Daily Verse Daily Verse by Faithlife | John 21:12
- Thread starter SCAdmin
- Start date
21:12–13 By taking the bread and fish and giving them to his disciples, Jesus acted as a Jewish host pronouncing the blessing at a meal (6:11, 23).
Stetzer, E. (2017). The Missional Church. In E. A. Blum & T. Wax (Eds.), CSB Study Bible: Notes (p. 1710). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.
12. none … durst ask him, Who art thou, knowing it was the Lord—implying that they would have liked Him just to say, “It is I”; but having such convincing evidence they were afraid of being “upbraided for their unbelief and hardness of heart” if they ventured to put the question.
Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (Vol. 2, p. 170). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
Breakfast by the Shore
I don’t know much about mental health, and the therapy that can produce it. But I do know a little about the healing of memories, and the finding of a forgiveness that can go back to a buried hurt, fear, failure or sin and deal with it. I have had the privilege of working pastorally with people, and watching as a deep unhealed wound was gently exposed, dealt with in love and prayer, and enabled at last to find healing.
That’s one of the things that is going on in this chapter. And it begins with the charcoal fire.
Remember the two passages that bring us to this point. In chapter 13, Peter insists, loudly and emphatically, that he at least will remain loyal to Jesus. He’s not going to let him down. He wants to follow him wherever he goes: to prison, to death, wherever. In fact, he is prepared to lay down his own life on Jesus’ behalf (13:36–37). Then, in chapter 18, we watch helplessly as Peter tries and fails. He follows, but when he gets there it all goes horribly wrong. Then, instead of getting out quickly before worse occurs, he stays and gets it wrong again. And again. Three times he denies that he’s one of Jesus’ followers (one of? He’s supposed to be their Number One). And the cock crows.
And it all happens beside a charcoal fire. Think back to the smell of that fire, wafting through the chilly April air. Think of Peter going out in shame, angry with himself, knowing that Jesus knew. Knowing that the ‘beloved disciple’ knew. Knowing that God knew. And hearing the next day what had happened to Jesus. Not even the resurrection itself could wave a magic wand and get rid of that memory. Nothing could, except revisiting it and bathing it in God’s own healing.
The charcoal fire is the start of it, and it seems from the conversation in the next section that Jesus planned it that way. But for the moment there are—well, I was going to say there are other fish to fry. That’s the point. They have caught a massive netfull: 153 fish in all, more by some way than the nets would normally hold. Enough for breakfast for the whole village.
But then there comes an interesting little exchange. Jesus is already cooking fish and bread on his charcoal fire. He doesn’t need their catch. He is well capable of looking after himself (though what ‘needs’ his risen body now has are past our comprehension). John, describing this scene, isn’t wasting words. He isn’t filling in time. John never pads out stories. He is telling us something, something about working under Jesus’ direction, something about the relation of our work to his.
How dreadfully easy it is for Christian workers to get the impression that we’ve got to do it all. God, we imagine, is waiting passively for us to get on with things. If we don’t organize it, it won’t happen. If we don’t tell people the good news, they won’t hear it. If we don’t change the world, it won’t be changed. ‘He has no hands but our hands’, we are sometimes told.
What a load of rubbish. Whose hands made the sun rise this morning? Whose breath guided us to think, and pray, and love, and hope? Who is the Lord of the world, anyway? We may be given the holy spirit to enable us to work for Jesus; but the holy breath is not independent of the master who breathes it out, of the sovereign God, the creator. Neither the institutional church nor its individual members can upstage him. Jesus welcomes Peter’s catch. He asks him to bring some of it. But he doesn’t, in that sense, need it.
Of course we are to work hard. Of course we are to be organized. Of course there is no excuse for laziness, sloppiness, half-heartedness in the kingdom of God. If it’s God’s work we’re doing, we must do it with all our might. But let’s have no nonsense about it all being up to us, about poor old Jesus being unable to lift a finger unless we lift it for him. In fact, we are much more likely to work effectively once we get rid of that paranoia-inducing notion. Jesus remains sovereign. Thank God for that.
Once again, as when Jesus emerged through the locked doors of the upper room, there is a moment where our spines tingle. ‘None of them dared ask, Who are you? They knew it was the master’ (verse 12). That is a very, very strange way to put it. It belongs with the other exceedingly strange things that are said in the resurrection accounts. They knew it was him … yet they wanted to ask, and were afraid to.
Why did they want to ask? They had been with him night and day for two or three years, and they wanted to ask who he was? I might as well wake up my own wife one morning and ask her who she is. If they didn’t know him by now they never would.
And yet. The sentence only makes sense if Jesus is, as well as the same, somehow different. No source mentions what he was wearing. No source describes his face. Somehow he had passed through death, and into a strange new world where nobody had ever been before, and nobody has yet been since—though we are firmly and securely promised that we shall join him there eventually. His body was no longer subject to decay or death. What might that have been like?
We have no means of knowing. We are in the same position that someone in the sixteenth century would have been in if they’d been shown a computer logging on to the Internet. They hadn’t got electricity in those days, let alone microchips! The difference between our present body and Jesus’ risen body is like that only more so. This is a whole new world. It isn’t magic. It isn’t ghostly. It’s real, but it’s different. God help us if we ever imagine that our normal everyday world is the sum total of all that there is. What a dull, flat, boring idea.
We must always be ready to be surprised by God. They were, that spring morning, the third time they saw him after his resurrection (did John choose, in adding this chapter, to tell a third story in order to complete a kind of perfection, as with his seven signs?). They were surprised by the huge catch. (Does John see a symbolic value in the 153 fish? Possibly. It may, by a complex piece of mathematics, stand for the completeness of the ‘catch’ that the apostles will make when they take the gospel into the world. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t 153 fish, only that by now virtually everything John says may bear different levels of meaning.) They were surprised by Jesus himself. And they were surprised, we may suppose, at themselves. Who were they? What were they doing? What was to happen next? When God ceases to surprise us, that may be the moment we have ceased to do business with him.
Wright, T. (2004). John for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 11-21 (pp. 158–161). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Stetzer, E. (2017). The Missional Church. In E. A. Blum & T. Wax (Eds.), CSB Study Bible: Notes (p. 1710). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.
12. none … durst ask him, Who art thou, knowing it was the Lord—implying that they would have liked Him just to say, “It is I”; but having such convincing evidence they were afraid of being “upbraided for their unbelief and hardness of heart” if they ventured to put the question.
Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (Vol. 2, p. 170). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
Breakfast by the Shore
I don’t know much about mental health, and the therapy that can produce it. But I do know a little about the healing of memories, and the finding of a forgiveness that can go back to a buried hurt, fear, failure or sin and deal with it. I have had the privilege of working pastorally with people, and watching as a deep unhealed wound was gently exposed, dealt with in love and prayer, and enabled at last to find healing.
That’s one of the things that is going on in this chapter. And it begins with the charcoal fire.
Remember the two passages that bring us to this point. In chapter 13, Peter insists, loudly and emphatically, that he at least will remain loyal to Jesus. He’s not going to let him down. He wants to follow him wherever he goes: to prison, to death, wherever. In fact, he is prepared to lay down his own life on Jesus’ behalf (13:36–37). Then, in chapter 18, we watch helplessly as Peter tries and fails. He follows, but when he gets there it all goes horribly wrong. Then, instead of getting out quickly before worse occurs, he stays and gets it wrong again. And again. Three times he denies that he’s one of Jesus’ followers (one of? He’s supposed to be their Number One). And the cock crows.
And it all happens beside a charcoal fire. Think back to the smell of that fire, wafting through the chilly April air. Think of Peter going out in shame, angry with himself, knowing that Jesus knew. Knowing that the ‘beloved disciple’ knew. Knowing that God knew. And hearing the next day what had happened to Jesus. Not even the resurrection itself could wave a magic wand and get rid of that memory. Nothing could, except revisiting it and bathing it in God’s own healing.
The charcoal fire is the start of it, and it seems from the conversation in the next section that Jesus planned it that way. But for the moment there are—well, I was going to say there are other fish to fry. That’s the point. They have caught a massive netfull: 153 fish in all, more by some way than the nets would normally hold. Enough for breakfast for the whole village.
But then there comes an interesting little exchange. Jesus is already cooking fish and bread on his charcoal fire. He doesn’t need their catch. He is well capable of looking after himself (though what ‘needs’ his risen body now has are past our comprehension). John, describing this scene, isn’t wasting words. He isn’t filling in time. John never pads out stories. He is telling us something, something about working under Jesus’ direction, something about the relation of our work to his.
How dreadfully easy it is for Christian workers to get the impression that we’ve got to do it all. God, we imagine, is waiting passively for us to get on with things. If we don’t organize it, it won’t happen. If we don’t tell people the good news, they won’t hear it. If we don’t change the world, it won’t be changed. ‘He has no hands but our hands’, we are sometimes told.
What a load of rubbish. Whose hands made the sun rise this morning? Whose breath guided us to think, and pray, and love, and hope? Who is the Lord of the world, anyway? We may be given the holy spirit to enable us to work for Jesus; but the holy breath is not independent of the master who breathes it out, of the sovereign God, the creator. Neither the institutional church nor its individual members can upstage him. Jesus welcomes Peter’s catch. He asks him to bring some of it. But he doesn’t, in that sense, need it.
Of course we are to work hard. Of course we are to be organized. Of course there is no excuse for laziness, sloppiness, half-heartedness in the kingdom of God. If it’s God’s work we’re doing, we must do it with all our might. But let’s have no nonsense about it all being up to us, about poor old Jesus being unable to lift a finger unless we lift it for him. In fact, we are much more likely to work effectively once we get rid of that paranoia-inducing notion. Jesus remains sovereign. Thank God for that.
Once again, as when Jesus emerged through the locked doors of the upper room, there is a moment where our spines tingle. ‘None of them dared ask, Who are you? They knew it was the master’ (verse 12). That is a very, very strange way to put it. It belongs with the other exceedingly strange things that are said in the resurrection accounts. They knew it was him … yet they wanted to ask, and were afraid to.
Why did they want to ask? They had been with him night and day for two or three years, and they wanted to ask who he was? I might as well wake up my own wife one morning and ask her who she is. If they didn’t know him by now they never would.
And yet. The sentence only makes sense if Jesus is, as well as the same, somehow different. No source mentions what he was wearing. No source describes his face. Somehow he had passed through death, and into a strange new world where nobody had ever been before, and nobody has yet been since—though we are firmly and securely promised that we shall join him there eventually. His body was no longer subject to decay or death. What might that have been like?
We have no means of knowing. We are in the same position that someone in the sixteenth century would have been in if they’d been shown a computer logging on to the Internet. They hadn’t got electricity in those days, let alone microchips! The difference between our present body and Jesus’ risen body is like that only more so. This is a whole new world. It isn’t magic. It isn’t ghostly. It’s real, but it’s different. God help us if we ever imagine that our normal everyday world is the sum total of all that there is. What a dull, flat, boring idea.
We must always be ready to be surprised by God. They were, that spring morning, the third time they saw him after his resurrection (did John choose, in adding this chapter, to tell a third story in order to complete a kind of perfection, as with his seven signs?). They were surprised by the huge catch. (Does John see a symbolic value in the 153 fish? Possibly. It may, by a complex piece of mathematics, stand for the completeness of the ‘catch’ that the apostles will make when they take the gospel into the world. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t 153 fish, only that by now virtually everything John says may bear different levels of meaning.) They were surprised by Jesus himself. And they were surprised, we may suppose, at themselves. Who were they? What were they doing? What was to happen next? When God ceases to surprise us, that may be the moment we have ceased to do business with him.
Wright, T. (2004). John for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 11-21 (pp. 158–161). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
