Peter - Exposed & Free.

John 21:1-19

 

One has to feel for Peter in today’s gospel reading. What with all h has been through in the last few days, the  betrayal of Jesus, his failures to live up to his promise to standby Jesus, the empty tomb and the great disappointment  at the seeming failure of a great and powerful dream, he is now out on the boat and his nets are coming up empty.

 

Can’t even do what he has always done, catch fish.

 

Everything has fallen apart. No thing remains as it was and his life is all out of shape and there is no inkling that it will improve. The way the fishing is going, he is going to starve to death any way, so why worry about the Jews or the Romans?

 

The little aside John gives us, when Peter and the disciples recognise the presence of Jesus is very revealing; “When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea.”

 

‘For he was naked” -  why was he naked? Was it the preferred practice of the fisherman? What is it about boys and water that they want to take their clothes off and jump in? Were they all naked? It seems it was only Peter, as there is no reference to anybody else getting dressed and diving in?

 

And anyhow, isn’t this backwards? Wouldn’t you take your clothes off to dive in, not put them back on? I mean, it seems way more sensible to me, not to get your clothes wet early in the morning when there is little sun to dry you out.

 

When they get to the shore, a charcoal fire, Jesus standing near it organising a meal, confronts Peter. Jesus breaks into people’s lives around the disarming practice of sharing a meal. Throughout the gospels time and again Jesus breaks in, confronts, reveals himself and exposes others for who they are around a meal. The last supper, the feeding of the five thousand, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the various meals for the disciples, Mary and Martha and the leaders of the synagogue and more. The meal is central to Jesus self revelation and it is no wonder the Eucharist sits front and centre in our Eucharist, for it is here we are examined and transformed into the people available to the Spirit of God.

 

Peter was naked because he had been exposed by the events of the last week. All his talking big, super confidence and his knowledge of Jesus had been exposed by his failing to stand when it counted most. We find ourselves stripped and exposed for all the world to see when what we say and profess to know and be is confronted by the brutality of life. We may know all the formulas, understand all the terminology, know the truth of the scriptures, but is worthless if, when faced by life, we slip into the culture and practice of those who have no faith.

 

Peter was exposed to those around him in a way that left no doubt as to his ordinariness, his sameness with everyone else. He was no better or worse than those he was with, but He was no better than them. And they knew it and went fishing with him all the same.

 

Mateship, friendship, companionship can be the most powerful indicator of who we are. We are identified by those who see our faults and remain faithful to us. These are the people who don’t point the finger, pick out our faults, remind us of our failures. They simply go fishing with us. 

 

It is interesting that in the encounter with Jesus when Jesus asks him if he loves him, the final term for love Jesus uses is philios. Frank L. Crouch writes: "When Jesus himself clarifies the highest form of agapē, he does so in terms of philios. Love for friends is no second class love here."

 

Love of friends, the love which remains despite one failure after another, is the love Jesus calls Peter back to around a charcoal fire, just like the one around which he denied Jesus the third time. This is no deep and mystical spiritual love, just the love of one human being for another. A love without limits, without expectations, a love that simply asks to be replicated in our relationships with others. Peter was given no great mission. All he was asked to do was to love others in a way that would feed them in the midst of personal doubt, pain, oppression, doubt and fear.

 

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy.”  More from Merton: “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”.

 

Peter may have been hurt because Jesus confronts him and forces him to be realistic, not to over promise and to remain always true to himself and to others. He may have been hurt because no-one likes to be reminded of their failures, yet Jesus is not reminding him to shame him, only recasting that moment in the light of a new day so Peter can move forward in friendship with both Jesus and those around him. 

The conversation finishes, in between mouthfuls of fish, with the simple call to “Follow me”. When we come to the meal with Jesus, we are not brought to our knees by our failures, but are welcomed and encouraged hear the call to follow. Not to be perfect, not to be punished, not to be failure free but to simply follow. To go out into the world showing friendship to self and others in a way which validates life in the midst of death. Yes, we may find ourselves naked and undone as Peter did, it was in that state he was met by Jesus, welcomed in deep friendship and encouraged to go forward into the world as a friend.

 

As we come today to this Eucharist let us do so confident in the love of Christ, our Eternal brother and our friend, taking up the challenge to ‘follow’. Amen 

Doubting Thomas - Living in a Blurred World.

John 20:19-31

Today’s Gospel recounts the story of Thomas, known popularly, although not accurately, as Doubting Thomas. Whatever the origins of this story, it is both a challenging and hopeful story, one which asks some important questions and leaves the door chocked open by the naked doubt of Thomas. 

Michael Palmer suggests, "The rise of Donald Trump in American politics speaks to the depth and influential nature of our national and international fear. We're a people afraid, and that fear has trapped us. Like the disciples in those early moments after Jesus' death, we've locked ourselves in an upper room, waiting for the other shoe to drop."

Like the disciples who locked themselves away in fear of reprisals and the unwanted knock on the door, western society is in the midst of a similar phenomenon. The daily reports of violent actions by extremists such as the bombing of the Easter festivities in a park in Pakistan or the recent bombings in Yemen, Istanbul and Brussels fill us full of fear. The reports of violence in suburbs just like ours here in Melbourne cause us to double lock doors and think twice about going certain places at certain times. As for the church, clergy are now questioning the practice of wearing clergy collars when they are just ducking down the street in case people respond inappropriately to them.

Fear of others and doubts about our place in the world is indeed trapping us and keeping us reticent and impotent. How do we react in a world gone mad (if it has indeed gone mad)? How do we live out our convictions and faith in a world that appears to be hostile and dismissive? Do we lock ourselves away and become a hidden sect, secretive but safe?

In some sense that is what the disciples were doing. They were going for safety first. Even the occasion of Jesus revealing himself as being alive and present didn’t reassure them. Yes, they had seen Jesus but he had (apparently) to walk though a locked door. When he left the door remained locked. There was no surge of confidence and hope to drive them out into the streets. They remained where they were, out of sight and out of danger.

Thomas on the other hand wasn’t in the room with them. He hadn’t gone for the safety in numbers or in hiding idea. We don’t know where he was, he may have been back home, thinking about what had happened and getting on with life. There is no suggestion he was less fearful or less conscious of the risks he faced, yet he got on with life.

When told about Jesus being ‘alive’ he responded in a pragmatic and logical manner. There had been many stories and rumours going around. They started on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found it empty. Then Peter and the other disciple had a look and the rumours abounded. Not too much the gossip afoot in the general populace. For Thomas, perhaps, there was just too much variation in the story, too much too be asked to believe with it any evidence.

It wasn’t doubt in the sense he dismissed it out of hand, but a doubt needing experience to substantiate and verify.

That’s understandable, isn’t it? People tell you how great abseiling, bungee jumping, the Grand Canyon, Alaska or Victoria Falls, Sea World, Dream World or Movie World is but you will always have doubts its quite as good as they say it is until you go. You have to experience it for yourself.

Thomas is no different. He wasn’t there the first time Jesus appeared and there was just too much to believe without something to make it real. In any case, God came in the form of Jesus to experience life and all its challenges so that we could be understood and given the opportunity to experience what God is like. 

Nancy Rockwell writes "Thomas is a Greek name, and it means twin, though his twin, if he had one, never appears, and some suggest we are, each of us, his twin."

An interesting thought but one worth pondering in a number of ways:

How is what we believe influenced by our experience? We often speak as if we all believe the same thing and we all understand God and the Bible and faith in its purest and true form. Yet is it so? Or do we look at God and the Bible and our faith through the filter of our own personal experience? Are we not influenced by what we know, knowing by the experience we have lived though underpinned by our understanding?

People often say I don’t believe in God. I ask them to draw me a picture of the God they don’t believe in. Without question they draw a God I don’t believe in but when we start to discuss that drawing we uncover experiences that have given birth to such an understanding – Sunday School teaching, the disconnect between what a significant other has said they believed and what they did, treatment at the hands of religious people, violence in the world or the death of innocents – have all come together to give birth to the God they draw.

People of faith, you and I are no different. We say we believe in an unadulterated form and think we have it correct but what we know believe is the product of our life experiences as well as the religious teaching we have received in whatever form that comes. Like Thomas, there will be times when what we have experienced is forgotten and we get caught up in life and our lives, other things become more important. And that’s ok. 

In the midst of life there will be moments bringing us back to  the faith we affirm  and evaluate it against our experience and begin to refine it so that it is real for us. This won’t be a faith separate from the community, for as Thomas found out, he shares the experience of Jesus with others, in his case the disciples, in our case, the church. 

Thomas was no denier of the faith, simply one who had to experience it for him-self. In so doing he verified the truth of Jesus and went on to live out his faith in the world, although we know little about how he did that. 

Today, we are asked to live with what we don’t know and what seems beyond us, our doubts and to reflect on experiences, allowing them to lead us deep into the mystery of faith. Amen.