At the beginning of last week’s sermon I asked the question,
What’s wrong with these disciples?
And I ask it again this week.
What’s wrong with these disciples?
Peter and the rest of the disciples have seen the risen Christ.
They have heard his words to them, “Peace be with you.”
Jesus has breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
Now, when you forgive people their sins they are forgiven
and when you don’t, they aren’t forgiven.”
And Jesus said to them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
But I hardly think that when Jesus said that he was sending his disciples,
that he meant for them to go back to the Sea of Galilee to go fishing again.
You may have heard about Marie Ann Cummings, a single mother of two,
who last Friday won $12 million in the Lotto Super 7 draw,
and on Friday the 13 of all days.
She is described as a hotel service attendant,
which is probably a nice way of saying that she is a maid.
My guess is that Marie Ann Cummings won’t be returning to her old job any time soon. So if money can change a life, what could a resurrection do?
It hardly makes sense to go back to the old way of living
after you’ve seen the risen Son of God standing before you.
But that’s what the disciples do.
Back to the boats, back to the nets, back to the old sea.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.
If you read the 21st chapter of the gospel according to John,
you get the distinct impression that these verses are added on.
Most scholars agree that chapter 21 of John’s gospel account
is an editorial addendum to the originally composed gospel,
chiefly concerned about the place of Peter and John in the life of the early church.
But we are still left with the fact that it is scripture, the Word of God,
inspired and led by God in the writing,
whether written all at one time or on separate occasions.
There is a reason why our Bible includes these verses.
God has a purpose for John chapter 21.

So back to the story.
Why are the disciples fishing?
Perhaps they don’t know what else to do.
We are told that the disciples were together in Galilee.
What were they doing there?
We don’t know.
Maybe they were a bit confused and still bewildered.
Maybe they had heard what Jesus said,
that he was sending them, just as the Father had sent him.
But what did that mean?
So maybe after a few days of trying to figure it out,
Peter, tired of not knowing what else to do, just said, “I’m going out to fish.”
“We’ll join you,” said the others.
I don’t want to be hard on the disciples.
Because if I’m going to be hard on them,
I have to be just as hard on us as well.
After all, two weeks after proclaiming that Christ is risen, that he is risen indeed,
how many of us are living drastically different lives?
How many of us have signed up for mission work or enrolled in seminary?
Of course to follow Christ doesn’t mean that we have to give up our jobs
or do mission work in some far away place or become theological professionals.
But it should mean that some part of our lives ought to be different.
That Christ is risen from the dead,
and that we would dare confess such a thing,
should mean that somehow,
something of our priorities ought to have changed since Easter,
something of how we live and who we are must have been transformed, shouldn’t it? And yet, if we dare to be honest, how many of us can truly say that?
Truth be told, most of us haven’t really changed a whole lot since Easter.
We confess amazing things,
but believing that God’s Son rose from the dead,
that life and death aren’t only what they appear to be,
believing that we are loved by a God who can even raise the dead
and can raise us to eternal life,
doesn’t seem to have quite the impact on our lives as winning the lottery.
So most of us go back to the life we have led,
back to doing what we have always done.

That’s what the disciples were doing as well.
But as the text wants us to understand,
if we won’t go to Jesus, Jesus will come to us.
They went fishing, did the disciples.
And they caught nothing.
Early in the morning as they were returning with their empty nets,
Jesus stood by the shore and called out,
“Friends, haven’t you any fish?”
When they answered no,
Jesus directed the disciples to throw their nets on the right side of the boat
and when they did, they were unable to haul the nets in because of the number of fish. Then John said to Peter, “It is the Lord!”
Jesus comes to Galilee, to where the disciples are,
to the shores of the sea,
and turns their emptiness into abundance.
If we won’t go where Jesus is, Jesus will come to where we are.
But Jesus’ appearance in Galilee is only one way we see that truth.
We see it again in Jesus’ conversation with Peter.
Many commentators have said that the conversation between Jesus and Peter
here on the shores of the Sea of Galilee
is meant to correspond to the scene at the home of the high priest
before Jesus’ crucifixion.
There, Peter denied Jesus three times.
Here, Jesus will ask Peter to affirm his love for him three times,
and in doing so, Jesus will reinstate Peter.
No doubt there is much validity to that interpretation.
But there is another nuance in this text as well that we ought not to miss.

After they had finished that remarkable breakfast,
Jesus turns to Simon Peter and says to him,
“Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”
What does do you love me more than these mean?
Some say that it means Jesus was asking Peter
whether he loved Jesus more than the other disciples did.
Others think that Jesus was asking Peter
whether he loved him more than he loved the other disciples.
And still others believe that Jesus was asking Peter
whether he loved him more than he loved the things of the world,
like his boats, his nets and his fish.
In any event, the question Jesus asks Peter is, do you love me?
Peter responds, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Jesus asks a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
“Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Then for the third time Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, do you love me?
And he replied, “Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.”
It may seem rather straightforward.
Jesus asks Simon to affirm his love for him three times,
to make up for the three times that he denied Jesus before.
But there may be more than meets the eye going on here.
In the original Greek, when Jesus first asks Peter whether he loves him,
the word for love is agape.
Agape is a special word for love.
It means sacrificial love, the love that God has for us,
a love that gives without the expectation of return, reward or recompense.
Agape is love as an active choice,
love, simply because one chooses to love another.
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Indeed, says the gospel,
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him.
This is agape love, a love which gives sacrificially.
Did God so love the world
because he expected that the world would love him back in some reciprocal way?
Did God send his son to the world out of love
because he knew that the world would welcome him, embrace him and receive him?
No.
Even though God knew the fate which awaited his Son,
he sent him anyway, simply because he loved us.
That is sacrificial love, that is agape.

Jesus says to Peter, do you agape me?
And Peter replies, yes Lord, I philia you.
Philia, its another Greek word for love.
Philia, though, is not the same as agape.
Philia means brotherly love, sisterly love, the love of bonding, of friendship.
Aristotle argued that there are three kinds of philia love,
based on mutual advantage, what is useful,
mutual pleasure, what is pleasant,
and mutual admiration, what is good.
The key here is that in philia love, sacrifice is not at the heart.
Philia love is good and important, but it is not sacrificial.
There always is a selfish component to philia.
Ultimately philia is not the love of God for us.

So Jesus asks Peter, do you agape me, do you love me as I have loved you?
And Peter’s reply is, yes, Lord I philia you, I love you as I am able.
The second time that Jesus asks and Peter responds, the words are the same.
Do you agape me? Yes, Lord, I philia you.
The third time, however, the words change.
Jesus, sensing where Peter is in his ability, changes words.
Simon, son of John, do you philia me? asks Jesus.
And the gospel records that Peter was hurt
because Jesus said to him the third time, do you philia me.
Was Peter hurt that Jesus kept on asking,
or was Peter hurt because Jesus changed words?
Was Peter hurt because he realized that he could not love Jesus
in the way Jesus had desired?
Was Peter hurt because he knew that ultimately,
he failed his Master again?
You see, friends, Peter could not get to where Jesus wanted him to be,
so again, Jesus came to where Peter was.

And if it ended there, who would have the right to complain.
But it does not end there.
Jesus isn’t finished with Peter quite yet.
“Feed my sheep,” says Jesus to Peter.
“Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep,”
says Jesus to Peter, each time Peter responds that he loves Jesus.
Then Jesus tells Peter that there will come a time in his life
when agape will overtake philia,
when Peter will die the death of sacrificial love,
by which he would glorify God.
After this Jesus says to Peter, “Follow me.”

Jesus knows where Peter is at the present moment.
He’s not where he wants him to be.
But Jesus won’t give up on him.
Follow me, he says,
follow me and I will take you from where you are,
to where I want you to be.
The good news is that though Jesus will come to where we are,
he doesn’t desire to keep us where we are.
He invites us to follow him, to where he knows we can be.
Jesus knows that we are, all of us, not where he would want us to be.
Some may be more along the way than others, but we all fall short.
And rather than standing at the finish line beckoning us to get there,
Jesus comes to where we are, wherever we are,
and meets us, loves us, forgives us, encourages us and invites us to follow him.

Its good news.
Its very good news that Jesus isn’t about only mountain top experiences
or resurrection appearances.
Jesus is also about the everyday, the ordinary,
meeting us when we lack the courage to live as resurrected people,
when we struggle to do what we know we can do.
The good news is that Jesus cares very deeply
about our struggles and our hardest moments.
This past week has been one of the hardest moments in recent memory.
32 people killed at Virginia Tech by a madman,
who then turned the gun on himself.
In the depths of human suffering, Jesus is there,
comforting the families and sustaining faith,
and even in the most awful places,
inviting us to see a glimpse of what agape can look like.
Agape looks like the holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu,
who gave his life barricading the doors of his classroom
so that his students could jump out the window to safety.
Given what he had lived through already in his life,
remarkably, when faced with such a terrible choice, he didn’t hesitate.
He sacrificed his life so that others could live.

On Friday I had lunch with a former minister
of the Calgary Korean Presbyterian Church.
He now works in Maryland,
as the Stated Clerk of one of the four Korean speaking Presbyteries in the PCUSA.
His Presbytery includes Blacksburg, Virginia, where Virginia Tech is located.
Because the shooter was identified to be a Korean American,
he was prepared for the onslaught of media attention and scrutiny
which would inevitably follow.
What he wasn’t prepared for was the amazing volume of phone calls and emails,
from other ministers and members of the Presbyterian Church USA,
wondering if he knew the address of the killer’s family.
These Presbyterians were trying to send cards and letters of condolence to the family, knowing how much they would have been suffering in light of the horrifying news. People looking out for their neighbour,
even in the most difficult of times.
That’s what agape looks like.

We know where we could be,
but we also confess where we too often are.
The good news is that Jesus meets us where we are,
he knows that we don’t find it easy to leave what we know
and embrace the newness he offers.
He knows that life, too often, kicks us and keeps us down.
He understands that its hard to be transformed by promises
which we can’t put in a bank account, spend or eat.
And so he comes to the Galilee’s of our lives,
meeting us where we are,
validating that our struggles are important to God and that God cares for us.
What a gift, the gift of a Saviour who doesn’t just beckon to us from unattainable heights,
but comes among us to walk with us.
Yet we would do well to remember something here.
If it is true that Jesus comes to where we are,
it is also true then that there is no part of life in which we are safe, beyond his reach.
We can’t pretend that Jesus is only to be found at church on Sunday,
or in a bible study or an outreach event.
The resurrected Christ will not be contained,
but will come to us in every part of our life.
He is Lord, not only when we want him to be,
but also when we would rather forget about him.
But he also invites us to follow him, to where he would have us be.

My friends, we may be struggling with how to implement our Easter faith
into the living out of our lives.
We may be struggling like the disciples,
wondering how the Holy Spirit will work in us.
We may find it difficult to move
from what we know and what we are comfortable with,
to something new and unfamiliar.
Jesus understands our hesitancy.
As Peter confesses, Jesus knows all about us.
And when we are not able to move where Jesus is,
Jesus our gracious Saviour will move to where we are.
Friends, its not important where we are when Jesus comes to us.
What is far more important is that no matter where we are,
no matter how well we are doing or how much we are struggling,
what matters most is that when Jesus comes to us,
we are willing to follow him.
If we can only go slowly, Jesus will go slowly.
But he won’t stop, and invites us to take those steps, small steps at first,
but steps that move us forward in our faith,
in living out what it means to be an Easter people.

Before we leave this place today,
I pray that each of us will give some prayerful thought
to what steps Jesus might be asking us to take,
what movement in faith Jesus might be encouraging us to make.
And I pray that we will do more than just imagine,
but that we will act to follow Jesus.
Follow me, says Jesus.
Its how the gospel begins and its how the gospel ends.
May we believe and follow Jesus, so that we may have life in his name.