This is a sermon preached at Holy Cross, Byfield, on Sunday 1 May 2022

The occasion was the Third Sunday of Easter.

You can listen to a recording of the sermon here.

Acts 9:1-20

John 21:1-19

THE FINAL ACT: CONTINUITY AND NEWNESS

Today, in our Gospel reading we hear a strange story.

Strange because it is full of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the everyday and the extraordinary.

The familiar is in many instances – people’s everyday work; the ‘back yard’ (of Galilee); life as usual; fish; bread; breakfast.

The unfamiliar and extraordinary sits alongside - the Risen Jesus; the disciples’ discerning that it is indeed Jesus (they know it to be Him, but they cannot immediately recognise Him);the huge catch of fish; the nets that don’t break; the encounter that ends in challenge, recapitulation and reinstatement (the story of that intriguing exchange between Our Lord and St Peter).

Imagine yourself into the disciples’ shoes – you have had two encounters with the Risen Jesus already, both at the room back in Jerusalem where you had been hiding out, fearing for your lives about recrimination and persecution from those who had been hostile towards Jesus and pushed for his crucufixion.  What would you, if you had been one of those disciples, be doing with your time, now?

Would you be rehearsing the memory endlessly?  Would you be bending the ear of anyone who might listen?  Sometimes, we find and feel we have need of that sort of thing, don’t we?  To retell a story about something that has happened to us, or around us, to seek to work out its meanings by telling others about it.  (BTW, parish priests do quite a bit of listening to others’ stories and, it is true – my waistline bears witness – drink a lot of tea and eat a deal of cake and biscuits whilst we do so!  The heart of pastoral ministry!?!)

Or, if you had been one of those disciples - in one of those days immediately following that first astonishing Sunday when Jesus was seen alive, and not any longer in His tomb – would you have been excitedly chattering amongst the group, but yet too scared of the wider world to speak there?

Would you still be up in Jerusalem, the capital city, where this astonishing turn of events had started to take place?  Or would you be back home, on the shores of grubby, insignificant Galilee, the wrong-side-of-the-tracks, no-one-goes-there-ville where you all grew up?

In the story we hear today, the disciples are back home, and, more than that, back at work….

This is a story about the age we now live in.  This is a story about living in the final act of God’s great drama, the story about how He meets with us and saves and restores us, offering us a new and life-giving way after we have mucked it up stupendously!  I suggested last week that we might view all creation’s history – at least from our perspective as God’s human creatures – as a five Act play.  First Act, creation; second Act, our sinful, selfish separating of ourselves from God; Act three, our growing realisation of God’s presence and character through crisis and growth; Act four, the life, witness, work, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Easter mystery, marked the end of Act four in this great drama of our world’s history, and turned the page to the beginning of Act 5.  We live now in the new creation that God crafted through Jesus at Easter.  The ‘in-between’ times – the kingdom now, but not yet fully….the Act we get to find our parts in, to learn to improvise in, in anticipation of the closing action of the drama.

This story is all about the mixture of continuity and newness in the creative work of God in our era, in our Act Five.  The disciples are back to their day jobs – yet Jesus calls them away – just as He did when He first called them to follow Him in His earthly ministry.  (The writer of John’s Gospel is consciously reminding us of this parallel.  They were fishermen on the See of Galilee when he called out to them and said ‘Follow me’ just a handful of years before.  They left their nets, then, for the work He needed to teach them to do, following Him.  Now the scene repeats, with a few shifts of context and emphasis.  This is how improvisation works – you recognise the kind of scene you are in and so have some clues how to act, even though some of the factors may have changed).  This time, the charge to Peter is to not follow, but to lead – to be the shepherd.  Jesus has given the lead, has been the protagonist in the drama, but is now urging Peter to step into that leadership role for the opening part of this Final Act.  The Church is given the huge privilege and task in this era of feeding God’s lambs, looking after His sheep.  Just as Peter denied Christ 3 times on the night of Jesus’ trial prior to His execution, so now Jesus journeys Peter to his new calling, his expanded role in the play, through three questions and injunctions.  In this era, God calls to us where we are – to our fishing nets, our weekday offices and factories and call centres and homes, or wherever we find ourselves working day-to-day, but also calls us out to new challenges, for which He equips us to serve Him.

The resurrected Jesus is both continuity and newness.  Physical, eating, talking, breathing – yet not instantly recognizable.  The Gospel writer struggles for the words to describe something that has not been a feature of creation before.  We, too in this age are becoming something for which there are no words, yet.  In the fullness of the new creation, there will be new heavens and a new earth – something both of continuity and newness.  The writer of the Revelation is insistent about what he has been shown – that the new will grow out of the old, that earth is not shelved for heaven, that salvation history is not about escape from time to some timeless, anti-physical state, but is about the whole of the creation that is already entrusted to us being made new, better and brighter, even more physical and real than it was and is.  You have heard before the old Marxist travesty of the Christian hope?  ‘Pie in the sky when you die’?  Well, here in this story, pie in the sky when you die is ditched for fish on the beach while we preach – or perhaps, if I’m not trying so hard for the rhyme, fish on the beach while we work!…

This Gospel message is about the transforming of the ‘now’ through the Gospel.  The Gospel hope is a future hope only in that we trust God to bring what He has promised to completion.  The Gospel hope and promise is primarily about our work, here and now, to bring the Kingdom in.  It is a transforming vision – like the vision that transforms Saul in the reading we heard from Acts – that affects everything.

Your work and your everyday lives is where the Gospel can be transforming the world: your home; your family; your leisure time.  Your everyday decisions, choices, priorities.  The first of everything that God gives us, we give back to Him for Him to transform.  We hold nothing back…

Boy, what a vision.  If only we really lived like we believed it.  If only we could just sit down and share the simple food that Our Lord offers to eat with us and then share His work with Him.  And what an Easter challenge!  Can we do it?  Here in this church dedicated to the Holy Cross of Christ, in the communities of Byfield and our neighbouring villages, and the networks we relate to, in our homes and our workplaces?  Jesus says, “Follow me!”…  What a vision!  What a part to play!!!

+ AMEN