5 April 2024 - all things through Christ

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.”

They said to him, “We also will come with you.”

There wasn't anything necessarily sinful about turning to their former occupation. It wasn't that they had set their hand to the plow but were now turning back entirely to their former lives. For it was lawful for them to sustain themselves by their own occupation even as apostles and evangelists just as Paul provided for himself by his trade as a tentmaker. Yet, though licit, we notice in them in certain eagerness to return to the mundane and quotidian that seems a bit over eager or excessive. It is as though, perhaps unsurprisingly, the reality of the resurrection was too much to handle or to take in all at once and so they needed a breather to decompress. There was a new and elevated reality which they were called to enter, but they did not seem entirely to inhabit it.

So they went out and got into the boat,

but that night they caught nothing.

Their attempt to return to familiar things was not met with a fortuitous result. Rather they seemed to experience a concrete instance of Jesus' insistence that, "apart from me you can do nothing" (see John 15:5). Yes, it was lawful and licit for them to work. But in the new world of the resurrection their was nothing that was meant to be outside of the auspices of Jesus. Even ordinary reality was meant to be infused with his presence. One was never meant to turn so hard back toward the ordinary that the presence of Jesus on the shore would become unrecognizable. For when the presence of Jesus was recognized even the apparently ordinary became suffused with meaning and miracles.

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.

So the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord.”

In life, there are times when we feel as though we have worked all night and yet caught nothing. Perhaps we set to the task assuming it was something beneath Jesus' interest or unworthy of his notice. But the simple fact is that Jesus wants us to bring every aspect of our lives to him. When we do, he can put all of them into the service of his Kingdom. We can begin to recognize the promise of the universality of the Kingdom in the simple ways in which Jesus himself provides for us. He desires to remind us, even at breakfast, of his desire to be the one who truly nourishes us.

Jesus said to them, “Come, have breakfast.”

Through whatever comprises the work of our lives, the proverbial fishing, Jesus can teach us to trust and recognize himself as present there in order that he himself might make of us fishers of women and men.

Chris Tomlin - Resurrection Power