NOTES for Joh 21:1-14

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...

Why do the disciples not dare ask Him anything? What is this: shock at an unexpected miracle, at the unexpected Resurrection of the Teacher, compared with which the miraculous catch is a mere trifle? Perhaps that too, because they truly had not expected to see Him risen.

But there was something else. The disciples remembered perfectly well how they had all scattered then in Gethsemane. They remembered how they had all been completely convinced that everything was over, and had remained so until the very meeting with the risen Teacher. And even now they still did not really understand what was happening or what to expect next.

It was not only that there in Gethsemane almost all of them had been afraid and run away. The main issue was that all of them, without exception, had failed precisely as disciples: they had never understood the Teacher when He spoke to them about His death and His Resurrection. And now, after meeting the Risen One, this was completely obvious to all of them. There was good reason to be embarrassed. And, in essence, there was nothing to ask about: what can you ask when you understand nothing at all? All that remains is to look at the Teacher in confusion and wait for what will happen next, for what He will say and do.

And the apostles wait. They do not yet know that they will have to wait until Pentecost. They simply wait, making no plans in advance and making no attempt to imagine how events will unfold. For the first time in all their time with the Teacher, they tried to understand His words and actions, not their own interpretations of those words and actions. Jesus finally became for them the real Teacher. With a capital letter. Not only because of His divinity, but also because they had come to relate to Him in the right way. That is how life in Christ began for the apostles.

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.