May 5, 2019 “Redemption” – John 21:1-19

John 21:1-19
“Redemption”
May 5, 2019 – Third Sunday of Easter

I got my frying pan back on Thursday. A week ago we went to Portland for our conference annual meeting and stayed in an AirBnB. When we rushed out Saturday morning trying to get to the meeting on time, I left my favorite cast iron frying pan sitting on the stove in the place where we stayed. I didn’t even notice until I reached for it at home Monday morning to scramble eggs. My heart sank. I thought it was gone for good.

Fortunately our host was gracious and helpful and immediately boxed it up and took it to UPS. It got here overnight and is back where it belongs next to our stove at home. What might have turned out to be an expensive and annoying oversight was redeemed.

If I can feel as happy as I do about getting an old cooking utensil back, think about God’s pleasure in the redemption and restoration of men, women, boys and girls whom He has created. You and I and everyone else on this planet have been made to be enjoyed, cherished and loved by God. I paid a little postage to our host to get our frying pan back. God paid the life of Jesus Christ His Son to get you and me back.

The post-Easter fishing trip at the end of John’s Gospel shows us God at work in Jesus, doing His business of redemption with one of His favorite disciples, Peter. That rough, headstrong fisherman had been with Jesus for three years. Jesus’ own heart must have been heavy with how Peter got himself lost in the fearful hours just before the Crucifixion. As predicted, despite protesting unfailing loyalty, Peter denied he even knew Jesus, not once, but three times.

If our Lord operated like some business and government leaders do today, that would have been the end of the story for Peter with Jesus. Peter had gotten frightened and failed. He had been disloyal. Jesus might have just left it that way, left Peter sitting there on the back burner from that point on. He had ten other guys to work with. Why spend more time on such a loser? Why? Because redeeming losers is what Jesus is all about.

You might think that at this point Peter is already making a comeback. After all, he was the first of the male disciples to go in the empty tomb when the women reported it. With all the others he got to see and talk with the Risen Lord himself. Yet our text today shows that Peter who failed so spectacularly still didn’t quite have his head in the game.

As our text opens in verse 1, the disciples have followed the angel’s directions and headed north from Jerusalem to wait for Jesus back in Galilee. But in verse 3, we hear Peter fall back into his usual impatience. He doesn’t like just sitting around. So, in a sentence that warms my own heart, he tells the other disciples, “I am going fishing.” In other words, “Yeah, we’ve seen our dead master come back to life, but He’s taking His sweet time about updating us, so in the meantime we might as well be out on the water.” I know I would have been just like the rest of them, who answered, “We will go with you.”

They fished all night. That’s often a good time to fish, especially when the sun is high and hot during the day. Fish that dove for deep, dark water in the sunlight may swim nearer the surface in the evening and be easier to catch. But not that night. Verse 3 ends telling us that Peter and his friends caught nothing. Which sets the scene for what happens next.

In verse 4 Jesus comes walking along the beach early that morning. The boat was too far out for the disciples to recognize Him, but He knew exactly what was going on with them. According to verse 5, He called out, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” In a moment of rare honesty for fisherman, they simply answered “No.”

Jesus then told them in verse 6 to try casting their “net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” That in itself is not quite as odd as it sounds. A spotter from the shore can sometimes see down into the water in a way a fisherman can’t see close up. When I go fly-fishing, I will often scout the water from shore before wading in. In any case, the disciples took the advice of this man who seemed a stranger to them, and cast their nets once again on the right.

As Yogi Berra said, it was “déjà vu all over again” for those disciples. That net filled with so many fish they couldn’t even haul it into the boat. Verse 7 tells us it was John himself, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” who realized first what it meant. He said to Peter, “It is the Lord!”

That recognition happened because of what you can read in Luke chapter 5. Their very first encounter with Jesus, three years earlier, had been just like that. Jesus had gotten into Simon Peter’s boat that morning, preached a sermon to a crowd on shore, and then told Peter to push out and let down the nets. Simon protested, saying they had fished all night, there was no point. But he did what Jesus said and the nets filled to overflowing. Now here it was happening again, as John saw right away.

Just like when they went to the tomb on Easter, John got there first, but then Peter jumped ahead, by throwing on his clothes and jumping out of the boat. He swam in to meet Jesus leaving the other guys to drag that mess of fish into the boat, row it back to shore, and beach it.

Verse 9 sets the stage for the next episode in this story. Jesus has breakfast going there on the beach, a fire with fish cooking and bread. But perfectly fresh fish is better, so in verse 10 Jesus told them to bring some of what they had just caught. Peter was eager to please and ran back to climb in the boat and haul in the net full of fish. Here verse 11 gives us a fascinating detail, about which I’ve preached more than once a whole sermon. They counted the fish! Not just an estimate, not “about a gross” or “a hundred and a half,” but exactly “a hundred fifty-three of them.”

That’s fishermen for you. We love fish statistics, not just how many, but how big, and what size hook and weight line we caught them on, what the water temperature was and what time of day. So these fellows temporarily ignored Jesus their Lord, risen from the dead, and stood around and counted and marveled at how many fish were in that net and that it hadn’t broken. Jesus had to break in on them in verse 12 saying, “Come and have breakfast.” As John explains, they were close enough now to see Him and recognize His voice, so they didn’t need or at least didn’t dare ask who He was.

Jesus gave them bread and fish to eat, which may have been another little déjà vu reminder of a miraculous meal a whole crowd experienced in the same vicinity a couple years before. Verse 14 tells us this was just the third time so far Jesus had appeared to them. As we heard last week, the first two times were a week apart in Jerusalem, on Easter and then the Sunday after. But now it had been awhile. They had gone home to Galilee. They may have thought they would not see Him again. But Jesus was there, and He was especially interested in Peter.

In verse 15, the focus changes, gets more serious. Jesus begins a conversation with Peter, by asking the question, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He either meant, “Do you love me more than all this fishing business, more than the boats and the nets and the water and all that?” or He meant, “Do you love me more than these other disciples do?”

Either way, Peter immediately understood that Jesus was looking for a reaffirmation of his personal commitment. Jesus was looking him in the eye and asking for a declaration of his love. Peter responded like you or I might respond to a spouse or a child who asked us that question, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”

You may have heard sermons or read books which make a big deal out of the fact that Jesus used one word for love while Peter used a different, supposedly weaker word. So Jesus was supposed to be asking something like, “Do you love me with all your heart?” and Peter replied with something like “Yes, you know we’re friends.” But forget all that.

In John’s Gospel, those two words for love are interchangeable. John just likes to vary his language a bit to make it sound more interesting. Right here in the same passage, as Jesus responds to Peter and tells him what He wants him to do, Jesus uses different words for another thought, “Feed my lambs,” “Tend my sheep,” Feed my sheep.” The identical idea is expressed with slightly different words each time. It’s the same with the two words for love. It’s pointless to look for subtle differences on which to build an interpretation.

The point, the point, the point is that Jesus asked Peter three times. That’s what shook the fisherman down to the core of his soul. Verse 17 says Peter felt hurt when asked the third time if he loved Jesus. Three was a number he remembered very well, because three times was how often Peter denied Jesus on the night before the Crucifixion. After declaring publicly three times that he didn’t know Jesus, Peter was now being given the opportunity to declare publicly three times that he not only knew but loved Jesus.

This conversation was Jesus’ therapy for Peter, the disciple’s redemption after the trauma and guilt of his denials. I’ve always liked the explanation that when Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” “these” referred to the boats, the nets, the fish, the sun on the water, the wind and the waves and the whole happy trade of being a fisherman. Jesus supposedly asked Peter whether he would give up this occupation he loves in favor of Jesus, in favor of a mission to bring the Gospel to the world, to be a “fisher of men” as the old translations of Matthew and Mark put it.

The problem is that we’ve already seen that Peter loves Jesus more than his fishing. He’s the one who jumped in the water to leave the boat and the fish and everything behind to get to shore when he heard that Jesus was there. It was perfectly clear that Peter loved his Lord more than those, more than being a fisherman.

No, what Jesus asked Peter was whether he had gotten over the pride and self-importance Peter expressed just before Jesus was arrested and crucified. Here in John, Peter said before the arrest that he would lay down his life for Jesus. In Matthew 26:14 Peter said that even if all the other disciples were to desert Jesus, he would not. But of course all the Gospels tell us that Peter saved his own life and did desert Jesus by denying that he even knew Him. It’s one of the saddest moments in the whole Good Friday story.

That’s why Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?,” asked him three times, “Do you love me?” He asked if Peter still thought he was superior to the others, if he still imagined his love for Jesus was better and more faithful. He asked if Peter would still boast that he loved Jesus more than all the other disciples did.

Jesus gave Peter the opportunity in that breakfast conversation to turn a corner in his soul, to truly lay down the importance of his own life. So this time Peter didn’t claim to love Jesus more than anyone else. He just quietly and humbly said that Jesus already knew the answer. Peter did love him. If there is anything to the idea that different words for love here mean anything, then it’s just this. Rather than boast that his love was greater than any other, Peter only claimed the humblest and simplest love for Jesus. And Jesus thought that was good.

When Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved Him, it was not to draw out some profound and deep affirmation using the word for the highest form of love. It was to show Peter who denied Him three times that He was three times forgiven. It didn’t really matter how many times Peter had failed in his love, the redeeming love of Jesus was ready to accept him back, to restore him to his position as Jesus’ disciple, as Jesus’ friend.

Part of healing and redemption when we’ve failed, when our spirits have been broken is to regain a sense of purpose, a reason to go on living. That’s what Jesus offered to Peter and offers to anyone who loves Him. Each time Peter said he loved Jesus, Jesus told him to do the same work that Jesus came to do, to care for sheep.

As we will hear in next week’s Gospel lesson from John 10, Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the one who lays down His life for the sheep, who calls them and gives them eternal life. Jesus redeemed Peter by inviting him to do that same shepherd work, to love God’s sheep, God’s people, like Jesus Himself loves them.

That is how Jesus would like to redeem each one of us, to redeem you. Wherever you may find yourself in relation to Jesus, He is simply asking, “Do you love me?” He is inviting you not to compare yourself with other followers of Jesus and not to agonize over how poor your love for Him may have been in the past. He is simply asking now, at this moment, do you love Him and will you join Him in loving those around you?

As that conversation over breakfast on the beach shows us, even the faintest affirmation, even the most halting and humble “yes” to Jesus is enough. He will redeem and restore you, and then include you in what He is doing in this world, caring for sheep, for lambs who need the Shepherd.

When you come to the Table this morning, let it be a redeeming moment of breakfast with Jesus for you today. As you remember via the bread and then the cup that He gave His body and blood on the Cross for you, hear Him saying, “Do you love me?” And when you eat and drink here with Him, let it be your own, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.” Then go out and look for the sheep He is asking you to love and tend for Him.

Amen.