1 May, 2022: Third Sunday of Easter, Year C: Acts 5:27-32, 40b-41; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19
Children, have you caught anything to eat?
That’s a game-changing question, because Jesus shifts the emphasis from fishing to earn a living, to providing a meal for his apostles. This is no command to change, it’s a simple question that Jesus trusts will open their perception and understanding. He had told them at the Last Supper, I no longer call you servants but friends; now he addresses them as friends, confident in their capacity to respond.
And couldn’t we say, in the perspective of the Last Supper, that feeding themselves would no longer be self-serving? Wouldn’t it strengthen them for their mission? Couldn’t a meal with the Lord, a meal prepared by the Lord, be that communion shared by Jesus and the Father, offered to all who believe in him? Such a meal could never be self-serving.
I don’t know whether these apostles joined Peter on this fishing trip to pick up where they had left off, because their expectations of Jesus were shattered; or whether they had returned to what they know best to intuitively untangle the web of baffling events in which they had been recently caught.
But when Jesus addresses them they turn a new page in their lives. They could never go back to fishing as a livelihood. But could they ever stop fishing for God’s Kingdom, for lost or wounded or searching souls, whatever the cost or consequences? Could they ever stop plumbing the depths of the Spirit?