As I expect many of you have done, I have visited the site of the miraculous draft of fishes on a family holiday in the Holy Land. Our children, around 10 and 12 were, I regret to report, naughtily, but perhaps understandably, irreverent about many of the supposedly numinous sites, referring to this one the Holy Breakfast BBQ and pointing out that the flat stones were still miraculously hot (it was midday in June). This was, as I say an understandable if mischievous reaction to some of the more ridiculous aspects of, mostly Franciscan, piety. Another would be the holy footprint in a stone marking the point of Jesus’ lift off for the Ascension.
It was also, however, a telling- if unwitting- response to the stories around the Resurrection in which other worldly and cosmic spiritual truth comes to be recognised in almost banally earthy ways. To some extent this is true of the Gospel accounts of Jesus more physical life and it is an inevitable consequence of the incarnation. But in the resurrection stories in all four Gospels the revelation of the mysterious is set more starkly against mundane activity, in particular eating and especially eating fish for which we must assume Our Lord had a particular predilection.
It is inevitable too that there should be some mystery about any miracle as miracles necessarily contradict the everyday and the normal. And the Resurrection was the most stupendous miracle and correspondingly more mysterious and yet made evident in physical and commonplace experience. It is through that experience, that the Evangelists want convey the sense of total belief and total trust in a very strange event. I want to ask how their accounts can help us to share that faith.
The basic narrative is more or less consistent through the four gospels, and their accounts share several features.
The prominence of the women’s witness is striking; I have mentioned the frequency of fishy n all the accounts, meals. Nearly all have Jesus explaining how the crucifixion and Resurrection fulfil the scriptures- although giving no detail as to just how that is. In each account it’s decidedly odd that not one of His companions of at least three years recognise the risen Jesus at first, and when they do, it by his gestures and voice, not it seems, his appearance. Touching him, however, is treated ambiguously; Mary Magdalene is told to let go. Thomas although invited to touch Jesus actually, comes to his realisation before doing so. There’s an ambiguity too in where the recognitions happen but the consensus is that the disciples should return to Galilee and in John, back to there old lives as fishermen. Finally, the Evangelists agree that Jesus leaves instructions to his disciples which essentially create a missionary church; baptising, healing, forgiving.
The first thing we might take away from this is that men should give a little more credit to women’s evidence-in this case they got it right first. The real point here, however, is a legal one; women’s testimony was not generally accepted in law. The Gospel writers’ point is not just an early (and well justified) feminist one but also a hint that we need to look beyond forensic evidence to find the deeper truth. And clearly none of the disciples or women would have picked out Jesus on an identity parade. They needed- and we need- to recognise him by less direct but more telling means.
The two disciples on the way to Emmaus realise afterwards that they had unwittingly recognised him when he explained the scriptures with such
authority. For Mary in the garden, it is enough that Jesus says her name. For the eleven in the locked room, it is the words “Peace be with you” . Our liturgical use of that phrase makes us forget just how commonplace it is- “Shalom” or “Salaam” mean little more than “Hello”- but to the frightened disciples it’s enough to recognise Jesus. For Peter and John after a night’s fruitless fishing it is Jesus telling them to cast their net the other side. From these sudden recognitions, we may learn to try to find the voice of Jesus in our lives. We can perhaps recognise that sudden note of divine authority when we hear or read some verse or phrase which carries a strange but compelling truth. Or we might equally see and feel it in some small gesture of love and friendship offered and received without contrivance or condition.
The most striking recognition owes everything to gesture as Jesus when he breaks bread at dinner in Emmaus, which is plainly a vivid reminder of his actions at the Last Supper. A vivid reminder and repetition which the church has institutionalised as the Eucharist. The church’s emphasis on the Eucharist should not mean we do not appreciate that we can encounter, and understand something of Jesus’ nature and his gospel in other more earthy meals, even a picnic of grilled fish or indeed in any communal activity, where two or three are gathered together.
Finally, the return to Galilee and for Peter and John a return to their old life as fishermen, is perhaps telling us that we need not think Jesus is only to be found in Holy places. Jerusalem- Holy Salem- was indeed where the crucial events of Jesus life happened and perhaps, they had to take place in there but where we carry out His message and where we live the Gospel
will not be primarily in church but in our daily lives, in our homes or at our work.
I do not mean to suggest that we should look at the accounts of the resurrection as somehow coded advice on how to encounter Jesus, but I think it’s clear that the gospel writers want to tell us that the way the risen Jesus was recognised and his message understood , although powerfully compelling, was not as straightforward as it was in his pre-resurrection life. And while we will be engaged and instructed by the teaching and the healing of his earlier ministry, it is the risen Jesus whom we may now hope to encounter and understand both mysteriously and in the mundane. Amen