Fish for Breakfast
After the Resurrection, Jesus invited the disciples to breakfast and fed them fish. Image credit: Spence, Basil, Sir, 1907-1976. Coventry Cathedral - Fish, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54901 [retrieved April 2, 2024]. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelhut/4040236955/.
In the sacred myth of Easter, Jesus showed up at Lake Galilee to greet his fisherfolk disciples at dawn. First he directed them to a spot where they caught a huge haul of fish. Then he beckoned them to a campfire where he had prepared fish and bread for them. “Come and have breakfast,” he said.
Come and have breakfast! That’s all the theology I need. Might be all the theology you need, too. Because it’s about welcome. It’s about sharing. It’s about intimacy, yes? Because there’s something sweet about sharing breakfast right after a night’s sleep. It’s about informal, open-ended connection without expectations – dinner seems serious, breakfast, not so much.
Come and have breakfast! It’s a new day. The past three days are as past as the past three years, as past as the past three decades, as past as the past billion years. We are biologically evolved to sleep in order to clear and reset our brains so we can think new thoughts, do new things, live new life in another day. At breakfast we resurrect and start over. Born again. Every breakfast is Easter.
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Mysterious, isn’t it, that Jesus fed fish to his fisherfolk friends? Where did he get the fish, so early in the morning, without a boat and a net? That the crucified Jesus was standing on the shore was mind-boggling enough, but the disciples must have been further boggled by the breakfast. In this Easter myth, magic is at work – but people are at work, too. The disciples relied on Jesus’ magic to find the fish, but they still had to haul them into the boat – hard physical work. Jesus used magic to get some of the fish, but he still had to fillet them and put them on planks to cook them on the fire for his friends.
It seems like magic when we get second chances, when we recover from disease or disaster, when relationships reconcile after painful breaks, when we find joy in the midst of suffering. But there’s still work involved in resurrection. We have to do our parts in order to experience positive transformation. We must do the work of forgiveness, we must do the work of justice and peace making, we must do the work of patient, open-hearted listening. Come, and have breakfast, and get energized for resurrection for a new day!
Come and have breakfast! It means that God is not pie in the sky when you die. It says that God is here, in the form no less and no more than of Love. God isn’t far away, some cosmic abstraction. The divine Love that is God is viscerally present, available to encounter in person here and now... on earth.
Easter has cosmic consequences!
It’s hard for us today to appreciate the full significance of Holy Week for early Christians. A careful reading of the New Testament reveals that they believed that the life and death of Jesus represented a transformation of the structure of the universe. A transformation from a distant God in the highest heaven to a fully present God on earth.
In the sacred myth of Passion Week in the New Testament, there is the passage in which the curtain in the temple in Jerusalem is torn in half at the moment of Jesus’ death. This was the curtain that separated the chief priest from the “Holy of Holies” in the temple, signifying the distance between God and humanity. And there was darkness in the sky, and an earthquake. This represents the belief by early Christians that until the Christ came to the world, God ruled over the earth from a distance, from far away in the highest heaven. When Jesus died, that changed in a way that was literally earth-and-sky-shattering. It was as if a huge crack formed through the “seven heavens”, through which God, through the Christ, would commune and connect directly and personally with people on earth.
Today, given what we know about the nature of the cosmos, all this seems quaint! But there is an enduring cosmic significance in the gospel myth of the crucifixion and resurrection.
The Easter story represents a turning point in the natural history of the cosmos. At least in one tiny corner of the vast universe, at least in one short stretch of cosmic time, love emerged and flowered. A love so complete, so full, so extreme, that it extended beyond the merely natural affection of parents for children, children for parents, friends for friends. A love so overflowing that it extended even to one’s enemies.
It was wondrous enough that at least on our little planet in our little backwater of the universe, a mother would risk her life to protect her child. But it was a yet more supreme wonderment of cosmic evolution when a person lovingly offered forgiveness to the people who killed him. This turning-point in the evolution of love belongs to humanity as a whole. It emerged over time within a variety of civilizations. But Christianity expressed it in a particularly vivid and compelling way.
The story of Easter is a myth that expresses an actual, historical event of enormous significance for the entire universe: the emergence of higher consciousness that goes above and beyond primal instincts, a higher consciousness that embraces the cosmos as a whole – despite all its cataclysms. An event that might be summed up in Jesus’ invitation on the beach: “Come, and have breakfast!”
At Easter, we re-awaken that higher consciousness in ourselves, and re-commit to embodying it in the ways we live and treat each other. It’s the deeper meaning of what the early Christians declared when they said “Christos anesti! Alethos anesti!” – “Christ is risen – he is risen indeed!”