Easter 3, Year C: John 21:1-19
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
May 1, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
If you’ve been around church for a while you’ve probably heard that some of Jesus’ first disciples were fishermen. We read about it each year when celebrating the feast of Andrew and Peter—you can even see some fish and a net in our stained glass of St. Andrew at the back of the sanctuary. Children in Sunday School sing about Jesus promising to make his followers “fishers of men.” Once we’ve learned a fact, we naturally bring that knowledge with us whenever we approach the Gospel. So imagine how surprised I was this week to realize that John never mentions anything about what the apostles did for work before Jesus called them. He tells us some of them had been following John the Baptist, and in chapter 6 some of them clearly must have known how to pilot a boat as they made their way across the Sea of Galilee. But apart from that the author makes little to no reference to their lives before they began studying under Jesus or to the skills they brought with them.
It’s hard to know how important that detail—or lack thereof—is. The Gospel of John appears to have been written down later than many New Testament books, so the author may have assumed readers were already familiar with the other Gospels’ stories, like where Jesus provides a miraculous catch of fish after the not-yet-disciples spent a fruitless night on the water. Personally, I had always assumed those similar incidents are what clued in the disciples that this person on the shore in today’s text was the risen Jesus. But for John, that might not be the case.
The comment about the disciples not “daring to ask” who Jesus was may also remind us of stories like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, another resurrection appearance where some of his followers didn’t recognize him until late in their encounter. But just as John never mentions that Peter and company were fishermen, he doesn’t tell us about that story either: only Luke records it.
Again, it’s difficult to know how important these details are. Did John intend this Gospel to stand alone, or did he figure his audience already knew the other stories and would make connections for themselves? Two thousand years later, we really have no idea. If John assumed we would have already heard the other Gospels, the details he provides here certainly make some interesting cross-referencing material.
But what if he was trying to make another point entirely? John opens his Gospel with a vision of the Cosmic Christ, and I wonder if that shouldn’t influence our reading in this final chapter as his narrative comes to a close.
On Easter we talked about the ancient conception of the universe, and I suspect those ideas are coming into play in John than we might recognize as modern readers. In case you missed that service, people in Biblical times understood the cosmos to have three distinct parts: the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. Frequently represented as the sky, the heavens were the land of the gods, and the orderly movement of the stars and planets reflected how the divine beings dwelt together in perfect harmony.[1] In the earthly layer of existence, humans were tasked with maintaining order and trying to implement the gods’ will. The underworld, often associated with the sea, was an almost entirely unknown and unknowable realm. As all that had existed before the gods fought back the waters to provide a space for humanity to develop, the sea was also seen as the embodiment of primordial chaos: dangerous, unpredictable, and home to nameless terrors.
You might also remember that movement between these three realms was mostly a one-way affair and nearly always involved only the next adjacent layer. The gods could move back and forth between the heavens and the earth, but they didn’t enter the underworld. People would eventually move from the earth to the underworld, but we couldn’t really enter the heavens. And only rarely would someone reemerge from the gates of Death, which forever kept its secrets to itself.
Prior to this point in John, we’ve seen Jesus as an authority in the heavens: the Word that was with God, and the Word that was God. The evangelist records Jesus talking at length about how he’s come down from heaven and is the bread from heaven. His miraculous signs such as changing water into wine, feeding the 5,000, and healing the congenitally blind man demonstrated his power in the terrestrial realm. We’ve also seen one incident—walking on water—where he has authority over the sea. But walking on the water doesn’t show us any sort of power within the water. John has established that Jesus is able to guard his followers from chaos and deliver them to the safety and orderliness of land, but we never see any sign of influence over the hidden realm or any of its denizens. So although Jesus has shown extensive evidence of his mastery of heaven and earth, there’s nothing to prove that the sea itself—and, by proxy, the underworld—has any reason to heed him.
But by the end of John things have changed. Through the crucifixion, Jesus—born of Heaven and child of Earth—took up native citizenship among the dead. However, Death couldn’t hold him, and in resurrection, he disrupted the barrier between the underworld and the human realm. But that wasn’t completely unique to the mythologies of the day. It was uncommon, but every once in a while—even in John’s own Gospel—a character would elude Death. So although it was significant that Jesus may have found a way to free himself, by itself, that wouldn’t necessarily have done much for the rest of us.
I wonder if that isn’t what John is trying to address for us today. In this story, he’s showing that Jesus didn’t simply escape from or sneak out of the underworld: he conquered it and became master of that final realm as well. When the fish rush into the disciples’ nets, Jesus is displaying a new level of authority: commanding even those who dwell beneath the waves. Through incarnation, death, and resurrection, Christ has united the entire universe itself under the Reign of God.
By turning to the sea after Jesus death, the disciples, led by Peter, essentially abandoned any hope for order. They had given up and chosen to embrace unpredictability and chaos, essentially making a compact with Death. But atop the Sea of Galilee, riding the border of two realms, they once more hear Jesus’ call and return to shore. In that moment they choose to reject disorder and, turning from death to life, restore themselves not only to the stability of the human realm but to hope and submission to God. Upon landing their friend is already waiting to welcome and care for them, and in that moment they discover that the one who had been the Son of God and Son of Man has fully become the Lord of All.
Even in the tumult and confusion of our day, Jesus keeps calling, asking us to consider where our philosophy and reality have taken us and turn once again to align ourselves with the ways of faithfulness, justice, and love—the ways of God. We may not always hear it clearly, but his voice continues to echo throughout the universe, calling to order all that exists. Nowhere is beyond his reach, nothing is beyond his power, and no one is beyond his help, for all realms bow before him.
[1] Most of the time. Any disruption in the celestial realm would have calamitous consequences throughout the terrestrial one as well.