John 21:1-19, from the Third Sunday after Easter
I’ve always focused on the redemption aspect of this familiar story. The risen Jesus and Peter are walking by the Sea of Galilee, their first recorded contact since Peter denied Jesus three times during the run-up to Good Friday. Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Peter replies each time that he does, and Jesus responds with some version of, “OK, then feed my sheep.”
It is, of course, a beautiful scene of forgiveness and restoration, and my tendency to see it as exclusively about that stems, no doubt, from my personal tendency to screw up Peter-style. Jesus and I have had many such walks, and there surely will be many more before my life is done.
But in focusing on Peter’s restoration, I think I’ve overlooked something both important and obvious: The sheep are hungry. And doesn’t it seem odd, at least initially, that they would be, or that someone would have to look after them? It’s Easter! The tomb is empty! Sin and death have lost! What’s left to do except celebrate in the winner’s circle?
Plenty, it seems. Easter changed the world, but it didn’t change everything about the world. Sin, suffering and death remain. If you don’t know that, I can’t imagine what sort of gated Happy Land community you’ve been living in. Our own lives and the lives of those around us are full of pain, need, sickness, oppression, injustice and worse. Easter didn’t eradicate these evils. Instead, Easter called us to join God and one another in the fight against them, and where they remain, they remain, more often than not, because some of us have failed to heed that call.
It’s often a costly call to heed. Hungry sheep aren’t always cute and fluffy, you know. Sometimes, they look more like filthy refugees, or dangerous convicts, or people sick with some terrible contagion, or people who will snatch the help you offer, rob you of everything else you have, and curse you for bothering them. As if to underscore the point, Jesus told Peter that trouble was coming. “When you were younger, you dressed yourself and went where you wanted,” Jesus said. “But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”
Peter died, church tradition holds, as an old man, crucified, like his Lord, but upside-down.
The sheep are hungry, Peter. Hungry enough, perhaps, to devour you. But feed them nonetheless, because that is the work Easter restores us to do.
