Easter 3: One Hundred and fifty three fish

Our lesson from John this morning takes us back to the beginning. Recall that when Jesus first meets his disciples, several are working as fishermen. He tells them to follow him for he will make them fishers of people rather than merely of fish. In other words, they will become not just his witnesses, but those who go out to share what they see, hear and learn, with others. 

Of course as Jesus’s mission unfolds and we get to know his disciples a little more, we come to realize that Simon Peter is a rather passionate, impulsive man. On the one hand, keen to serve. On the other, fearful of the consequences of his fervent commitment such that he will end up denying Jesus three times, just as Jesus predicts. Jesus, however, doesn’t scold him, punish him, gossip about him, give him the cold shoulder or abandon him. In fact, he simply appears to Peter, in this case for a second time, and gives him a mission: feed my sheep, tend my sheep, feed my sheep. Three times Jesus repeats this. Was this done to reverse Peter’s three denials of knowing Jesus? Maybe. But I’d suggest that there’s something even bigger going on here.

When Jesus shows up, the fishermen have returned to their ways and habits. After all, even having been commissioned by Jesus to share the Gospel, these followers would still need to work. And yet again, they were coming up empty handed. So Jesus tells them to cast their nets out on the right side of the boat and this time, they pull in a lot of fish. At this point they recognize Jesus. Perhaps the recognition had to do with visible sight, but I daresay it’s more likely that the repeated theme of God feeding his people: the feeding of the 5000 with two fish and five loaves, or God feeding his people manna - bread - from heaven in the desert: God’s bringing abundance from nothing or emptiness recounts not just his provision for humans, but his very act of creation and bringing all things to completion. 

For we hear something that might seem a peculiar particular number to those unfamiliar with the OT Scriptures: the disciples, it turns out, collect 153 fish. In Ezekiel 47, we hear about God reconciling his people not merely through the temple, a synagogue or a church, but through himself. He speaks of this reconciliation as, “water flowing through the temple into the sea, flowing with new life,” which should remind people of the river in the Garden of Eden. 

Of this restoration God says to Ezekiel, “Fishermen will stand beside the sea. From Engedi to Eneglaim it will be a place for the spreading of nets. Its fish will be of very many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea.” In Hebrew Gametria, is a system of interpreting words and phrases by assigning numerical values to each letter of the alphabet and then summing those values the phrase, “Eneglaim,” which means the spring of Eglaim, totals 153.

Here then, is God’s fulfillment of his promise to restore or reconcile people to him in his holy temple, Jesus himself: 153 fish caught, the prophecy of Ezekiel is brought to its fulfillment in Jesus filling the nets of his disciples, and so also then, their hearts and minds with the evidence of his power to bring abundance from nothing, and so bring them from death into new life. 

It is with this that Jesus says to Peter, the fisherman standing by a charcoal fire that once served as a place of his denial, I have caught you again Peter. I am the true fisher of people; I am the creator of all things, the beginning and the end. Now you have come full circle to see this for yourself. I have caught you and fed you and now I shall release you to share this with others who sit at their own charcoal fires of fear, anxiety, indifference, pride and doubt.

As with Peter so with us: if we are willing to jump into the sea of this complex world we live in, to put on the garments of faith, to follow even when we cannot see where it is that Jesus is leading us, to follow through our own doubt, disillusionment, anger, boredom, or frustration, Jesus will take us where he is going, even if it is often where we struggle to go, gathering, reshaping, and reforming everyone of us as we are drawn in his Spirit to his Father, and our Father. Until God is all in all. AMEN