Jesus Appears to his Disciples (and eats a fish)

[00:00:04] Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our father and from our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:12] I want to start by highlighting a theme in the imagery today in the intro it and in the collect of the day. And this imagery is always in the hymns. [00:00:25] It's this imagery of God coming down and bringing us up. [00:00:34] So, for example, I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me. [00:00:44] Or, O Lord, you have brought me up. You brought up my soul from Sheol. Sheol is. Is a word for death. And specifically, though it calls to mind a place, it's death in the ancient world was like the place of the dead was pictured as being under the earth. [00:01:07] So you've brought up my soul, my life from Sheol. You restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit. [00:01:20] And then in the prayer, and I'll just pray it again, O God, through the humiliation of your son, you raised up the fallen world. Grant to your faithful people, rescued from the peril of everlasting death, perpetual gladness and eternal joys, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. [00:01:44] So through the humiliation of your son, humiliation is like being made low. Right? Or I guess in his case, humbling himself. Right. So through the humiliation of your son, you raised up the fallen world. You see the sort of the dual movement of humiliation of the son of God and then raising up the fallen world from the pit, from low down. [00:02:11] And finally, we'll do one from the hymn set heart and will on things above. So this is Christ come down, be present with us, and reorient us upward. We'll just leave it at that. [00:02:31] All right. So, Jesus, in this resurrection account, we've been kind of hitting all the resurrection accounts in the lectionary. Now, this morning we're in Luke, and in this resurrection account, Jesus comes to them, and they're afraid. [00:02:51] So they were startled. [00:02:54] Even though he said, peace to you, they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And he said to them, why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts now? Notice? Arise. I just want to point that out. Might as well they arise in their hearts, right? Doubts are kind of lower down like they arise. Okay, sorry. See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. [00:03:25] And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, have you anything here to eat? They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it before them. [00:03:38] It's really me. It's really me, guys. And, like, not just as a spirit, you know, I'm not, like, coming back in this sort of half existence or something like that, right? I've been raised from the dead. Physically. It's me. My body. [00:03:54] My body. [00:03:56] Okay. Here's the beautiful thing about that. One of the beautiful things about that, I suppose we were just celebrating Christmas a few months ago, the word becoming flesh, and now he's saying, here's my flesh risen from the dead. [00:04:10] Paul calls us flesh when he's talking about our sinful nature. His flesh represents what's lowest, okay? In us. [00:04:20] He's raised that up. That has been raised from the dead, and he has taken up human nature, us, what we are. He's taken it up into his life. And now we see it risen from the dead, and we see the son of God, God in the flesh, calling it his own. It's me. [00:04:43] This is me. [00:04:47] What a gift. It's a gift. Because he's taking us up into his life. He's taking our nature up into his life. [00:04:56] There's an ancient saying that was, I guess, spoken by multiple of the church fathers, like Athanasius in the fourth century and Cyril in the fifth century especially, kind of famously. [00:05:13] But it's like this. God became what we are so that we might become what he is. [00:05:19] And they don't mean, like, replacing God, but that. Well, first he made us in his image, but then he sends Christ down from heaven in order to draw us up into his own life. [00:05:35] I think that's what he's doing when he says, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have. [00:05:42] What does that phrase flesh and bones make you think of in scripture? [00:05:47] Flesh and bones. [00:05:51] Creation. Yeah, yeah. And the creation of Eve specifically, maybe. Right? Eve is made from a. From Adam's side. And Adam says, this, at last, is me. [00:06:01] That's me. Right? Remember, he named all the animals, but no one was like him. And he says, that's me. He says, flesh of my. Flesh and bone of my bones. Talking about Eve. That's me. [00:06:16] And Jesus says, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. He says, I'm you. [00:06:23] You're me. I'm taking you up into my life. You see me risen from the dead, I just came through. Death to life, never to die again. [00:06:32] I'm you, you're me, he says, this downward movement. Christ humbling himself to the point of death even death on a cross taking the lowest place and then exalting us. [00:06:50] That's why John expresses kind of with amazement, see what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God. That God would exalt us like that. [00:07:03] That's all his love. That's his generosity that knows no end. See what kind of love the father has given to us. That we should be called children of God. And so we are in Christ. [00:07:21] All right, I'm gonna. I'm gonna pause. [00:07:24] My wife says I should be more interesting in sermons, so I'm gonna. [00:07:29] I'm just kidding. Not really, but I'm going to tell you a riddle, all right? So this is a riddle from the Hobbit. And note. You remember riddles in the dark. That chapter takes place in the lowest place. [00:07:50] They were going over the mountains. The Hobbit and the dwarves, they were going over the mountains. They sleep in a cave. Goblins come and take them down deep into the mountain and then they're running away. They end up, like, at the lowest place under the mountain. And that's where they meet Gollum, this guy, you know, who's been. Well, living in a pit in a dark place for a long time, on water. And so there's. He's in the pit, there's darkness, there's water, and he eats fish raw. Okay. [00:08:22] Not the most pleasant place, okay? But he and the hobbit, Bilbo, have this competition of riddles. And here's a riddle that Gollum says. [00:08:36] Alive without breath, as cold as death. [00:08:40] Never thirsty, ever drinking, all in mail, never clinking. [00:08:47] Nobody shouted out, all right, raise your hand. [00:08:52] No, I'm gonna say it one more time, just for fun. Alive without breath. As cold as death. Never thirsty, ever drinking. All in mail. Never clinking. [00:09:04] And the answer is a fish. [00:09:09] Right? A fish alive without breath. It is pretty unusual. Usually we think of living things as having breath, right? Alive without breath. It's cold as death. [00:09:20] Never thirsty, ever drinking. [00:09:25] All in male. Never clinking. [00:09:29] It's kind of neat that J. R. R. Tolkien would structure this way because that's the thing about fish. They kind of live in opposite world. [00:09:39] Like everything else breathes, but they don't breathe right. And we talked about breath last week, right. Breath has to do with life. It also has to do with meaning. We speak with breath. [00:09:52] That's a lot of the imagery in why the Holy Spirit is pictured as breath. [00:09:58] So alive without breath, and then never thirsty, ever drinking. It's kind of an opposite world down there where nobody else can live, right? [00:10:08] Well, Christ has come down and lifted us up out of the pit, out of death, out of chaos. You could say that we, with our sinful nature, live in opposite world by our sinful nature. I'm not talking about now that we're redeemed. Right? But sin is kind of opposite world. It's thinking that wrong is right. It's believing the lie of the devil. [00:10:38] Because of sin, we were kicked out of the garden and into the wilderness. And our fallen nature wants to embrace the wilderness, wants to go against God's word that created reality. [00:10:56] We live in opposite world. If we reject God and just continue in that way and think that life can be found apart from the creator of life, we live in opposite worlds. So fish. Fish are a very good picture for fallen humanity. And so Christ says to his disciples that he's going to make them fishers of men, because you know what happens when you pull a fish out of the water? [00:11:24] It dies. [00:11:27] And speaking of baptism, Paul says, so you must consider yourself dead to God and alive. Dead to sin. Get that? Right? Dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, right. New life in Christ requires a kind of death. It requires repentance. It requires the drowning of the old Adam. Right. Death to sin and then being alive. It's death to opposite world. That's not the reality anymore. [00:11:54] So another interesting thing is that fish have to be. Well, you know, sushi is great. It's really good food. But, you know, normally you would cook fish, and cooking something is a. It's a way of refining it, right? You put it in the fire, and all the germs that would make you sick burn up, right? And they're gone. Right. It purifies the fish and simplifies it and makes it edible. So there's a process of refinement and gollum down there, he's been pretty messed up by evil for a really long time, and he's down there eating raw fish, right? But, okay, Christ eats broiled fish. [00:12:38] That word broiled, it could be roasted. The key is it's over a fire. All right? So I'm going to say he eats refined fish, fish that's been refined for human consumption. [00:12:52] So let's go back a step and kind of recover the beginning of the sermon here. Christ has come down in order to draw us up and take us up into his life. He's taken our nature and made it his own. So that he's saying, flesh are my flesh and bone of my bones, essentially, right? I have flesh and bones. See, I'm you and you're me. I've risen from the dead for you, to take you up into my life. [00:13:17] And then he eats a fish. Now, on the one hand, he eats a fish to say, look, flesh and bones, right? I'm eating. I'm really here. A spirit wouldn't eat, right? Okay, but there's more going on here, right? He's told his disciples, I'm going to make you fishers of men. He's called men. Fish. [00:13:39] Human beings fish. [00:13:42] And he takes the fish up into his life, right? That's what we do when we eat things. [00:13:50] We make it our body. We take this thing up into our own life. [00:13:54] He takes the fish and he eats it, incorporates it into his own body. [00:14:01] This refined. It's refined fish, thanks be to God. You and I, we are fish. And Christ takes us up into his life, incorporates us into his body, and not just us. Right? But he says, well, he opens their minds to understand the scriptures, and then he says to them, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day, rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Repentance and forgiveness. You could say death and life, that this would be proclaimed to all nations. [00:14:49] You and I, we're part of all nations, and we've been brought into Christ's life. And there are more to be brought in. There are more to be incorporated into Christ's life. And he still today comes to us. That was into him. [00:15:03] He still comes down to us and is present by his word and spirit. And he is still about taking people up into his life by his word. And you and I, we have a part in that. Our church has a part in that. Christ's body has a part in that, because we are an expression of our head, right? Christ working through us to do his work. And what's his work? His work is taking people up into his life, his risen life. And, you know, the refining process is still going on. [00:15:38] Christ is still, through trials and difficulties, still conforming us to his image by faith. One day we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. [00:15:56] It's not quite done yet, but it's happening. [00:16:01] Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. [00:16:20] Brothers and sisters in Christ, who've been taken up into his life. [00:16:26] Put your hope in Christ. [00:16:28] Look to Christ and he will take you up into his life. He has taken you up into his life so that nothing can harm you, not even death. He's taken you from death to life. He's given you a new identity. He's given you a new life. No more opposite world, as we put our hope in him. In Jesus name, amen.