Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter
So many people do not REALLY have faith in Christ or in his resurrection. They see Jesus as a nice guy who said good things like "Love each other" but the idea that Jesus rose bodily from the dead seems both a figment of imagination as well as an unnecessary part of the gospel story. Today's scriptures ask us to reconsider the significance of Jesus' bodily resurrection, though.
To see this, we have to first remember that today's gospel story (John 21:15-19) takes place in the context of the larger story of Jesus meeting his disciples on the beach and cooking them breakfast. We read that story on the Friday of the first week of Easter. (John 21:1-14) The shoreline where Jesus met his disciples is, not coincidentally, the place where he first called them to follow him and be his disciples. In this encounter on the beach after the resurrection, Jesus once again takes them fishing, and then afterward cooks up a nice, hot breakfast of grilled fish. People have made much of the fact that Jesus is eating fish with his disciples after his resurrection, with good reason. Jesus’ body, post-resurrection, is not some ghostly figment of the disciples’ imagination. John points out that Jesus eats fish because it means Jesus has a body, and that body is real.
We read this in the first week of Easter, partly to begin to come to grips with what a bodily resurrection might mean. Partly it indicates that Jesus is Lord, no mere human, worthy of our worship. But it also gives a window into why people might bother to follow Jesus. If Jesus were some mere ghost, I have serious doubts that Christianity would have spread as far, or convicted as many people as it has. As a case in point: during this Easter season we've been reading about the exploits of the apostle Paul. It is always, always important to remember that Paul was not remotely interested in being Christian, but actively persecuted them. Yet he had a conversion, an encounter with the living Christ, which leads him to change his life around completely.
So it is no accident that in today's second reading, we are reminded of this complete conversion (which we also read earlier this Easter season). Paul back in Jersualem, among the very same people he had once led, in persecutions against the Christians! Paul is charged with inciting violence, disturbing the peace, and desecrating the temple and has been imprisoned for two years already. He was first charged with these crimes when the previous governor, Felix, was in charge. Festus (and Felix before him) are in charge of this largely Jewish province, and they want to keep the peace: that is their job. And so they do not release Paul, because they want to make nice with their constituents (see verse 9). Much like Pontius Pilate, Festus wants to wash his hands of this pesky problem and asks Paul to go to Jerusalem to face charges. But Paul refuses, saying: " I have committed no crime against the Jews, as you very well know. If I have committed a crime or done anything deserving death, I do not seek to escape the death penalty; but if there is no substance to the charges they are bringing against me, then no one has the right to hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar." (vv. 10-11)
"I do not seek to escape the death penalty," Paul says. This proclamation, too, makes little sense if Jesus was simply a great person to emulate. Why bother dying for someone who says platitudes that anyone might say? But since Paul is convinced, utterly, of Jesus' life, death AND bodily resurrection, and that God is doing something radically new in this world by his death and resurrection,he's willing to submit to the death penalty. Paul will eventually die for his faith: in later chapters, Paul will continue to Rome, first having survived a ship wreck and then a venomous snake bite, healing the sick as he goes, before finally arriving in the city. He remains under house arrest for two more years, and he evangelizes every chance he can get. And ultimately he will receive the death penalty, but at the hands of the Romans.
So we come full circle, back to where we began, with breakfast on the beach. To some extent, these past eight weeks of Easter have been about coming to terms with a difficult idea, that Jesus rose from the dead, and that his death and resurrection mean something. Jesus' life is far, far more radical than we might have understood if he had merely walked around and said things that sounded good, but died an ordinary death.
So now, as we look ahead to Pentecost and the end of the Easter season, we find that our meditations on Jesus' life, death and resurrection are supposed to effect our lives too, just as they affected Paul's. We are meant to go out and be disciples, too. We cannot stay on the beach forever, for there is work to do, and the Spirit calls us.
- Jana M. Bennett