John 20:1-18—Easter Scripture and John 21:3-14
March 27, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Everyday I get up in the morning on the same side of the bed. After showering and brushing the same teeth for decades, the very first thing that I do is to eat breakfast. I eat a bowl of cold cereal with a banana in fat-free milk, a glass of orange juice to take my vitamins, and read the front page of the morning paper. I eat cereal for breakfast every day—365 days a year. Breakfast is the most ordinary meal of the day.
Few of our meals are more ordinary than breakfast. Most of us eat the same thing for breakfast every morning, without fail. If we stagger down to breakfast and find the box of corn flakes empty, we are not right for the rest of the day. Few of our meals are more ritualized, more predictable, and more humdrum than breakfast. Breakfast is not the meal where we look for creativity. Joe’s Café always has waffles and oatmeal. Rather, what we look for is routine, something to help us get up and get going in the morning.
Back to Work
On the morning recorded in John 21, Jesus, the risen Christ meets with seven of the disciples on a beach in Galilee, two weeks after Easter. The risen Christ had met with his disciples two times before: one time when Jesus came to the house where the disciples were hiding behind locked doors for fear for their lives and the second time a week later when Jesus appeared again when the doors were shut so that Thomas may put his finger on the wounds of Jesus so that he may believe.
But this morning, the disciples are back to work in Galilee. Can you believe these disciples? They have gone home and gone back to work.
Now I ask you, if you had come face-to-face with a person resurrected from the dead, on two occasions no less, would you be able to go back home and go back to work? You might have.
Then we know that in Matthew 28, when the risen Christ appeared to them, he gave them their marching orders: “Go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them, teaching them all that I have commanded you.” (Matt. 28:19-20) Whatever happened to that command? Rather than going out into the world and making disciples, they went home to the backwaters of Galilee to catch fish!
How would you have handled Easter? If you were one of the disciples, would you have gone back to fishing?
One can understand handling Good Friday this way. After all, who would be surprised that Jesus was crucified? This is the way the world treats its saviors and its prophets—
by killing them. The disciples, while in great grief over the death of Jesus, were quite willing to return home and go back to work after the crucifixion. It was better than to remain in hiding in fear of being associated with a troublemaker. With no more visionary leader, it was time to be responsible for their families and livelihood again.
You know how it is, when you have experienced some trauma or a death. Helpful friends urge you to get back to work as soon as possible, to lose yourself in the habitual, the routine, and the predictable. Get your mind off this sadness by going back to work, we might say. So Simon Peter said, “I am going fishing.” And the other disciples said to him, “We will go with you.”
They returned home and restarted their fishing business. The disciples fished all night and they caught absolutely nothing. They are back to their old, predictable routine of failure. Not only that, they were failing at being disciples too for they did not obey Jesus when he told them to go out into all the world and make disciples.
We can deal with the cross. It means failure. We find the cross perfectly understandable, because this is the way the world works. We think that Jesus failed in his mission by being crucified on the cross. We try and we struggle, but death has the last word. This may not be a very pretty picture, but at least it is a picture that we can understand. This is the real world. These are the facts of life. Death is as routine and ordinary as corn flakes for breakfast.
Jesus Meets Us
Today is another ordinary day in the life of the disciples. As the sun rises, the disciples are surprised to look out and see Jesus on the beach. They are a long way from Jesus, about a hundred yards, and they did not recognize him. He calls to them, asking them how their fishing is going. Then he directs them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat. They do so, and their nets fill with fish.
They pull in their nets now bursting with fish. John is the first to see and cry out, “It is the Lord!” Jesus has prepared a fire, and has made breakfast for them on the beach. He invites them to bring some of the 153 fish that they caught to place them on the fire. He invites them to eat. Once again, Jesus will feed their hungry souls.
The scene is so ordinary, so everyday, with these seven disciples squatting around in a circle and Jesus offering them breakfast. It is not simply that Jesus is raised from the dead; it is that he appears to us, here and now. He feeds us. There, in ordinary Galilee, during an ordinary workday, he shares an ordinary meal with his disciples—freshly caught fish and bread. This is where we meet the risen Christ, or more to the point of the story, where he meets us.
Some of us here are probably still hoping and praying for some kind of special revelation, a sign, an appearance, a voice so unexpected that it would throw us off our rational thinking and predictable lives to finally believe in the idea of a God who lives. But think about what you are praying for. What has given you the privileged idea that you deserve a private relation to the divine? When we want a special revelation of our own, we want to feel that we are special among people of faith.
Jesus Christ doesn’t go around trying to convince you that you should believe in him. Christ appeared on an ordinary beach in Galilee while the disciples went back to their routine lives and jobs. The good news message for today is that Christ appears in ordinary San Francisco, during ordinary days, sharing ordinary meals with us as his disciples. We come to meet the risen Christ in the ordinary times of our lives.
You know that what we have gone through in the past few weeks that this Easter message is going to be about Christ meeting us in our ordinary every days. Ordinary days are times when we get sick or get into an accident or unexpectedly end up in the hospital.
When we saw Don Jin in the hospital immediately after his heart attack, many of us had worries and doubts that he would come out of this horrible looking condition the way he was or that he is even alive today. It was again an ordinary and familiar sight that we have seen before. We understand Good Fridays and that comas can easily lead to bad news. Although Don has suffered a setback and is still in serious condition, he is still alive! Today I stand here like so many who have seen Don in the hospital, to testify that Christ meets us in ordinary places like in the hospital and reminds us once again that death does not have the last word!
When you ask a Christian to summarize the gospel, he or she would most likely say, “Jesus died for our sins.” Notice what we say. In spite of the empty tomb, it is death that dominates our attention. On this Easter Sunday, death does not dominate our lives but the empty tomb does—the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We all have been given special revelation that Jesus Christ is the resurrected Lord when we have seen how Jayson Gatdula, Candi Yee, Alan Wong, and now Don Jin who all have walked in the shadow of death, are still having breakfast with Christ!
Easter Breakfast
The tradition of having “Easter Breakfast” comes from this passage in John. For the past 38 years, the YMCA serves breakfast on Easter Sunday. But when the Y serves breakfast, it’s very special. They only have breakfast once a year. The breakfast cancels our adult classes that meet over there.
But the breakfast that the risen Christ had with the disciples on the beach was rather ordinary and nothing special. It was what they had everyday—some fish and bread. He comes to meet us where we are working and starts a fire on the beach ready to feed us.
Our Baptist church has a tradition of celebrating the Lord’s Supper once a month on the first Sunday of the month. Some many years ago, we think that if we observed the Lord’s Supper more frequently that it would become less special. Since it’s supposed to be religious, it needs to be special. But the glory of this meal is that it is not supposed to be special—observed only once a month. This is ordinary food for Christians.
The presence of the risen Christ among us, as today’s gospel reminds us, is not special but it is so wonderfully ordinary. Christ comes to where we are, here and now. Thank goodness we don’t have to wait for some distant eternity to be close to the risen Christ. He comes to the Galilees of where we live.
Since we have moved back into our church building after the retrofit and renovation in 2000, Joe Chan and Gil Qoung along with their helpers have cooked breakfast in our church kitchen almost every Sunday. Every Sunday they have waffles and oatmeal.
The significance of “Breakfast at Church” is not that it’s a great deal for your money but that when we gather as Jesus’ disciples in that upper Fellowship Hall room, we are meeting Christ. The breakfast that we eat is suspiciously like the bread and fish that Christ served to his disciples on the beach.
Perhaps that is why for most of us the most important, holy, and sacred time that we have in our families is around the family dinner table. Most of us will be eating together as families today. It isn’t that the food is special; it isn’t that the words we say over the food make it holy. Rather, it is the presence of the family that makes this ordinary gathering so extraordinary. Every meal, once the blessing is said, becomes a kind of sacrament, and “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” as we say about the act of Baptism.
We can go through our entire lifetime wanting God to give us a special revelation—some kind of sign or convincing event to help us to believe in the living God. We sing, “Open our eyes, Lord, we want to see Jesus, to reach out to touch him and say that we love him.” Remember what the disciples said when they had breakfast with Jesus on the beach?
“Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because
they knew it was the Lord.”
Like the disciples with Jesus, we are stilling asking Jesus, “Who are you?” when we already know. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. Jesus is risen and you can see him everyday when you are having corn flakes for breakfast!
The story of the Easter breakfast on the beach does not record any ethical instruction by Jesus. Rather, I think this story is told to us as a kind of gracious promise. The promise is that we will go back to Galilee, resume whatever it was we were doing and take up our everyday, back to work duties. And there, Christ promises to meet us. He comes to us, he calls us, feeds us, gathers us, strengthens us, is deeply, undeniably present to us. In so doing, he redeems all of our lives, not just on Easter Sunday, but also on Easter Monday and all the days of our lives.
I want you to eat breakfast every day. Not only is it the most important meal for your health but Jesus meets us in those ordinary, routine, predictable times in our lives. Whenever you sit down or stand up for breakfast, you are once again blessed with the revelation that God will come to meet you today.
At the counter where I eat my morning breakfast, tomorrow will again be cold cereal with a banana in fat-free milk. When I pull aside the curtains and face the rising of the morning sun from the East, it will remind me again that the risen Christ comes into our ordinary and daily lives to meet us. Every day is a revelation from God that death does not have the last word and that Easter is no more special than eating corn flakes with Christ.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, in your glorious resurrection, you not only defeated evil and the powers of death but you came back to us. You revealed yourself for us; you spoke to us; you fed us. For your continuing presence with us, we give thanks. For your continuing nurture and care of us, we give thanks. All praise is yours, risen Christ. You came back to us, came back for us, that we might live with you and for you now and always. Amen.