(Audio)
Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.”
They said to him, “We also will come with you.”
There comes a point for most of us when we shift back from the joy and vigor of the Easter season back to business as usual. It isn't so much that we consciously choose to do so. It is rather that there seems to be no other direction open to us. We are at am impasse, and the old ways are all we know.
So they went out and got into the boat,
but that night they caught nothing.
The thing about the Easter experience is that it reveals to us that our old ways were insufficient. This seemed to satisfy us then. But now are hearts and minds have been awakened to a new and better hope. Hearts that have seen the risen LORD find themselves less able to pretend that anything else in this world can satisfy them.
Does the resurrection mean that we cease to do the jobs we did before? Does it mean that we are all to be full time professional religious? Not necessarily. Even many of them continue to work in the world in a variety of ways. It is rather that the resurrection is meant to shine new light on everything and change even those things that were old and familiar, filling them with new possibilities.
Jesus said to them, “Children, have you caught anything to eat?”
They answered him, “No.”
So he said to them, “Cast the net over the right side of the boat
and you will find something.”
So they cast it, and were not able to pull it in
because of the number of fish.
Jesus did not angrily ask his disciples what they were thinking, tell them to stop fishing, and to get about some more religious work. Instead, he revealed himself to them in the very midst of their ordinary lives, which were in fact no longer ordinary simply by the fact of his presence.
And none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?”
because they realized it was the Lord.
The LORD reveals himself to us so that we can have certainty about who he is. These individual moments of revelation are crowned and activated by the grace of Pentecost. We begin to see the symmetry, this hidden pattern that unites each revelation.
The Holy Spirit brings them to fulfillment by filling the gaps between them in our souls, changing them from isolated incidents into something that is the very motivating principle of our being, a new certainty, a new fearlessness in following him.
If we are being examined today
about a good deed done to a cripple,
namely, by what means he was saved,
then all of you and all the people of Israel should know
that it was in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean
whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead;
in his name this man stands before you healed.
He is the stone rejected by you, the builders,
which has become the cornerstone.
There is no salvation through anyone else,
nor is there any other name under heaven
given to the human race by which we are to be saved.
The LORD is risen! He wants us to know it so deeply that every aspect of our lives is transformed, even things that seem outside of the scope of our Christian walk. He wants us to believe it strongly enough that are not only not afraid to witness to it, but unable to hold ourselves back from doing so. It is this holy assurance that makes the difference when we tell people that there is "no salvation through anyone else". Without it, we sound like bigots. With it, we are offering the love we ourselves have received.
This is the day the LORD has made;
let us be glad and rejoice in it.
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