Friday April 21
When we are in doubt we return to what we know: the past. When we don’t know where we are going, we turn back. When Jesus was dead his disciples returned to their former way of life: they tried to go back to fishing. But “they caught nothing that night.” Even the past could give them no reassurance; they had nowhere to go. That was what made them capable of receiving the Good News, which is for Now. “Now” is like a bomb thrown through our window, and ticking.
Can I be said to “have” the faith at all if I think of it only as an old ideology battling for survival against new? What about that cataclysmic Now that those broken-down disciples had to enter in order to see the Lord? There is a way of appearing very Catholic, and it is to appear very concerned with the past. Can this be right? Our life doesn’t often (or ever?) put us in a tight place like those first disciples. Or if it threatens to do so, we have many means of slipping away. Then we can offer one another bland assurances about the faith, but they will convince no-one, not even ourselves. Unless we experience this “dying to oneself”, our words will offer nothing but routes of escape into a reassuring past.
Alternative:
The disciples had gone back to the only thing they knew: fishing. But it seemed they had lost the ability. Jesus was dead; there was no way forward; and now it seemed there was no way back either. It was at that moment that the Risen Lord appeared. Many readers of the New Testament have noticed the two charcoal fires in John’s Gospel: (18:18 and today’s reading); in fact it would be difficult to miss them: they both stand out clearly in the half-light. One of them marks Peter’s denial of his Lord, the other his rehabilitation. They are connected, as the best and the worst are always connected, the highest and the lowest, the holiest and the most sinful. It was to make such connections that the Word was made flesh (itself an astonishing connection). Making connections is God’s work.