Have
you ever heard of Fred Snodgrass? Fred Snodgrass is remembered for one mistake that he made in his life—a mistake which
many people would never let him forget. Fred Snodgrass was a baseball player. He
played center field for the New York Giants. During the 1912 World Series, the NY Giants were playing the Boston Red Sox.
The score was tied in the tenth inning. A
Red Sox batter hit a “fly ball” which fell right into the mitt of Fred Snodgrass—and he dropped it! The Red Sox’s team went on to win the game, the World Series—and the error
Fred Snodgrass committed stuck with him for the rest of his life. When he died 62 years later, his NY Times obituary read,
“Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.” Fred Snodgrass’
life became defined by that one failure.
That is how the church might
have remembered Simon Peter – “Simon Peter, Fisherman; Denied his Lord in 33 AD.” Even after Peter had become an elder in the Church, The church never forgot Peter’s failure—the
church wrote it in all four of the gospel accounts! They wanted every Christian to know how Peter had been sitting around
the fire on a cold night, while inside the courtroom Jesus was being tried for his life. A
servant girl recognized Peter as one of Jesus’ disciples. Peter then had
fervently denied three times even knowing Jesus, much less being one of his disciples. Recognizing
his failure, Peter then went away and wept.
The church remembered that
failure, and Peter remembered that failure. Moreover, if the gospel story had
ended with Jesus’ burial in a borrowed tomb, that likewise would have been the end of Peter’s story. That failure would have defined his entire life. Peter had seen the empty tomb, but an empty tomb proved
nothing. Most likely Peter also had been with the other disciples when Jesus
had appeared in the Upper Room on Easter. Yet, there seemed to be a story left
untold, the story of how Jesus had restored Peter as his disciple.
Therefore, the writer wrote
an epilogue to his gospel story—in our Bibles, it is found in chapter 21. In
that epilogue, the disciples have left Jerusalem,
and they have gathered by the Sea of Galilee. Simon Peter was there along with Thomas, Nathaniel, James, John, and
two others. Later in the story, we will learn that John, the beloved disciple,
was one of those two unnamed disciples. Beside that same Sea of Galilee was where Jesus had called several
of his disciples only three years earlier. They had returned there, because they were in emotional overload.
Within a week’s time,
they had experienced the high of Palm Sunday’s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem—they had experienced Jesus’
driving the merchants from the Jerusalem Temple—they had celebrated a Passover meal like never before—there had
been the emotional prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane—the armed arrest of Jesus—their flight into the night in
order to save their own skins—the three denials by Simon Peter—the jeering mob—the bloody and painful crucifixion—and
finally, Jesus’ burial in a borrowed tomb. Then came those other experiences
that brought an emotional overload of another sort – the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances. After such a traumatic week, they were numb—they needed space and time in order to assimilate all
that had happened.
They moped about. Impulsively, Peter spoke up and told everyone that he was going fishing. They all then followed his lead
and headed for the boats. That may seem strange to some today. But that is how
we humans react to emotional overloads in our lives—we return to those familiar routines of our lives where we can sort
out the confusions we are experiencing. That is why so many of us have our “comfort
foods” that we eat, especially when we feel “stressed-out,” because they remind us of a simpler time when
life seemed to make sense. For Simon Peter, returning to fishing was his way
of dealing with all the confusion of his life.
Yet even in his familiar
routine of fishing, Peter did not find relief. Peter and his friends had been
fishing all night, and yet they had caught nothing. Peter felt that he had failed
to live up to being Jesus’ disciple. Now he could not even catch fish.
He needed help!
The day was breaking. They were exhausted. They had pulled their
nets back into their boat, and they were rowing toward the shore. As they rowed,
they saw a stranger standing on the shore. As they got closer, the stranger called
out to them—telling them to cast their nets on the other side of their boat. Desperate, they did as he had directed
them. Without warning, they hit such a catch that they had difficulty pulling
it all in. The disciple John was filled with amazement over the miracle that
he was experiencing. Moreover, through that miracle, he recognized that Jesus was the stranger on the shore. He shouted to
Peter next to him in the boat, “It is the Lord!” Peter, who had been
fishing wearing only a loin cloth, put some dry clothes on. Then, unable to wait until the boat could reach the shore, Peter
impatiently jumped into the water getting his clothes soaked, swimming and wading to shore as fast as he could.
When he arrived on shore,
he discovered that Jesus had been busy building a fire. Jesus was frying some fish for them to eat for breakfast. Sitting
around that fire, Jesus did not reprimand Peter for his failures on that cold night outside the courtroom. Instead, Jesus
broke the bread as he had broken the bread countless times before, and he handed each one of them a piece of fish to fill
their empty stomachs. As he fed them, they remembered how Jesus likewise had
fed bread and fish to those thousands on that hillside only months before.
When they all had finished
breakfast, perhaps Peter and Jesus took a walk on the beach. During that walk, Jesus asked Peter 3 questions—questions
that paralleled Peter’s threefold denial of him. In asking Peter those
three questions, Jesus was giving Peter was given the opportunity to fill in the hole in his life that he had dug for himself. However, even more so, through asking those three questions, Jesus was defining Peter’s
discipleship for his life.
“Simon”, Jesus asked,
“do you love me?” Peter remembering his failures replied, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” And,
each time Peter answered that same question, Jesus followed with a simple command, “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.”
The early Christians could
not forget Peter’s story, because they saw themselves in that story. They knew that regardless of how inspiring particular
moments in their faith might have been—that they, too, had denied Christ through their acts of omission and commission.
There further had been those times during which they had thrown up their hands and asked, “What difference had Easter
made in their lives?”
Perhaps in these days following Easter, like
Peter, we too need to be able to recognize Jesus’ presence in our lives. Daily
the news media showers us with stories of earthquakes about the world that are killing thousands of people—in our country
our Congress seemed locked in battles between the major political parties—thousands are still out of work and homes
still are being lost—our young men and women continue to fight in an unpopular war that seems to have no end in sight—and
the other day, 29 miners were killed in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine. Death and illness seem to threaten our
lives on a daily basis. Like Peter and the other disciples, we ask, “What
difference has Easter made in our lives?”
What Jesus did for Peter,
Jesus does for us today. What Jesus told Peter, Jesus tells us today. Jesus feeds
us through God’s Word proclaimed in worship, and he feeds us his “soul food” in the Lord’s Supper.
Besides feeding us, he charges us to model our own daily ministries upon his ministry unto us.
And, as we follow his lead, he will lead us to places yet unknown—and through it all we will grow in our perception
of what it means to be Christ’s disciple. THEREFORE, THE QUESTION THEN
FOR US IS NOT, “WHAT DIFFERENCE HAS EASTER MADE IN OUR LIVES?” RATHER,
THE QUESTION IS TO BE, “WHAT DIFFERENCE HAS EASTER MADE IN THE WAYS THAT WE REACH OUT IN CHRIST’S NAME TO THOSE
IN NEED?”
We know that Peter followed
Jesus’ lead. Moreover, tradition says that Peter’s witness led to him being crucified upside down on a Roman cross.
Yet it is not Peter’s death that we remember, but rather Peter’s
witness in his life. Likewise, it is not our responsibility to worry about the
future of the church. Rather, it is our responsibility, right now, to follow Jesus’ lead in being his disciple today.
Our faithful witness today is what matters. As
we do so, I believe that the church will continue to witness 2000 years from today.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer has
written these words: “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he comes to those men
who knew him not. He speak to us the same word, ‘follow thou me!’
and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in
the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they
shall learn in their own experience who he is.” (The Quest for the Historical Jesus)
