Fishing, fish, charcoal - déjà vu?

The Gospel for the 3rd Sunday of Easter begins with 7 disciples including Peter returning to a place and an activity where they first met Our Lord and heard the Lord’s call, Galilee [John 21:1-19]. It is very much a moment full of previous moments and it feels like déjà vu! Two of the disciples are not named but 5 are. Peter, who represents leadership and action as he leads the apostolic ministry, as we see in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles [5:22-32, 40-41]. Thomas the twin who represents the importance of asking questions and seeking answers, in other words, he is the theologian in all of us. The sons of thunder, James and John, are the sons of Zebedee and are brothers. James is often called James the Great, as opposed to James son of Alphaeus who was called James the Less, and was the first of the Apostles to be martyred; he was martyred by King Herod. John who represents the beloved disciple is the disciples closest to Our Lord’s heart and is called the Beloved disciple, the one Jesus loved as he cleaved to the heart of Jesus. Nathaniel, the disciple without guile, has that straight talking simplicity found in children and which Our Lord praised. All of these named disciples articulate the qualities that should be found in all of us.

They went back to Galilee. They are back at the beginning and it is there at the beginning that a new beginning begins when Jesus appears to them. He shows them that all their pasts with him now find their home in him. When he appears to them they find that these past words, acts, happenings and locations feel like déjà vu moments for the Risen Jesus meets them and they all feel it is a familiar meeting, a meeting full of familiar words, actions and happenings in a very familiar place where Jesus first met them and now Our Lord uses it to give them a sense of coming home. A coming home that will lie in the future on the otherside of their sufferings, deaths and martydoms and it will be a home built out of their words, their actions, their happenings and their locations where they served him in that self same mission that was his on earth!

For Peter, it is the beginning of mercy as, unlike Judas, he did not despair of the mercy of the Lord. Indeed, given that all the disciples, save John, had run away then Peter’s reconciliation with the Lord also meant their reconciliation with the Lord too. For if Jesus forgave Peter who like the other disciples had run away but who added to it a three-fold denial of knowing Jesus, then these disciples too have a second chance. Here is a new beginning offered by the Gospel for they now experience it as the Good News of the second chance.

Peter was clearly in mourning for both the death of the Lord and his denial of him. But Peter’s mourning—while painful—brings him to the truth and ultimately to a true and full repentance. For Pope Benedict, the key difference between Peter and Judas here is that Peter’s mourning includes a glimmer of hope and a sense of God’s infinite mercy. And this gives Peter the chance to start over; moved by God’s grace and having come face to face with his own weakness, now he is ready to let God work through him in an even more powerful way. Pope Benedict writes in ‘Jesus of Nazareth’: “Struck by the Lord’s gaze, he bursts into healing tears that plow up the soil of his soul. He begins anew and is himself renewed”.

This then is the way of the spiritual life and the path to sanctity as taught by countless saints, and it requires us to recognize:

(1) our brokenness and

(2) God’s infinite mercy.

If we only think about God’s infinite mercy, we may end in the sin of presumption; but if we only think of our brokenness, we’ll end in despair like Judas.

But Christian hope mediates between the two—recognizing on the one hand our true brokenness, that we are nothing without God; but also on the other hand, never losing sight of the infinite and inexhaustible richness of God’s mercy.

This is the way God sees us:

God sees us as broken and wounded and so he longs to heal and transform us;

only when we are “poor in spirit”—when we face up to our brokenness — that we will know our true need for healing and our real need for salvation;

when we recognise that we are broken and that we cannot fix, heal or save ourselves then and only then can we can know our need for God;

for God desires to engage, heal, and transform us at the very deepest levels of our being but he can do nothing for us till we turn and surrender our lives to him.

When we think we can “do it ourselves,” we hinder God’s work in our lives. In God’s providence, sometimes our failures are there to teach us that very lesson for in the words of a wise priest, ‘failure can be a sacrament of resurrection.’

Here is an important dimension of mercy for all of us, especially in our families. For the mercy offered to Peter and the other disciples is concrete and not abstract that is why Jesus asks Peter three times ‘Do you love me?’ For mercy is built on repentance and as Peter denied Jesus three times so the Lord asks him three times ‘’Do you love me?’ We all need to do penance so that our experience of mercy is known by us to be real and thus to be remembered like Peter’s.

Mercy is never cheap grace, rather mercy always costs us and that cost is the cost of true, heartfelt and full repentance for only the truth can set us free. But whatever mercy may cost us in repentance we must always keep in mind what and who paid the cost of this mercy that spells our redemption - Our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross!

So, we find in this scene in Galilee by the sea with Jesus and the seven disciples is a build up things, words and actions that spell out a complex series of ‘déjà vu’ moments which strongly point to new beginnings built out of past happenings, such that pre-Easter beginnings are now made into an Easter re-configuration of those first contacts that occurred between Jesus and the Apostles and all of which open out to a new future and a new horizon that comes together in the eternal realm:

Our Lord’s greeting from the shore to the disciples in the boat when he calls them ‘friends’ - a déjà vu moment for it echoes the words Our Lord spoke to his disciples at the Last Supper when he said that he no longer calls them servants but friends [John 15:15];

the command to put out their nets again on the starboard and they catch 153 fish - a déjà vu moment for it echoes the time when Our Lord said to them to put out into deep water and prepare for a catch and what a catch [Luke 5:4];

Peter impetuously jumps into the water at the words of John ‘It is the Lord’ - a déjà vu moment for it echoes another time when Peter impetuously goes to the Lord across the water [Matt 14:22-33];

the bread and the fish - a déjà vu moment for it echoes the feeding of the 5000 [John 6],

the charcoal fire - a déjà vu moment for it echoes the time Peter denied Our Lord three times [John 18:17-18ff] ;

the stepping forward, blessing and giving of both bread and fish - a déjà vu moment for it echoes Jesus blessing bread and fish at the feeding of 5000 [John 6] at the Last Supper [Matthew 26; Luke 22] ;

Our Lord asking three times ‘Do you love [agapas me] me…Do love [agapas me]…Do you love [phileis me] me? - a déjà vu moment for it echoes Peter’s three denials that he knew Jesus [John 18:17ff].

To put these déjà vu moments in terms that Mark Twain puts it “History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”, so too does it happen in salvation history including our own! For there are no coincidences in the life-story of a Christian only God-incidences and when things come in threes in our lives we better pay attention to what the Lord is pointing out, as did Peter and these six disciples!

Whether our déjà vu moments are echoes of the past or the echoes of the future it shows that our lives have a meaning that weaves in and out of our own intentions, purposes and decisions. It may well be that these déjà vu moments are a breakling into our present consciousness by a future awareness that all of us will have before the Lord’s Judgment seat as He takes us through our lives and sheds light on what happened and why it happened. And so puts our future self in touch with that past self that made that past decision in response to that past happening that will be viewed from our point of view in eternity - which we experience now as a déjà vu moment but one that is from the future!