Fish for breakfast has always been for me a rare treat which happened either on backpack trip where there was fishing water or as a boy at our cabin in Arizona. In either case there would have been a very early morning visit to the water and some good luck plying my fishing rod. Unlike the disciples in our text this Sunday, John 21:1-19, I would not have a boatload of fish, but only one or two. Yet frying up freshly caught fish beside some hash browns, eggs, or peppers and onions is a very pleasant thought and memory.
As I will elaborate in detail on Sunday, it’s fascinating that we are given the exact number of fish caught on that post-Easter morning along the Sea of Galilee. John doesn’t tell us how the disciples came to leave Jerusalem and to be back in the place where it all started, but in verse 11 he tells there were 153 fish in the overloaded net.
In any case, Jesus asks for and presumably prepares some of the fresh fish on a fire He’s already started and serves them to His followers. Oh, to have the Lord make you breakfast!
The miraculous catch of fish confirms Jesus’ identity as the One who had initiated His call to the same fishermen with an almost identical miracle haul. At that earlier point and in a parable Jesus told in Matthew 13:47, 48, we as readers would pretty much understand the net full of fish as an image of the “fishing for people” to which the disciples were called. In Matthew 13:47, we’re told there were “fish of every kind,” which could be understood as the great diversity amid the numbers of people God will draw into His kingdom through Jesus and His witnesses.
Yet the second half of the text turns from all those fishing images to what you might feel is a warmer, gentler metaphor. As Jesus sits down with Peter to plainly confront the disciple with his betrayal, the Lord adopts another picture which has been a constant part of His ministry. Three times He tells Peter, “feed my sheep.”
I like to think those pictures, fish and sheep, are an intended contrast to let us see to necessary and inseparable parts of Christian discipleship and ministry. We are to engage in evangelism, support missions, and haul in the fish. Yet we’re not meant to simply count the catch and move on, leaving the poor creatures gasping on the shore. Those “fish” are also “sheep,” who need tending and feeding. The church of Jesus Christ is not merely to gather together as many people as possible, but to nurture and grow them up in faith and faithfulness.
So Peter the fisherman in the end is asked to become a shepherd. His traditional symbols include a boat and the “keys of the kingdom” which Jesus speaks of in another conversation with Peter. But another symbol for Peter is a shepherd’s staff.
Peter’s ministry fully understood as both fisherman and shepherd is also ours as the Christian church. We are all in some sense fish and sheep, both needing to be hooked and caught for the Lord, maybe more than once, but also in definite need of loving care and feeding. Let’s try to see each other in both ways.