What Does It Look Like to Live After the Time of Jesus on Earth?
It’s all well and good to see in the four Gospels how people followed Jesus while he was with them, but what about us as we live between Jesus’s first and second comings? Physically he’s absent from us. What does he leave us to do, to get on with? And if you’re not yet following Jesus, what would it look like for you to do so at this point in history?
Last time we saw how Thomas came to believe that Jesus was alive. He wouldn’t believe simply because the others said so — he had to see for himself, which he did. And John then concluded his Gospel to tell us that he’s written enough evidence to bring the reader of his book to believe for themselves that Jesus is alive, that he’s the Messiah and the Son of God, and so to have the life that he came to bring.
But John’s Gospel does not end at John chapter 20 verse 31. We have John chapter 21 as well, and this chapter sets up that question for us: what comes next? As Jesus leaves the stage of history, as he finishes his life on earth, what comes next for those who follow him?
And from these verses, from this miracle and this story, two things come next.
1. Fish with Jesus
So the disciples — seven of them — decide that they’re going to go fishing. You’ll remember that at least three of those named here were fishermen as their former profession. They laboured all night. You didn’t just leave your nets or your line overboard and wait; you had to cast your nets, drag them back up, and see if they had caught anything, and do it again. It was hard, back-breaking work. They did it all night and they caught not a fish. Not a sausage. Not a boot. Nothing.
And then it’s early morning, the sun’s beginning to come up, and there’s a little bit of light, and through the early morning gloomy light a hundred metres away on the shore they see a figure. And that figure says to them, “Haven’t you caught any fish?” That’s rubbing salt into the wound for them, isn’t it? Any fisherman that you might know would not be too pleased to have to admit to a complete stranger that they’ve just spent the entire night and caught absolutely nothing. It’s humiliating.
But they decide to trust this stranger — with all risk, that if they can’t see him clearly, then equally he can’t see them clearly to laugh at them later. So they say no, they haven’t. He said, “Cast your net over the other side of the boat.” They must be wondering why they hadn’t at least tried that once all night. But they do, and up comes the most enormous catch of fish.
At which point, with classic personalities — as we meet them in the Gospels — the apostle John has the fastest insight. He recognises the figure on the shore. “It is the Lord,” he says. And as soon as the others hear him say that, once again with the personality that we’ve met, Peter has the quickest action. He puts his shirt back on, because he was stripped off for work. Possibly he just thought it wouldn’t be dignified — it wouldn’t do to appear before his Lord without his shirt back on. So he sticks his shirt on and just jumps into the water, and leaves the others to do the hard work of dragging the catch back to the shore.
Later, of course, they count the fish — again, these are fishermen, you can’t catch that number and somebody doesn’t tot it up, surely — and the answer was 153. And 153 large ones. So if you go to the fish and chip shop, you know you have the option of regular fish or large fish, or if you can pass for an OAP sometimes you can get away with ordering a small fish — the rest of us don’t have that option yet. But the large is larger than most of us actually want to eat; it’s a big helping. And John wants us to know, in this account, they didn’t just catch 153 fish — they caught 153 large fish. That’s quite a lot of food for seven of them, and plenty for them to sell at the market as well.
Now, remember, in John’s Gospel the miracles are signs — they point to something beyond themselves. The question is: what does this miracle signify? What does it point to? And the answer is several different things, that we will see today and over the next couple of weeks.
But start today with this picture of fishing. Throughout the Old Testament there is often symbolic language used, so that features of the world around us are described to symbolise truths, especially in Old Testament poetry. So for example you often get stars spoken of when human leaders are being described. But here’s another one: frequently the land and land animals are used to describe the Jewish people of God, or to represent them in some way, and the sea and sea creatures are used to represent Gentile nations.
So for example, there’s one of the Old Testament prophets who was specifically sent on a mission not to the Jews but to the Gentiles. What happened to him? His name was Jonah, and you might remember he had an adventure with the sea — he got swallowed up by the sea, and then by a fish within the sea.
Let me give you one little example of this symbolism of the sea sort of representing and speaking of the Gentile nations, the foreign powers. Psalm 65 verse 7, speaking of God, describes him as the one who “stilled the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, and the turmoil of the nations.” So you see the parallel language there — two lines of the poem designed to kind of reflect and echo off each other. God stills the roaring of the seas and the roaring of the waves, and he also stills the turmoil of the nations — the nations of the world depicted as this turbulent sea.
And therefore when the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the glories of the new covenant that will come when the Messiah arrives, and when he wants to describe the peoples of all nations joining the people of God, the way he describes it is he paints a picture of water flowing from the temple in Jerusalem eastwards into the Dead Sea, and the Dead Sea as a result becomes full of fish, and therefore there are fishermen all along the shore of the Dead Sea able to catch fish. I’ve been to the Dead Sea — nothing lives in it, it’s too salty. But when this fresh water from the temple flows into the Dead Sea, it suddenly teems with fish, and that’s a picture of the life coming from God’s dealings with his people Israel, the temple overflowing and bringing life to the Gentile world as well.
So when the disciples catch a huge quantity of fish, then we are seeing what Ezekiel spoke of about to happen. Jesus came — we learned this last time — to bring life. But that life is not just for the Jewish people; that life is for all nations, as God promised that it would be.
Now, maybe this use of symbolic language in the Old Testament is new to you and you want to go and ponder that one and think about it for a bit — that’s fine. But just consider this: in the other three Gospels, much is made of the fact that the first disciples were fishermen. When Jesus calls them to follow him, he tells them they will no longer be fishing for fish but fishing for people. And in Luke’s Gospel, Luke even records that at that point a miraculous catch of fish occurred. Now Matthew, Mark, and Luke do this because of that same Old Testament background that I’ve just explained to us. So you might not be familiar with the Old Testament background, but you certainly are familiar with the stories in the other three Gospels of Jesus calling the first disciples, based on that same Old Testament background — and that same background is what is going on here.
So if John 21 is here to answer the question of what happens next after Jesus is gone, the answer is: what happens next is the good news of Jesus spreading to people of every nation on earth. Or more exactly, Jesus’s disciples taking the good news of Jesus to every nation on earth, because after all they are the ones who catch the fish. And therefore as we read John 21, the message becomes that we will take the good news of Jesus to the ends of the earth. We get to fish with Jesus.
Now, the ends of the earth sounds an awfully long way away, and some of you have lived in Kent your whole lives. Someone — I heard in the village — was reporting what someone had told them that someone had told them that someone had told them that someone had told them the vicar of Kemsing is moving to Scotland. Well, if you’ve only ever lived in Kent then Scarborough probably does feel like moving to Scotland, but I can assure you there’s a long way to go further north before you get to Scotland. But the ends of the earth sounds a long way away. Jesus isn’t telling you that you need to go to Thailand to tell people in Thailand about Jesus — not necessarily. Start with those we know. That’s how good news spreads: you tell people that you know, who tell people that they know, and so on. It’ll get to the ends of the earth that way, if you just tell people that you know.
Sometimes in modern Britain the ends of the earth come to us, wonderfully. Britain’s becoming a very cosmopolitan, diverse, and colourful place, and people who live in nations where they would never get to hear about Jesus at home can come and live here and hear about Jesus. I knew of a friend who was leading a church in east London who was seeing huge numbers of Iranians becoming Christians — Iranians who had fled persecution and oppression in Iran, come and lived in this area of east London, started coming to church, and become Christians, whereas if they’d stayed in Iran they probably would never have had that opportunity.
Some people, however, literally do end up moving house to another country to share the good news of Jesus. It doesn’t matter — a house is built one brick at a time, and the good news spreads everywhere as we share it with one person at a time. We fish with Jesus.
Now, at this point some of you are thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t know what to say if I was to share the good news of Jesus with a friend.” Well, it’s quite okay to say to your friends, “I don’t know the answer to that question that you’ve just asked me — I’ll do my best to find out.” “I don’t know” is a perfectly good answer. But everyone can say, “I’ve discovered that Jesus is alive. I’m going to follow him — will you come with me on that journey?” That’s something very simple that any Christian can say.
Maybe you’re thinking, “I’ve tried telling my friends and my family about Jesus; they just weren’t interested, they didn’t want to know.” Well, you know what — that’s exactly what the disciples would have said. They’d worked hard all night and they’d caught nothing. But remember, Jesus was the one who brought the fish in. He knew where the fish were, and he could make sure that the disciples caught them. You never know what part your work telling others about Jesus will play down the line; there could be all kinds of fruit that you will never see. It’s his project to catch fish all over the world and bring them into his kingdom. It’s not your project.
This all reminds us of John chapter 15 verse 5, before Jesus died, when he said to his disciples, “Without me you can do nothing.” So we pray, we tell people we know about Jesus, and Jesus will catch his fish.
Fish with Jesus — that’s the first thing that comes next after he’s left.
2. Be fed by Jesus
Here’s the second thing that comes next: be fed by Jesus.
Be fed by Jesus.
So catching fish is only one half of the story; the other half of the story is eating the fish. Marcus Rashford the footballer has decided that he wants to try to improve the quality of the food eaten by lots of children around this country. It’s a good project, and one of the things apparently on his menu — that he thinks lots of families could easily cook and would provide a nutritious diet for their children — are fish finger sandwiches. Well, Jesus got there first, sorry Marcus, because that is basically what’s on the beach: fish finger sandwiches. Fish with bread. But there are two important things to notice about this barbecue on the beach.
The first thing to notice is that Jesus provides the food. We see that in two ways: he enables them to catch the fish that they’ve just caught — they couldn’t have caught it without him — and then when they land on the beach he’s already got the first helping of fish on the fire, already cooking, and their catch is going to provide the seconds. So he invites them to a meal that he provides; they don’t invite him to their meal. He provides the food.
But the second thing to notice about this barbecue on the beach is the timing of the meal. The meal is sandwiched — apologies — in between the catch of fish and then the commissioning of these disciples, which begins in verse 15, which wasn’t read for us today. Now it matters that this breakfast meal happens before they are commissioned. Jesus is showing that these disciples need feeding before they can feed other people.
Now, what do they need feeding with? Well, in the story they need feeding with bread and fish. Bread and fish — ring any bells? No? In fact we’re collecting for the food bank this week, aren’t we, which is called Loaves and Fishes. Bread and fish. Ah yes — John chapter 6, the feeding of the five thousand.
Now John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand is followed by a long discussion to explain that sign, and this is not the place to open up the whole of John chapter 6 for you. But the headline is this: food in that story symbolises our need for Jesus. We need Jesus just like we can’t live without food. Food brings us life, and Jesus gives us eternal life.
So before we can feed other people with Jesus, we need Jesus. We need to feed on Jesus for ourselves. Feed on Jesus — that’s not a statement, by the way, about Communion. Communion may be picking up on that theme and reflecting on it further, but it’s figurative language for receiving Jesus so deeply, and all that he offers — taking him in until he’s part of every corner of your life. Just feed on him. Make him part of you. You have to do that before you’re commissioned in the second half of the chapter. The food comes before the commission.
It’s very easy to read and hear John’s Gospel stories like this — stories about the resurrection — and immediately your mind flits to think of all the people who would benefit from a book like John’s Gospel, or from hearing a talk like this. That’s good; that’s good to want to feed other people. But only if you’ve fed yourself first. It’s like being on the aeroplane when they give you the emergency evacuation instructions, and they say if the oxygen masks come down, you fix it around your mouth and nose and tie it securely at the back. But then they say, “If other people around you need help with their masks, make sure you put your own one on first before you help other people.” Why do they do that? Hopelessly selfish, isn’t it — do you look after number one, yourself, first? No, because if you pass out helping somebody else out, you’re not going to be a lot of use to anybody at that point. That’s the reason for it.
So: you want to help other people by taking them to Jesus and telling them of Jesus? Great, do it. But make sure you’ve fed on him for yourself first. We minister to others out of the strength that comes from feeding on him ourselves, and not out of our own emptiness. So become a Christian if you haven’t already, and then read the Bible, pray, worship, meet with his people, have fellowship — and then, as you are being sustained and fed by Jesus day by day, feed others.
So it matters that the breakfast on the beach comes before they’re commissioned. But it also matters that the breakfast on the beach comes after the catch of fish. After all, Jesus already has food cooking — it almost looks like he doesn’t need the miracle. They didn’t have to catch the fish, because Jesus already has the fish he needs. But no — it matters that this feeding comes after the fishing, because the catch of fish symbolises the hard work of telling the world about Jesus, and after that’s done they get to sit and eat with Jesus and enjoy their catch.
The Old Testament has many pictures for Jesus’s kingdom coming in. Jesus’s parables use many pictures to speak of the kingdom coming in, and one of them is the picture of a feast, of a banquet. So here’s Isaiah chapter 25 verse 6. It says, “On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine — the best of meats and the finest of wines.” And lots of Jesus’s parables start, “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who had a banquet.”
Remember the first sign that Jesus did in John’s Gospel — John chapter 2 — he produced, miraculously, somewhere between six and nine hundred bottles of the best quality red wine the world has ever seen. That’s the beginning sign at the start of John’s Gospel. Here, at the end of John’s Gospel, we have the final sign: 153 plump fish, freshly barbecued.
You see, when Jesus returns, the future for his people will be like the very best feast imaginable. Serving Jesus in the church and the world is hard work. Isn’t it wonderful to know that not only does Jesus feed us with himself to give us the strength we need to do that, but that when the work is done we will get to sit down and enjoy good food with Jesus himself? We’ll get to eat, laugh, chat, relax, and enjoy — and like them, you get to enjoy some of your catch. You see, one of the most wonderful things on that day will be that people that you have told about Jesus will be there to enjoy the food with you.
Conclusion
Jesus is not here, but he will come back. And while he’s not here, we can come to him, and we can let him feed us with himself. We can receive the life that he came to bring — feed on him on a daily basis — and so he gives us the strength to serve him, especially joining him in fishing, so that people of every nation can join his people. And then when he returns, we will feast with him, with each other, with those we’ve brought to Jesus, and each day will be better than the one before.