Today's passage shows us how the disciples changed during the three years they spent with the Teacher. They became a close-knit family, brothers hurrying to one another's aid - this is clear from the way they respond to Peter's words (John 21:3). But despite this unity, the Lord gives them no catch. The failure is meant to lead to something greater.

Before us is a scene we have seen before: tired fishermen with empty hands see Jesus standing on the shore and hear His request to cast the nets (Luke 5:4-6). And, as on that earlier occasion, they do not know who is before them. Now He is far away, and they simply do not recognize Him; the previous time they did not know what to expect from this Man.

But these men are not merely fishermen anymore - they are already apostles. In three years the disciples learned to receive and "see" a person, recognizing God and His presence in him; they learned to value each person by listening to his actions and feelings. And precisely for this reason, what they resisted the previous time they now do without delay. And they recognize the Lord.

This is how, at times, the very thing we resist in our life turns out to be the main thing that will bring Jesus into our home...

What made the beloved disciple recognize the One who stood on the shore in the morning mist? After the Resurrection Christ is not bound to any particular appearance or place, and so the disciples do not recognize Him, just as Mary Magdalene, who came to the tomb in the morning, did not recognize Him at first. As for us, we do not know at all what He looked like, what His gaze or voice was like; in this we resemble the seven disciples, for whom the Man on the shore is no different from all the others.

But for the disciple "whom Jesus loved," that is, the one who himself loved Him more than anyone else did, the combination of a familiar episode (they had once already fished with Him; see Luke 5:4-9) and the special sensitivity that lets one recognize those one loves made it possible to recognize the Teacher. And what was possible for one disciple is possible for the others, and for us, thousands of years later.

In bearing witness to Christ, John at the same time bears witness to the Kingdom. It cannot be otherwise: they are inseparable. The very appearing of the Son is connected with the fact that God's life, the life of the heavenly Father, formerly invisible and unreachable, becomes visible (v. 2). Visible through a concrete Man and in a concrete Man, whom one can touch with one's hands and examine just as we can examine and touch everything that exists in our world (v. 1). And through this, one can become part of the Kingdom, share in the life by which the Father lives and which the Son bears in Himself in all its fullness (v. 3). This is Christianity. John does not speak by chance of the fullness of joy (v. 4; the Synodal translation calls it "perfect joy"). The point is that joy which is connected with God's presence in the life of a person or a community. This joy, of course, was known even before the coming of Christ.

But no one in pre-Christian times knew its fullness. And the issue here is not that it was never experienced in fullness by anyone, nor even that every joy, together with life, then ended in Sheol, the world of shadows, the kingdom of the dead, which made everyone equal. The issue is that the breath of God, the breath of the Kingdom, could not be contained in fullness in any human heart - and therefore could not be revealed to the world from within, so as to be accessible to every seeker.

From outside, this breath reached people, and in the world at all times there were people who sensed it. But to transform our world completely, to return it to the state in which it could again become part of the Kingdom, as it was before the fall, can be done only from within. And the Savior, coming into the world, brings the Kingdom into it. In all the fullness now accessible to every seeker who is ready to trust Him.

But to share in the life of the Kingdom means not only to touch it outwardly. It also means to let it in. To make our heart become the door through which the breath of the Kingdom enters the world. This is beyond the strength of fallen man. But one can open one's heart to Christ, let Him into one's life, and then He will make our heart the door through which the breath of the Kingdom will burst into the world just as it once burst into it through the open windows of the upper room in Zion. Then our life will become Christian to the end - we will live by the Kingdom and in the Kingdom.