The following is the sermon preached by Sarah Decker at St. Joseph's on the third Sunday of Easter, 18 April 2010. The text is John 21:1-19.The Gospel according to John records three different days during which the resurrected Christ appears to his followers. On the first day, Jesus appears initially to Mary Magdalene and then later in the evening to his disciples, minus Thomas. A week later he appears to his disciples, including Thomas. Today’s gospel lesson describes Jesus’ third and final resurrection appearance in the fourth gospel.
The scene is the Sea of Tiberias, where Peter, John, and five other disciples went out at night into a boat hoping to catch some fish, but caught nothing. Just as the sun comes up Jesus (not recognized by the disciples at this point) calls to them from the shore, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” After they answer, “No,” Jesus instructs them to cast their net on the right side of the boat, saying that they will find fish there. Obeying the strange fishing advisor, the disciples cast their net on the right side of the boat and are overwhelmed by a net bulging, but not breaking, with 153 large fish. Perhaps after thinking something like, “Wait a minute… ,” John says to Peter, “It is the Lord!” Peter, who was naked, throws on some clothes, jumps into the sea, and starts swimming to Jesus while the other disciples drag the net of full of fish to land. On the beach the disciples find Jesus preparing breakfast, and after Peter contributes some of their fresh miracle fish, they all eat together around a charcoal fire. And none of them ask Jesus, “Who are you?,” because they know it is him. When they are finished with breakfast, Jesus addresses Peter. He asks him three times, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Three times Peter answers ‘yes,’ and three times Jesus follows Peter’s response with an injunction to feed or tend his sheep.
In this conversation with Peter, Jesus tells us how we ought to love him: by tenderly caring for our neighbor. Jesus reminds Peter of the new commandment he gave earlier in the gospel, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (13:34) and repeated a chapter later with the added declaration, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (15:13) Indeed, Jesus, who calls himself the Good Shepherd who lays his life down for the sheep, tells Peter in our gospel lesson that the love he thrice declares will lead to his death. Jesus says to Peter, “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” And John comments that Jesus “said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.” The expression, “stretch our your hands” likely refers to Peter’s crucifixion, and the language of being led unwillingly with a belt evokes the image of a lamb being led to the slaughter. Therefore, just as Jesus is not only called the Shepherd, but is also proclaimed by the Baptist to be, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” so too Peter is charged to imitate the love of Christ by caring for Christ’s sheep as a shepherd and by laying down his life for them as a lamb led to the slaughter.
When we hear the Risen Christ’s words to Peter and his call to him, “Follow me,” we also should hear a call to discipleship that is self-sacrificial love—laying down our lives for one another. This may indeed mean our physical death, as in the cases of the well-known modern martyrs Martin Luther King Jr. and Oscar Romero, as well as the four American church women who, like Romero, took up the cause of the poor in El Salvador despite the Salvadoran government’s persistent persecution of those working for justice. The day in 1980 before Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan were martyred, at the closing liturgy of an assembly of Maryknoll Sisters, Ita Ford read from one of Romero’s homilies given soon before his assassination earlier that year. Ford read, "Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive - and to be found dead." The next day the women were captured by members of the Salvadoran military, were tortured, raped, and murdered because of their love for the poor and refugees of El Salvador. Many Christians, with names known and unknown, have loved Christ in care for their neighbor unto physical death. This is a present reality.
But Jesus not only offered himself upon the cross for us, but also led a life that was characterized by self-sacrificial love, beginning with the incarnation of the Word of God who deigned to take on human flesh and to live among those who would reject him, and plainly expressed in Jesus’ washing of his disciples feet. Thus should our whole lives be marked by self-renunciating love. This may look like changing our plans in order to share a meal with someone hungry, getting a bad night of sleep in order not to cut short a conversation with a discouraged colleague, not purchasing the clothes we like the most because they were made in sweat shops, doing the nasty or boring cleaning tasks at home, suppressing our pride by withholding “I told you sos,” or even letting the other person eyeing the last box of Nature Valley Oat and Dark Chocolate granola bars at Target take home the object of desire.
Maybe each one of these examples does not represent something all that difficult, especially if we are just shooting to accomplish one such self-renunciatory act per day (perhaps with a Benjamin Franklin style check-list). Yet, for them to be mere examples of a way of life that is continual self-sacrifice or the sort of life that leads to the cross is very difficult, perhaps impossible. Even Peter, who zealously declared to Christ earlier in the Gospel of John that he would go to his death for him, could not so much as admit to knowing him when push came to shove.
Yet it is this very same Peter, after his three-fold denial, that Jesus commands to tend his sheep. And it is to this same Peter that Jesus tells that he will in fact lay down his life to glorify God. What is different about this Peter? Sure, he is humbled and repentant. But what gives him the strength this time to make good on his promise of devotion to Jesus? How is it that he is able to go to his death as a follower of Christ?
According to Saint Augustine, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ that makes all the difference for Peter. He writes, “[Peter] would do, when strengthened by [Jesus’] resurrection, what in his weakness he promised prematurely.” No longer, Augustine maintains, does Peter have a false estimate of himself, but instead has the strength of heart to claim Christ graciously bestowed upon him and the courage to face death because the Lord’s resurrection illustrates the life to come.
Indeed, prior to the resurrection, when Jesus foretells his betrayal and departure, Peter questions him, “Lord, where are you going?” and Jesus replies, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.” This is precisely when Peter makes his false claim to faithfulness, saying, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” Peter did not yet understand that Jesus had to die for him before he could die for Jesus.
Jesus did die for Peter, and for us, and he rose from the grave three days later. And from his fullness, manifested by the resurrection, we receive, as the prologue to the gospel says, grace upon grace. When promising his disciples the Holy Spirit, Jesus declares, “because I live, you also will live.” And on the first day of his post-resurrection appearances, Jesus breathes on his disciples and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Jesus’ resurrection from the dead means for us, as Jesus says in the Good Shepherd discourse, abundant life, and it means the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Thus it is the grace of the power of the resurrection that takes Peter from an overzealous coward with mere good intentions to one who, like Jesus, tends the sheep and ultimately lays down his life for them. Furthermore, what transformed Peter transforms us. Because of the resurrection, it is not silliness for us to aim to love one another as Christ loved us, by living lives of self-sacrifice. We have cause to hope that our lives may be shaped by self-gift such that if called upon to die for the Shepherd and the sheep for whom he shed his blood we would remain faithful to the end. We can pray and receive the Eucharist with the anticipation that God has provided the grace needed for our isolated efforts to love self-sacrificially to grow into habits and a way of life. We can answer Jesus’ call, “Follow me,” with the confidence that we, like Peter, have received the grace of the power of the resurrection. Amen.
