The Love That Follows

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
May 3, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

John 21

“‘Do you love me more than these? …Follow me.’”

When Simon Peter says to his companions, “I am going fishing,” he is saying more than the English language can bear. The author of this added chapter to John’s gospel puts in Peter’s mouth an “infinitive of purpose,” according to New Testament scholar John Macdonald, a phrase “that expresses more than momentary intention.” Peter is not going fishing for the day or simply to pass the time. “Peter is going back to his earlier way of life and will stay with it,” says Macdonald.

It is what we have all done in the days and nights following Easter morning. We return to our lives at the office, in the classroom, around the kitchen table, down the avenue and with the church as though he were dead and gone. We say to our friends and family, “I am going…to work…to school…to church…to tend the garden…read a book…wash the dishes…join the choir” with no expectation that Jesus will come to us or command us or call us to do something other than tend to the things we apparently love more than we love him.

Once again, John underlines that we therefore do what we do in the darkness and to no avail. “They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.” We know how this goes. In fact, even when we labor and are heavy laden because we think we are doing something we ought to do for Christ’s sake--doing something that, if he were alive, he would praise for its selflessness, its purposefulness, its pious intention—our weary and heavy-laden spirits belie our discipleship. We are not following him: we are going it alone and, if you want to know the truth, we are a bit put out by the whole situation. Having given ourselves to the task at hand, the cause du jour, the goals of an institution, the objectives of a company, the endless expectations of a family, the business of a church, we are spent in the middle of the night, confounded by our failure, exhausted by the futility of it all. Believing that everything pretty much depends upon us, we imperceptibly become the type of disciple Emil Brunner had in mind when he wrote, “His whole life [being] spent in this ceaseless endeavor to alter conditions, the personal meaning of life is forgotten, a nervous haste takes possession of him, and finally, since he is forced to admit that all [of his doing does] not alter anything essential, he falls into a state of mind which is either one of cynical resignation or of irritated hostility to everything and everyone.” No doubt there are disciples in this very sanctuary who have burned themselves out in just this way!

But then without our human help, the day breaks and Jesus reveals himself. Put another way, God sends the light of the world once again to shine upon the darkness we have preferred, the graves we have dug for ourselves, even in this Eastertide. Jesus stands at a distance and calls to the disciples from the perspective of eternity. But following their futile fishing expedition, they first hear his voice as the voice of a judge: “Children (literally Jesus calls out “Boys”), you have no fish, have you?” One can imagine the disciples mumbling one to another, “Who is the smarty pant on the beach? Did he so much as cast a net once during the night?” Yet as he has all along, John lets us in on the truth the disciples never quite seem to understand: namely that this is the voice of the vine without whom we can do nothing; the voice of the bread of life and the living water by whose side we will neither hunger nor thirst; the voice of the light the darkness has not overcome; the voice of the life for which we were made.

In every case he comes as one whose love cuts to the chase that our life has become because we continue to run after nothing much. “Have you no fish, no hope, no help, no hint of life’s purpose and meaning?” The temptation, of course, is to resent the question and to refuse the questioner lest we let someone else in on our emptiness. The safer response always is to blame the stranger on the beach, the companions by our side, the shortcomings of the boat, the conditions at sea for the state of our soul.

In this regard, the disciples’ response attempts to steer a middle course. They shout back to the stranger on the beach with words that barely contain their frustration. “No! We have nothing.” It is an admission and it is a start. For at the beginning of a new life must be an honest acknowledgement that the life to which we have returned has left us dead in the water and not so much becalmed as bewildered.

So Jesus next commands this sorry group of fishermen to cast their nets to the right side of the boat--a command which, when obeyed, changes everything. Now the nets are so full of fish that they cannot haul them into the boat. Yet John’s point is not “how” they are fishing but “with whom”; not the haul of fish from the opposite side of the boat but their relationship with the one standing on the beach who is thereby made known. This is a detail dying denominations often miss. To wit we are told that the future of Christ’s church lies with the latest scheme for transformational ministry or liturgical reform or missional commitment when knowing him and following him alone will give to the church her future. Therefore for John I imagine the catch of fish represented something like the compelling attraction of a community, living in obedience to the risen Christ, for those seeking life’s meaning and purpose.

This reading of John’s last chapter is curiously confirmed in the findings of a new study by the Pew Foundation. Among a sample of 3000 people who were raised with no religious affiliation, the vast majority had chosen to join a community of faith as adults. “So what was the reason for this flight of the unchurched to churches?” asked New York Times columnist Charles Blow. “Did God appear in a bush? Did the grass look greener on the other side of the cross?”

The reason given by the sample, in so many words, involved an emptiness and void that only a community of faith could fill. “While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious,” Blow goes on to opine, “the cold hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is the picnic? And is my child going to get a part in the holiday play?” Still the choir and the picnic and the part in the pageant might as well be a return to an earlier way of life, even a culturally secular way of life posing as the church, unless the risen Lord is alive and afoot in the community.

When the disciples realize Jesus is alive and make their way to him, something almost mundane takes place: Jesus cooks them breakfast. I say almost mundane because you can tell the disciples are beside themselves with the thought that Jesus is with them frying fish and has invited them to the table. “None dared asked him ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord.” (He is really alive! they thought.) Or to return to the proclamation of Easter morning, he is alive because he has surprised them!

Those who have come later in life to the church often begin with this sense of astonishment at his presence that those of us who were raised around his table seldom know. For the unchurched, Blow believes that a faith community’s most powerful appeal is “to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism—that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign. It’s the part that fears loneliness, craves companionship and needs…fellowship.”

Perhaps that is why, once breakfast is over, Jesus turns the conversation to love: the love that follows. Scholars believe John’s alternating choice of words for love in this exchange between Jesus and Peter is insignificant, but I beg to differ. Turning to Peter who thrice denied that he knew him, Jesus asks, “Simon son of John, do you love me [agapas me] more than these?” In Greek, agape is the self-giving, self-emptying love of God, an act not dependent on affection. To put it bluntly, Jesus might as well have asked, “Will you die for me?”

In response Peter says, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you [philo se].” Philia is the love between friends or more formally, “a preferential bond based on mutual attraction.” To put it honestly, Peter could have said, “Yes, I think you are terrific and I will be your friend forever.” Again Jesus asks if Peter agapas me and again Peter responds, Philo se. A third time Jesus asks of Peter only the love he is able to give: Phileis me, asks Jesus. Philo me, Peter insists. But then Jesus goes on to tell Peter he will love him in this way: he will lay down his life for his friend. Agape! Then Jesus says simply “Follow me!”

This Sunday we begin the fourteenth year of attempting to follow him together. There have been seasons, I know, when we have simply gone fishing, when no matter where we cast our net it seemed to come up empty. There also have been seasons when the net was so full that we could not haul the life we had been given in. Yet when I say my thanksgivings to God for these years, I thank God not for any particular institutional detail but for the multitude of ways we have come to love one another and the world God so loved in him. For the most part, we have not yet been given the grace to love him as those who lay down our lives for him. Nor have we laid down the life of this community of faith in order to follow him. Loving him in this way is not something we can decide or determine or design. We can only ask him, in the words of Graham Greene’s whiskey priest, for the little bit of courage and self-restraint it would take to be saints.

In response, writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he “gives us no intelligible program for a way of life, no goal or ideal to strive after. It is not a cause which human calculation might deem worthy of our devotion, even the devotion of ourselves…. [Rather we are] dragged out of relative security into a life of absolute insecurity…into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous…, out of the realm of finite…into the realm of infinite possibilities (which is the one liberating reality).” I do not know what the years ahead portend. I only pray that he will continue to accompany this community of faith that I hold so close to my heart, calling us anew in every moment to feed his lambs, tend his sheep, feed his sheep and so lose ourselves in his service that we may find ourselves bound together in his love. Thanks be to God.

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