We have walked together the eight days that began with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. We have encountered the empty tomb, and we have heard the story of the women dismissed and mistrusted. We have met Jesus appearing suddenly to his friends through a locked door. We have heard from a disciple who needed to touch Jesus’ wounds to believe, and then we heard him declare, “My Lord and my God!”
But today’s story is different. Now the timeline is fuzzy: we know this is some time later, but we don’t know how much later. And the story has changed locations. We were in Jerusalem, but now we’re back Galilee, where everything began. Simon Peter announces to his friends, “I’m going fishing,” and his friends respond, “We’ll come along!”
I asked the folks in the Bible Study this week: Why do you think they went fishing? What was going on? We talked about the chaos of it all, the confusion, mingled with the joy. The fact that everyone had experienced the shock of Jesus’ crucifixion and then the shock of his resurrection, with no real time to process either shock—not to mention the grief.
Fishing is a great thing to do when you’re grieving, and you’re not sure you want to talk about it, but you also don’t want to be alone. As one of our members said, when life gets chaotic, hurtful, or confusing, sometimes you have to say to yourself, “I’m gonna go do something I understand…”
Image: Koenig, Peter. Breakfast on the Beach, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58541 [retrieved April 27, 2022]. Original source: https://www.pwkoenig.co.uk/.