I want to say from the outset that I know next to nothing about fishing. When one of my best friends puts on his waders, the fish network for hundreds of miles around lights up and sends the alarm to all the schools, freshwater and saltwater: “Mark is coming, swim for your lives!” But whenever I go out with worm and hook, every piscatorial bearer of fin and gill yawns in abject boredom. With me, they know they’ve nothing to fear.
But I do know what “fish stories” are. Fish stories are so far-fetched they are difficult to believe. Sometimes, though, fish stories turn out to be true.
The first Easter had come, dawning on a quiet morning. The Risen Lord appeared to his overwhelmed and frightened disciples in the Upper Room and proved to them that he wasn’t a ghost. Then he came back a week later and appeared again, this time to visit Thomas, who just couldn’t come around to the reality that his Crucified Friend was now back, scars and all.
Some time after these mind bending, reality-twisting reunions and revelations, Simon Peter announced to six of his fellow disciples “I’m going fishing.” Just like that. And his friends said “We’re coming too.” So they all got into a boat and went fishing.
This is refreshingly human. I can’t think of another example, in the storytelling of that time, that matches such simple humble honesty. World literature until that moment cared only for the emotions of superhuman heroes (like Odysseus and Aeneas). No one cared about the feelings of common fishermen. But the Gospel story did. It recounted that after Peter denied that he was friends with Jesus, he “broke down and wept bitterly.”
As far as I can tell, this was the first time in world literature that attention was paid to the tears of a common man.
So here, after all the grief and trauma of the arrest in the garden, the kangaroo court trial, the mocking torture and a gruesome crucifixion that lasted for six horrible hours … after days of paranoia that the religious police were coming after them and then hearing some women saying that they had seen Jesus again … after weeping and then not believing your eyes when you do see him standing there in news that’s too good to be true but true nonetheless.
There he was, clearly not a ghost, despite the locked doors and barred windows. Freer than a bird in flight.
So, what’s a regular guy supposed to do when his heart’s been wrenched and dragged through hell and then rocketed up to heaven? Well, go fishing. Makes perfect sense. So they set out on the Sea of Galilee and let down their nets.
And caught nothing. But when the day was breaking, they heard a voice from shore echoing through the morning fog: “Have you caught anything?” “No!” Peter and his friends answered in obvious frustration. Then the voice became more familiar. “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you’ll find some.”
Memory bells must have started to ring in the minds of those fishermen. Didn’t something like this happen three years ago? “Remember?” they must have been thinking, “after he preached from the boat, after we had fished all night and caught nothing? Now someone is telling us to do the same thing?”
But this time, the voice from the shore said to put their nets down on the other side. Now, as I’ve said before, I’m no fisherman at all, but I do think there’s something at least a little fishy about this advice. I mean, no matter which side of the boat you put down your nets from, it’s still the same water underneath.
So they did. And the nets – which this time did not break – were so full they couldn’t haul them on board. John, who was one of the seven fishermen, counted the fish – 153 tilapia to be exact. It finally dawned upon him to call out “It’s the Lord!” Peter jumped for joy into the water and waded ashore.
There they found their once-dead friend sitting very much alive in front of a charcoal fire, grilling fish and setting out bread. “Have some breakfast,” he said, as he “took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish” (John 21:13). Memory bells rang again about another Eucharistic moment some time back, at the feeding of the five thousand, another fish and bread story.
Poor Peter. If I were him, I’d have been exhausted in a PTSD-like frame of mind. He was not just listening to a fish story. He was caught inside one. The biggest one of all. “He was dead,” Peter thought, dead in the worst way possible. Yet, here he was, shattering the hard walls of unbelievability. Here he was in all risen reality, standing in my head which had been locked up tight like the Upper Room with the windows shut. I had been so brainwashed by death. At every disappointment, at every tragic dashing of hopes and failed breaking of promises, I had become more and more convinced of the unbreakable wall of death.
Yet, here He is, at breakfast on the shore of forever, by the sea of “all things are possible,” the ocean of divine love that will never die. He had broken through the wall, and had come back.
The addiction to the dark night of death is the most powerful addiction of all. The only antidote is the morning Son.
“Do you love Me, Peter?” He asked me. “Yes, I love You” – even though I betrayed You, even though I fell apart when I was afraid and depressed and angry at You for going so far into the night. “Yes, Lord, You know that I love You” – even though I denied You like a coward. Not once, but three times.
He asked the question three times, a reversal of each denial. So the trauma was healed, the broken heart was thus mended, just like the nets that had always needed mended before but now no more. Peter and his fishing friends fished for fish no more, but for a much, much bigger catch. Actually turning the dark world upside down to do so.
Because of a Fish Story that turned out to be true.
There’s been a lot of dark nightfall of late, yes? I’ll be the first to tell you, from personal experience, like the tears of a common fisherman, that being brainwashed by death is a powerful thing. Every discouragement, every disappointment, every tragedy and loss make that dark wall of death seem all the colder, all the higher, all the more permanent.
But I’ll also tell you this. In this morning fog of after catching nothing all night long there’s a voice on shore, calling out in the breaking dawn. It is the Risen Voice, saying
“Go fish.”
Christ Is Risen!