not an idea. And it's not necessarily an
emotion or feeling. Ideas are
fickle. Emotions and feelings come and
go. In the Christian experience love is
always particular and love is always a choice.
We choose to love—even when it doesn't make any sense to, maybe
especially in those times. We choose to
love—even when we don't feel like it.
It's always love in action. It's
concrete and real. It's embodied. Feeding people. Healing people. Forgiving people. Raising the dead. Washing the dusty, sweaty, smelly feet of his
disciples—there's nothing abstract about this.
Before Jesus died he said, "I give you a new commandment, that you
love one another” (John 13:34). And here
after his death and resurrection, the love continues. Jesus says to Peter—and to us – feed my
sheep. If you love me, feed my sheep.
Who are the sheep? The disciples? Followers of Jesus? Members of the church? Every one created in the image of God? It depends upon how narrow or broad we wish
to be. How big is this flock? It's tough
to say. Personally, I would rather be broad than narrow, if in being narrow I
unintentionally exclude one of the sheep.
But should we even be concerned with who is in and who is out of the
sheepfold? We're called to love our
neighbors, and as Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) knew, the neighbor is anyone
who stands before us or beside us.[1] Maybe if we treated the people we meet as if
they’re already part of the
sheepfold, even if right now they don't see themselves as bearing the image of
God, they might in time come to see themselves as a fellow sheep.
Feed my sheep,
Jesus said. Take care of them. Take care
of them because at times we're not too smart, we get lost and lose our way, we make
poor decisions and we’re stubborn, we get tangled in thorn bushes and stuck in
ravines, we get lulled away oh so easily.
And make sure they're fed and watered.
Feed my sheep. No one should go hungry, no one should go thirsty.
It's not surprising that the Church
has been engaged in feeding and healing people, providing shelter, establishing
hospitals and hospices for a long time.
We’ve been at this for centuries - soup kitchens, breadlines, food
pantries. We've been helping to provide clean drinking water. When I served in Newton Presbytery, in New
Jersey, we had a partnership with Nairobi Presbytery in Kenya. One of our projects there was providing fresh
water to people living in remote villages near Kibwezi, several hours east of
Nairobi. We built an enormous tank to
collect the water and then we installed a ceramic pipeline underground that
brought fresh, clean drinking water from the tank to thousands of people in the
villages. (I
remember climbing up the ladder and standing on top of the tank and looking out
toward all the villages in the bush.) It was built underground so that the
elephants couldn't crush the pipes when they came barreling through the jungle
obliterating everything in their wake.
Feed my sheep. If the sheepfold is large, then this means
continuously reaching out toward people; there’s a job for us to do. The Church
will never go out of business. Feed my sheep informs the work of the church and
how we do ministry. This is really important
for us to note because the nature of ministry is changing in the United
States. The models for ministry are rapidly
changing. We are in the midst of one of the most significant moments of
transition in the history of the Church.
For
the last forty years or more the American Protestant church has been operating
with what is known as a consumer church
model, shaped by the consumerist bent of the American populace. In the consumer church members says, "I
go to church." The Church is seen
as a dispenser of religious goods and services—engaging worship, good
preaching, inspiring music, Christian education, adult education programs,
exciting youth ministry. People go to church to be "fed," to
have their needs met through quality programs and to have their
seminary-trained professionals teach their children about God. "I go to church." I go to be fed. And if I'm not getting fed, if the preaching
isn't good or the music uninspiring or if my kids are bored with church school,
if I’m not getting what I want I’ll withdraw my financial support, stop
pledging, I will shop around for a different church where I can get my needs met. In a consumer church model it's all about
"I." The customer has to be
pleased. If not, she'll take her custom
elsewhere.
There’s nothing biblically or
theologically sound in any of this. And,
to be honest, it’s not particularly faithful.
For the last ten years or so theologians
and biblical scholars have been seriously—and correctly—critiquing this model.[2] They're trying to bring us back toward a
biblical model for the church, a model known as missional. Mission means,
literally, to be sent. A missional
church views itself as a people sent on a mission. Members do not say, "I go to
church." We say, "I am the
church." “We are the church.” Together, we are a people sent. We’re a people who gather together as a community
for worship, for rich fellowship; we’re committed to that community of people no
matter what; a community that’s not pastor or program focused. We’re a people engaged in community
engagement; we hear the teaching from the Word in worship, we self-feed ourselves
throughout the week, in order to be equipped to go out into the world feeding
the people of God wherever they are.
The consumer model looks inward. The missional model is always looking outward. The consumer model is individualistic. The missional model is community
oriented. The consumer model assumes
that we just sit here doing our churchy thing and wait for people to flock to
us, to be fed here—if they're convinced that we're worth coming to (or coming
back to), all of which requires a lot of self-promotion.
The
missional model knows we need to go out and meet God's people where they are,
beyond the walls of the sanctuary, to love and care and feed them—not to get
them to come to church or become members, but simply to serve, because that's
what we do as God’s people, that's how we witness God's love, that's how it's
embodied in the world. Becoming a member
is secondary.
It's
the missional model that's bringing the church back to its roots. It's the missional model that's best suited
for our post-modern, post-Christian, post-denominational, post-Protestant-majority
world—for we have to remember again what it means to be a disciple of Christ,
what Christ calls us to do in the world, if we're going to be able to feed the
sheep today and really follow.
How do we translate "feed my
sheep" for today's world? For the church,
for ministry? Perhaps one word might
help us here: compassion. In The Secret Revelation of John, an ancient
text discovered in 1945, a text that had not been seen since at least 180 AD,
maybe earlier, unearthed in Nag Hammadi, in the deserts of Egypt, Jesus says to
John, "Arise and remember that you are the one who has heard, and follow
your root, which is I, the compassionate."[3] Jesus the
compassionate. When Jesus says,
"feed my sheep," he's saying to Peter, be compassionate, extend
compassion to my people. If you love me,
Jesus says, then feed my sheep, be like me the compassionate one, and live in
such a way that when they people see you, they know you're compassionate, part
of the sheepfold; live in such a way toward others so that they know that they,
too, are sheep, that they too are the objects of God's compassion.
Just imagine what a difference this would
have upon the life of the Church, upon us as a community. Just imagine what a difference this would
have upon the world. May it be so.
[1] Søren Kierkegaard,
Works of Love (1847).
[2] For a
fuller exposition of a missional ecclesiology see Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in
North America (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1998).
[3] Karen L.
King, The Secret Revelation of John
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006).s
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