As Good as it Gets (Easter 3C)

 

Primacy of Peter Beach, Northern end of Lake Tiberias

“As Good as It Gets”
Easter 3C
1 May 2022 Said 10 a.m. Eucharist

Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20) ; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

God, impower us to feel and love:

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

The story is told of an early Zen Buddhist master in China:  seeking enlightenment, he fled to solitude in the mountains, where he sat in silence for years, meditating and waiting for the moment of enlightenment.  After years of disappointment, he finally decides he has had enough.   He comes back down into society, into the local village.   It is a market day, a raucous and lively scene of people haggling over prices, and trying to get the advantage of each other.  A butcher is having problems keeping up with the demands of the crowd.  One woman calls out “the trotters, I want the trotters!’  Another, “the pork loin for me.”  Another, “the ribs, the ribs!”  The monk notices that one woman stands silent, watching the butcher intently as he occasionally discreetly palms bits of less attractive flesh into the masses he weighs and passes to the consumers. 

 

Suddenly she calls out, “The good bits.  I want the good bits.” 

 

The crowd falls silent at the implied accusation the woman has rudely made:  he is selling bad stuff as if it were good. 

 

The butcher, without missing a beat, chimes up, with an affable shrug to his accuser as if she were an old friend, “Hey lady, all we got here is good.” 

 

The crowd, including the accuser, breaks into laughter.  The monk laughs heartily with them all.  And at that moment, the story says, the monk finds enlightenment. 

 

The point of the story is this: breaking with our familiar routine and losing our sense of control, even if this is only in laughter, may bring us to our true self.  We can be freed by embracing the absurd—the idea that what we see before us, no matter how seemingly bad, is all good: this is as good as it gets and that’s okay—is how in an instant he reaches Nirvana.

 

“Is this as good as it gets?”  Usually for us in the West, the question is a complaint, an expression of dissatisfaction.  The idea is that things ought to be better than this, and we ought to be enjoying things more than we are.  Not accepting how things are, not being reconciled to the status quo, is here understood as a necessary prelude to needed change, reform, or improvement. 

 

Many Eastern spiritualities see acceptance as a core virtue, something you need for serenity and peace in yourself and in society.   Some Western wags criticize the Asian values that cultivate acceptance and detachment by pointing to the endemic poverty, injustice, corruption, and abuse of political authority in many of those societies and saying a culture needs some dissatisfaction, because “when it comes to societies, you get as much bad as you are willing to accept.” 

 

But many Western spiritualties also teach that we must cultivate acceptance to have serenity and peace.  Reinhold Niebuhr, the great progressive American Protestant theologian of the mid-20^th century, wrote the original prayer that sought to reconcile these differences, which in shortened form has become a classic in 12-step recovery spirituality: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.” 

 

The Northern end of Lake Tiberias.

 

Today’s scripture readings all touch on acceptance and the desire for change.  In the Acts passage, we hear Jesus’ question, “Why do you persecute me?” Saul’s reply, “and who, sir, are you?” receives the shocking and surprising answer that turns Saul’s world upside down, “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you persecute.”  With Saul, we hear the call to retire in our blindness to a “Street Called Straight” where new friends can direct us and help heal us.  In the passage from Revelation, we get a glimpse of what John the Divine thought was the ultimate destiny of us all—the beatific vision of God, where things really truly are as good as they can possibly get. 

The Gospel, an add-on after the end of John, tells of Peter who, like that Chinese monk leaving the mountain, flees the scene after Jesus’ death and reappearance.   Peter says “I’m going fishing.”  That means, “enough of this Jesus stuff, death and resurrection, going on fruitless mission trips.  I’m going to find some respite in doing what I am most used to, what I have spent most of my life doing.  I am going to get lost in my work.”  But the fishing is fruitless.  They hear someone calling to them from the beach, telling those wizened fishers—of all people!—how to fish. The miraculous “draft of fishes” results. 

 

One hundred and fifty-three fish!  That’s a lot.  Rarely in John’s Gospel does he give you specific numbers—usually, he gives rounded estimates, unless he has some symbolic meaning in mind.  But here it’s 153.  Scholars have proposed many explanations, and the best, I think, is from the science of the era:  St. Jerome in the 4^th century tells us that the classical Greek zoologists had catalogued 153 different kinds of fish.  John’s Gospel, if referring to this, is saying that in that unbroken net, there were found every kind of fish: Overwhelming abundance and wildly expansive diversity.  Graceful and undiscriminating acceptance:  It’s what the Church is.  It’s what resurrection does. 

 

John, the beloved disciple who founded the community whose Gospel this is, recognizes that the one on the shore is the Risen Lord, and he tells Peter.  In most modern translations of the Bible, Peter then puts on his clothes and jumps in to swim to shore to Jesus.  This strange image is an artifact of poor translation:  when you are careful about the Greek, what happens is Peter, stripped naked as he works the nets to keep his clothes dry, immediately ties his tunic around his waist so as to be decent, and jumps in and swims.  He gets to the beach first, before the other disciples, including John. 

 

The place where this happens is a small rocky beach on the north side of Lake Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee, called forever after “the Primacy of Peter” because Peter arrived at the beach first.  But Peter arrives at the beach first only because he impetuously jumped in to swim.  John recognizes Jesus first, even before Peter jumps in.  Thus this Gospel explains that the Johannine Community, though distinct, is a cherished part of the great Church.  Peter may have become the leader of unified Christianity, but John was the one who first recognized Jesus!  Remember, every kind of fish has been caught in this net!

 

The resurrected Jesus’ question, “Peter, do you love me?” repeated three times, seems to “undo” the threefold denial of Jesus by Peter during the Passion story.  Jesus makes Peter his disciple again by giving him as many chances to reaffirm his love and friendship as he had denied it.
Most translations miss a major element in how the story is told in Greek.  Jesus, pointing to the abandoned fishing tackle, asks, “Peter, do you love me more than these things?”  But Peter replies with another verb for love, a word that is primarily about the affection of friendship rather than the usual word for love itself that Jesus has used.  “Of course I like you.”  Jesus replies: “Then feed me sheep.”  Jesus asks a second time, “Peter, do you love me?” Again, Peter replies, “I like you, Jesus.”  Jesus says again, “Then feed my sheep.”  And then Jesus, seeing Peter’s increasing vexation at the repeated question, softens how he words it, adopting Peter’s verb for love: “Well then, Peter, do you like me?”  Peter: “I really do like you,” is the reply.  And again, “Feed my sheep.” 

Jesus here accepts Peter for who he is and where he is.  Even if Peter’s love is not quite what Jesus has in mind, it is enough.  And this acceptance is what brings Peter back into the circle of love and fellowship, undoing the harm of his betrayal and denial.

Are there ways that we, like Saul, persecute Jesus?  Do we scapegoat others, label them as insufficient, decline to seriously take to heart what they are saying? Instead of accepting them, do we transfer our hurts, guilts and fears onto them, gossip about them, work them harm, and or outright persecute them?  And do we do this, like Saul, for what we think as the best of reasons? 

Do we, like Peter, deny even knowing Jesus even as we proclaim that we will never forsake him?  Do we say we believe in Jesus, but then not act as if he lives and reigns?  Have we failed to live up to the values we profess: openness, hospitality, diversity, welcome, and reverence”?  Are we negligent in prayer and worship, and fail to commend the faith that is in us?  Are we deaf to Christ’s call to serve others as Christ served us? 

Beloved:  we all fall short of the mark, like Saul and Peter.  But know that it is okay.  Jesus loves us regardless.  He accepts us and the way we are even as he works a great change in us.  When Jesus asks us, “do you love me,” and we reply “I like you,” he keeps asking us the question.  When we persist and say “love is maybe way too much for me right now, how about ‘like’,” he keeps at it, but ultimately says, “Like is good enough for now, my friend. Love will come tomorrow.”  But it will surely come. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.