Followers of Jesus don’t take His story and put it into ours. Instead, we see ourselves in His story. The Gospel lesson last Sunday lets us do just that this workday. Easter Sunday is past and disciples are back to work. “Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing” (John 21:2-3). You and I are in the story, going to today’s routine work. Productive, non-productive, ho-hum? Missing the zest of Easter?
Read the entire lesson in John 21:1-14. A man on the shore asks if they’ve caught fish, tells them to cast on the other side of the boat, and the miraculous catch of 153 fish leads to voila! It’s Jesus! “Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’ Now none of the disciples dared ask him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord” (21:12). Jesus here in our daily routine!
“Charcoal embers brightly burning, / Bread and fish upon them laid:
Jesus stands at day’s returning / In His risen life arrayed;
As of old His friends to greet, / ‘Here is breakfast; come and eat.’”
(Thomas Dudley Smith; Lutheran Service Book 485, 3)
We live by faith amidst the things we see today (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:7). “Unseen, spiritual reality is not unreal. In fact it is more real—decisive over the shadow reality of the seen world. A spiritual reality all around, above, and inside the secular reality of the world of our five senses, spirituality is a dimension we enter only when we are supernaturally born into it and learn, through the disciplines, to make it our regular habitat. Do we take the supernatural, the world of the unseen real, seriously?” (Os Guiness, “The Call,” 150)
“Morning breaks, and Jesus meets us, / Feeds and comforts, pardons still;
As His faithful friends He greets us, / Partners of His work and will.
All our days, on ev’ry shore, / Christ is ours forevermore!”
(LSB 385, 5).
We’re in His story!