Professor of Pastoral Theology, Care and Counseling at Columbia Seminary in Decatur
Today we have yet another of the many beautiful stories in the gospels of appearances of Jesus after the Resurrection. In Eastertide we share with the disciples in that mysterious and awesome threshold or luminal time, when we stand in between the concrete certainty of Jesus’ actual flesh and blood life here on earth, and the now-2,000-year period lived on earth by us and all followers of Jesus—ever since the Ascension and Jesus’ passing the gift of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the church, the new incarnation of Christ in us and in our forefathers and mothers in the faith. Although in this year 2009 we are very far down the corridor of time within this era of the church, every year as we dwell in these 50 days of Eastertide, we step back into a time that is not only lived out here on earth—a time when the realm Heaven reaches into our time from some unfathomable place out of time and beyond, to bridge worlds of knowing and unknowing, temporal and eternal. The Anglican Communion itself stands within this span of time almost like the blink of an eye – begun over 1500 years after Christ’s Resurrection. Even so, we are part of that larger stream of history that embraces all the faithful, who celebrate with joy all the ways in which Christ continues to be raised up in us and among us, even today!
Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;
Nay, let us be thy guests; the feast is thine;
Thy self at thine own board make manifest
In thine own Sacrament of Bread and Wine.
And so in the midst of Eastertide, today, we have this story—perhaps one of the most peculiar, in which Jesus appears again to the disciples, shows them his wounded hands and feet, eats a piece of broiled fish, and then teaches them—in effect, commissioning them and preparing them for the greater commissioning which will come to them at the time of his Ascension, and which will be sealed by the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
This particular story stands in contrast to the Emmaus Road story that immediately precedes it in Luke’s gospel. In that story, the disciples meet Jesus without realizing it as they walk along, and they recognize him only in the moment when he sits down to supper with hem and breaks he bread and blesses the wine. Then he vanishes from their sight! There is a kind of ghost story quality to that story. Jesus is not quite as corporeal. The disciples are not said to have touched him, nor actually eaten with him. He vanishes, and then they feel their hearts have been aflame. Was it really Jesus? Or was Jesus present in some symbolic way in the person of a stranger? The story is enigmatic and ambiguous. It leaves us wondering, and leaves us with an impression of mystery.
Luke tells the story we have today immediately after the Emmaus Road story to underscore the point that this risen Christ is definitively not a ghost (and he takes pains to say so right in the text of the story), not a hallucination. Luke wanted to make it very clear to his readers that these proliferating stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances were neither fanciful nor hysterical, but actual, real encounters with the Christ—immediate, embodied, and real on a very down-to-earth level.
He makes the point of saying that the disciples themselves were “disbelieving for joy and wonder.” A powerful statement of the two-sidedness of the post-Easter experience—both disbelief, and joy and wonder. As the eternal penetrated the temporal world again and again over the course of those 50 days, the disciples came to trust that joy, and to prepare themselves to be witnesses to their new conviction that Christ was still alive and in their very midst.
And so we come to that peculiar passage about Jesus asking, “Do you have anything to eat?” They gave him broiled fish, and he ate it in their presence. Hmmm. Why would the resurrected Lord of all Creation be hungry? Commentators and preachers for centuries have simply skipped over that part of the story. Why, do you suppose? Did they consider it trivial? Or just a piece of early Christian legend that was meant to add some oomph to the believability of their story? Surely Luke was impelled to include that detail, partly in contrast to the Emmaus Road story—to say, “Look, see, he showed his hands and his feet, and even ate with us.” This was no ethereal ghost but a real, down-to-earth physical experience. We also have in this a reminder not to separate spirit and body, as the early church often did as it became more influenced by Graeco-Roman philosophy, especially following the lead of St. Paul.
But I find even more in this passage about Jesus eating the fish than a kind of literalistic “proof of life.” The fish in this story is a symbol carrying multiple associations and meanings, many of which might have been quite transparent to Luke’s own readers. Fish, as a very common food in a coastal society, appear in many biblical stories going all the way back to the Hebrew Bible. While the primary use of the fish was for food, fish also came to symbolize—are you ready for this?—not only food, sustenance, life, but death! In the Book of Exodus (7:21), Moses and Aaron caused the river to turn to blood, killing the fish and polluting the water so that the Egyptians would die. In the Book of Isaiah (50:2), the death of the fish was associated with God’s rebuke against the people: “By my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a desert; their fish stink for lack of water, and die of thirst.” In Ecclesiastes (9:12), fish were associated with untimely death: “For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.” The fish in today’s gospel story, then, may represent Christ’s own death, but also the final death—the death of death itself!
Of course, sometime early in the church’s history, the symbol of the fish also came to represent Christ himself, perhaps in an association between the fish and Christ’s victory over death. The acrostic derived from the Greek letters for the word “fish”—ichthys—stood for he Greek words for “Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior.” Now the symbol of death had become a symbol of life! Jane Flaherty, a priest in Portsmouth, Virginia, once wrote, “I wonder if the practice of eating fish on Friday comes from the symbolism of the fish as Jesus’ death. Perhaps we should eat fish on Sunday as a sign of the risen Christ—not as [fasting or] penance, but as celebration.”
The activity of fishing, which so dominates the stories about Jesus’ life and the everyday lives of the disciples, also became the central metaphor for becoming “fishers of people” (John 21:19). In another resurrection story, the risen Christ directs the disciples to cast their net to the right of the boat, and they catch 153 fish! Then he broils fish for them for breakfast on the beach. Here in our story today, Jesus begins to prepare the disciples for their own commissioning, as witnesses—for which the Greek word is martys—witnesses, martyrs, and evangelists—tellers of the good news—a life-and-death commissioning that would demand their all, but which they also now trusted would give them the same victory over death that Jesus so dramatically revealed.
But there is still one more element. The fish recalls the story we heard, not long ago, about the feeding of the 5,000 on the hillside, and the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
We meet, as in that upper room they met;
Thou at the table, blessing, yet dost stand:
“This is my Body”; so thou givest yet:
Faith still receives the cup as from thy hand.
This miraculous feeding, with a great flowing abundance that resulted in baskets overflowing and even food left over, is a story of the Eucharist—Christ’s abundance that feeds us and nourishes us in both body and soul. In the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the loaves and fishes have a certain symmetry, like bread and wine. The English word “Lord” means, literally, the loaf-ward, the warden of the loaves, so when we call Jesus “Lord,” we are saying that he is the one who feeds us with the most basic stuff of life. So why did we need fishes in the miracle? Fishes have in many cultures and mythologies been a symbol for the unconscious, and for dreams. Picture golden carp flashing beneath the surface of a Japanese pond. The pairing of loaves and fishes is a pairing of here-and-now with vision, conscious with unconscious, body with mind and spirit.
So fish also is a Eucharistic symbol of Christ’s own hospitality, and Christ’s overflowing abundance. But there’s something different about today’s gospel story! Now the tables are turned. It is the disciples who feed Jesus. The gift of hospitality has been passed on to them. Jesus is now both host and guest.
Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;
Nay, let us be thy guests; the feast is thine;
Thy self at thine own board make manifest
In thine own Sacrament of Bread and Wine.
In these times when the church is so fragmented across the world, and the Anglican Communion itself struggles with so much division, this gospel message is one of both hope and challenge. The hope is that we as the church are Christ’s body, Christ’s hands and heart in this world. In spite of our brokenness, we are still united as members of this Body, and we still belong to God and to one another. This is both our hope and our joy!
And the challenge is this: When we see persons who hunger in our own time, we are called like the disciples to answer the question: “Do you have anything to eat?” And we are called to give of our abundance. In so doing, we both feed Christ himself, and become Christ for the other, just as that hungry other person has shown Christ to us, wounds, hunger, and all. It is this, and not clinging to one side of a church fight or another, one part of the worldwide church or another, that makes us Christians, and makes us Christ’s own. It is by feeding others that we are fed. By feeding others, we take the feast of the Eucharist with us into the world, truly sharing the body and blood of Christ in our own time.
One with each other, Lord, for one in thee,
Who art one Savior and one living Head;
Then open thou our eyes, that we may see;
Be known to us in breaking of the Bread.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment