John 21:1-19

After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. ² Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin,^[a] Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. ³ Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

⁴ Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. ⁵ Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” ⁶ He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish.⁷ That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. ⁸ But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards^[b] off.

⁹ When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. ¹⁰ Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” ¹¹ So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. ¹² Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. ¹³ Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. ¹⁴ This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

Jesus and Peter

¹⁵ When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” ¹⁶ A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” ¹⁷ He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. ¹⁸ Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” ¹⁹ (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

The apostles Peter and Paul have been generally regarded as the two most important founding figures of the Church: Peter as the Rock upon whom the Church was built, and Paul as the first and most prolific Christian evangelist. To this day if you visit Rome, the city in which they both eventually met their deaths, the two most important church buildings are St Peter’s Basilica, built over Peter’s tomb, and the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls, built over Paul’s tomb.

I’d like you to think now about your own story of conversion. Paul’s story of conversion is basically the archetypal conversion story; the persecutor of Christians who is knocked off his horse by a blinding flash of light, and gets up again as a follower of Jesus himself. In some ways, Paul’s story is perhaps too well known, and so has come to be something of a measuring stick for comparing the strength of conversion stories; this is quite unhelpful really. How many of us have had such a conversion experience? I certainly have had moments (plural) of strongly sensing the presence of God, but there wasn’t a blinding light or even an instantaneous conversion. I believe that Jesus meets each of us where we need to be met, and no two conversion stories are alike.

The passage we heard today contained Peter’s story of conversion – or you might say, reconversion, since he has already been a follower of Jesus. The conversion stories of Paul and Peter are quite different, but also have some interesting similarities. What is fundamental to both these experiences of conversion is the experience of radical forgiveness and mercy at the hands of the risen Christ – which is why this passage is in the lectionary during the season of Easter.

It’s interesting to think of someone experiencing radical forgiveness and mercy from the one they’re already following. Unlike Paul, Peter has not been deliberately persecuting anyone. He’s a fisherman, not a religious fanatic. But when the angry mob turned on Jesus and was driving itself into a bloodthirsty frenzy, Peter, who had been so sure of his unflinching loyalty to Jesus, so sure he would never deny him, lost his nerve, gave in to his fear, and pretended he had no connections to Jesus at all. Right when Jesus most needed someone to stand up for him, Peter denied even knowing him, not once but three times. There’s a famous but challenging saying: all it takes to enable evil doers to perpetrate great evil is for good people to turn away their faces and say nothing. This is exactly what Peter had done. This is what we all have done. “What you did to the least of these, you did to me,” said Jesus on another occasion, and of course that is what is being implied when Jesus cries out to Paul, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Even in our own society, there are countless acts of mistreatment and abuse towards people, particularly towards minorities like refugees, Indigenous people, people of other faiths, people who don’t identify as heterosexual, and many others. And yet most of the time I do nothing more about it than complain over my cappuccino that someone really ought to do something. I don’t need the cock to crow to tell me I’m no better than Peter.

And Peter knew that Jesus knew. He heard the cock crow and saw Jesus cast him a penetrating look, and he knew that he knew. And even then, Peter did nothing but flee into the night, a broken man. How could he ever face Jesus again after that? Of course the next day Jesus was dead and Peter had no expectation of ever having to face him again, and perhaps that was even worse. Sometimes we would prefer to be made to face those we have failed, to express our remorse and take our punishment and perhaps in some way feel that in suffering our punishment the record is squared, and we are free to move on.

In any case, now we have this encounter on the beach. The crucified and risen Jesus is barbecuing a fish breakfast and he calls Peter to join him. John the gospel writer ties these two stories together very clearly, deliberately, and quite beautifully. Where was Peter when he denied Jesus? Standing around a charcoal fire in the chief priest’s courtyard. And where does he encounter Jesus now? At a charcoal fire where Jesus is cooking on the beach. Do you know how many times John’s gospel mentions charcoal fires? Just those two, in the entire book. It’s no accident. And how many times did Peter deny Jesus? Three times. And how many times does Jesus now ask him if he loves him? Three times. It is like Peter is being taken back to the scene of the crime, isn’t it?

So what’s that all about? Is Jesus trying to rub his nose in it? If Jesus is forgiving him, what happened to ‘forgive and forget’? Isn’t this a bit humiliating? Why does he have to first rake over the coals, so to speak?

These are important questions, and they probably go to the heart of our frequent misunderstanding of forgiveness. The phrase “forgive and forget”, which by the way is not a biblical saying at all, has been responsible for an awful lot of misunderstanding and therefore an awful lot of grief and inability to forgive and let go. It has fuelled the mistaken belief that forgiveness means pretending that something never happened. Don’t talk about it. Don’t name it. Just pretend it never happened and get over it. The truth is that nothing is surer to compromise your ability to get over it than trying to pretend it never happened. Jesus is not on about sweeping things under the carpet and doing mental gymnastics to make denial of reality look like a virtue. But he is totally on about mercy and forgiveness. Full blooded, bracing, scene-of-the-crime forgiveness.

Real forgiveness is not about pretence, denial or forgetting. Real forgiveness is about bringing the offence into the light, naming and acknowledging it fully, and then choosing not to seek to make the perpetrator pay. It is relinquishing our rights to recriminations and vengeance. It is choosing to offer only love and honour in return for hatred and hurt that have been received, but naming the hatred and hurt all the same. Jesus doesn’t hide his wounded hands and pretend that nothing happened and none of us did anything wrong by him. He reaches out to us with torn and mangled hands, and there is no way for us to reach out and accept his embrace without touching those wounded hands that speak simultaneously of our failure and Jesus’ readiness to love us anyway.

So there we stand with Peter by that charcoal fire, the second one, just as we stood with him at the first one. There is no cheap superficial forgiveness here. Jesus wants to see us healed and set free, and he knows that we never will be if the scene of the crime is not revisited. If nothing is ever said, never named or spoken of, then we will forever live with the fear that resentment is still festering and that recriminations and retaliation have perhaps just been postponed. For true healing, we need to be taken back to the scene of the crime, to in some sense symbolically reverse and undo what we did. “Simon Peter, here by the fire where you denied that you even knew me, I ask you now, do you love me?” “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” This is excruciatingly intense and painful stuff. We know it is because the author even tells us that Peter is really hurting by the third time.

We go through these same moves in our liturgy here each Sunday. Sometimes we wonder why we need to include confessions of sin in the service every week. Isn’t that all behind us? Haven’t we been forgiven and now we can quickly forget it and move on? Well, yes, we have been forgiven. But Jesus wants to forgive and heal us, and that healing always begins with fully facing up to what we have done, with revisiting the scene of the crime. That was the genius of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. The forgiveness that reconciles rather than turning its back is born in truth telling. It is also the genius of 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. If you’ve got friends who are long term 12-steppers, they will be able to tell you how essential a full and bracing honesty about one’s own failures and the abusive consequences of those failures is to their journey of recovery and rebuilding. Denial never provides a platform that can bear the weight of a reconstructed life. I’m not going to pretend that our prayers of confession in the liturgy attain even a tiny percentage of the intensity of the truth telling of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions or even an AA meeting, but the message is the same. New life begins with facing up to the failures of the old, with revisiting the scene of the crime.

And of course, during this Easter season, our liturgy also takes us to that second charcoal fire and we hear with Peter that question, “Daughters and Sons of the Earth, do you love me? Then feed my sheep.”

Why is it here, in this particularly intense exchange that Jesus starts talking about tending and feeding his lambs and sheep? Perhaps there is a bit of cheeky humour going on here. Peter the fisherman is being turned into a shepherd by a carpenter who has just told him which side of the boat to catch fish from! But underneath the irony, there is something important happening too. You see, real forgiveness is never primarily a matter of words. Jesus doesn’t seem to mention forgiveness here, nor does he in the more dramatic encounter with Paul. But real forgiveness is not in words, but in actions, and what more radical expression of forgiveness could there be than Jesus saying, “I want you to be my representative. Tend my sheep. Proclaim my message. I entrust my flock and my mission and my reputation to you. Not because I’m pretending you didn’t deny me (Peter) or persecute me (Paul), but because we have revisited that and in the face of that, you have given me your love, and I have no desire to see you humiliated or punished. Come, be free, and be my people, my representatives. Feed my sheep.”

Friends, what crime scenes might you need to re-visit? What things do we need to be wholly, completely, brutally honest with ourselves about, in order to be forgiven and set free? I wonder too: what crime scenes do we need to re-visit? What acts or non-acts of our past history need to be fully acknowledged and truly forgiven, in order for us to be set free from the past and walk into the future? And knowing that Christ’s complete forgiveness is right in front of us, made possible by the cross, how might you express your freedom in the feeding of His sheep?

Perhaps this morning is a moment of re-conversion for all of us. Here we are, standing around the charcoal fire, reminded of our crashing failure, but invited to breakfast with our crucified and risen Lord, who reaches out to us in broken bread that speaks both of the wounded hands of mercy and of the first taste of the bountiful catch, the overflowing banqueting table of heaven. So, here at the scene of the crime, where we have promised much, failed even more, and been loved far more still, in the spirit of that humbled but surprised-by-joy response of “Yes Lord, you know that I love you”, let us stand and affirm the faith of the church:

We are not alone, we live in God’s world.
We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus,
the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others by the Spirit.
We trust in God.
We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God’s presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope. 

In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us. We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.