Be exalted, O God, above the heavens, and your glory over all the earth: Ascension Day

Acts 1.1-11 'As they were looking on, he was lifted up.'

Hebrews 9,24-28; 10.19-23 'Christ has entered into heaven itself'

Luke 24.46-53 'While he blessed them, he was carried up into heaven.'

 

My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready;

I will sing and give you praise.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,

and your glory over all the earth.

(Psalm 57.8,12)

+

'Lift up your hearts' 'We lift them to the Lord'.

The great ‘Sumsum Corda’ – lift up your hearts is said at the beginning of the great Eucharistic Prayer of Consecration, when things of the earth, bread and wine are lifted up, elevated, and become the tokens of heaven.

A divine exchange takes place, all with the purpose of raising our hearts and minds into the heavenly places, into the ways of God.

This is a resurrection-ascension gift, as St Paul puts it: 'if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.' (Colossians 3.1,2)

For the believer this is the elevation of baptism that follows the plunge into the waters as Christ descended to the depths to be raised by the Father.

This resurrection-ascension gift enables the movement of the heart, upwards to God; the movement we see on this Ascension Day, as Jesus Christ ascends into the heavens.

When we lift our hearts up to the Lord it is as if our hearts are caught in the slipstream and trajectory of the Ascension of the Lord.

We don’t just stand gawping up into heaven, as the angel said to the disciples (Acts 1.11); rather, our hearts become heaven shaped so that our lives on earth honour and serve the Risen and Ascended One.

The human heart is a wonderful and terrifying thing: a human heart can be open, broken, bleeding, warmed, as well as being lifted up.

At the beginning of Lent, in the great Collect for that season, we prayed that the Lord - who hates nothing that he has made - would 'create and make in us new and contrite hearts.'

That is a prayer for hearts of flesh, to replace our hearts of stone (cf Ezekiel 11.19; 36.26), so that our hearts are purified of sin as we seek forgiveness from God.

Mention of Lent takes us to a beautiful piece of symmetry.

The season of Lent lasts for 40 days to take us to Easter, and it is 40 days from Easter Day until the day of Ascension.

40 days before Easter, on Ash Wednesday, we were taken down, into the dust.

We were reminded of our humanity and mortality: 'dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.'

On Good Friday, Jesus is lifted up on the Cross and we recall his words, ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (John 12.32)

On Easter Day we rejoiced in the Resurrection of Christ - as this Paschal Candle bears witness - and, in the renewing the promises of our baptism, we proclaimed, 'I turn to Christ; I repent of my sin; I renounce evil'.

Now, 40 days after Easter, on Ascension Day, Christ ascends into the heavens, and, as the Collect for today puts it, ‘so may we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him continually dwell.’

The great mystery at the heart of the Christian religion is that Christ humbled himself to share in our humanity, so that we might be elevated to share his divinity.

God stooped down to raise us up.

This is known as theosis or divinisation, that is to say becoming more and more as God.

It is a magnificent statement of God's purpose in Jesus Christ.

The letter to the Philippians reminds us that:

[Christ Jesus] emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2.7-11)

God puts down and God raises up: as Mary sings, in her Magnificat, that song of praise of God's mighty acts, 'he hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek' (Luke 1.52)

Through the Holy Spirit, and in the Name of Jesus, God pushes vanity, pomposity and sin from their enthroned position in our lives and exalts that is Christlike and that magnifies the Father.

And he needs our hearts to be ready for that: as the psalm says:

8    My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready;

I will sing and give you praise.

10  I will give you thanks, O Lord, among the peoples;

I will sing praise to you among the nations.

11  For your loving-kindness is as high as the heavens,

and your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

12  Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,

and your glory over all the earth. (Psalm 57.8,10,11,12)

In an increasingly disenchanted world - where we are told that the only reality is the material, things you can see, touch and analyse, that has had its heart and soul stripped out - all too often Christians have bought the seductive line that our faith is so heavenly that it is of no earthly use.

Let’s not fall for that counsel of despair and hopelessness!

The Ascension of the Lord tells us different: there is ultimate hope, meaning and purpose: God lives! Christ reigns! The Holy Spirit comes!

With hearts lifted up to the Lord, we Christians live in this earth, yet as citizens of heaven.

St Paul pitches it just right:

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. (Philippians 3.11, 20,21)

That is Ascension language: may it become our own.

My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready;

I will sing and give you praise.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,

and your glory over all the earth.

The peace Christ gives

Acts 151-2, 22-29 ‘It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements

Revelation 21.10-14,22-23 ‘He showed me the holy city coming down out of heaven’

John 14.23-29 ‘The Holy Spirit will bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.’

 

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.

Not as the world gives do I give to you.

Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

+

In today’s gospel Jesus promises three things.

First, he promises that God, will dwell in the person who loves him, Jesus, and keeps his word.

What a promise! God finds a home in your body, in your life.

Secondly, flowing from that, he promises that he will send a Helper, the Holy Spirit, God, the love that flows between Father and Son, who will complete that presence within you.

What a promise! God doesn’t simply find a home within you, but will teach you and will bring all his words and deeds to your remembrance.

In other words, through the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ will be more alive to you than you can possibly imagine, and will form and shape you more deeply in God’s image, so that your life looks more like Christ’s.

That’s the goal of the Christian life, right there!

And when we hear Jesus say that the Holy Spirit will bring all his words ‘to remembrance’, it is impossible not to recall his words at the Last Supper, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’

Those words accompany the taking, consecrating and sharing of his body and blood in the Eucharist.

Jesus Christ, whose Spirit is invoked over the gifts of bread and wine, is made present to us afresh: he is brought to remembrance.

That is the sacramental way in which Jesus dwells in us and we in him.

Those two promises – God coming home to you, his Spirit teaching and making him present to you – are made to the baptised, and today to Marlie who is presented for baptism.

Those two promises are sealed when we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit at Confirmation, when we are fully ready to receive Christ’s body and blood into our own body and blood.

All of which leads us to the third promise, Christ’s promised gift of peace.

The world into which Marlie, and all of us, has been born and which we have to navigate, is a world marred by turmoil, unrest, war: the very opposite of peace.

In such a world to be promised peace, as a gift to us - peace that is not yet known or understood by the world – is a gift to our troubled and fearful hearts: we yearn for peace and tranquillity, ‘give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give’ (Book of Common Prayer, 1662, 2^nd Collect at Evening Prayer)

St Augustine’s words ring true to human experience, some 1600 years after they were first uttered: ‘Lord, You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.’ (Confessions)

Augustine articulates our restlessness and longing for peace: and the way to peace through Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit and by us allowing God to be the guiding presence in our lives.

So let’s consider this gift of peace.

What is this peace that Jesus gives us? How is it his peace and not the sort of the peace the world gives?

For a start the word ‘peace’ is really important in the Bible.

In Hebrew there is the beautiful word שָׁלוֹם (shalom) and in the Greek New Testament the word ειρήνη (eirene).

But when we say the word ‘peace’ we can mean different things and the Great Tradition explores this.

For example, St Thomas Aquinas teaches that there exist four types of peace: 1) concord; 2) apparent or false peace; 3) true but imperfect peace; and 4) perfect peace.

‘Concord’, literally meaning ‘of one heart’, is simple agreement among the wills of different people concerning one thing.

That is a good thing when people are of one mind and not disputing.

But there‘s a danger because we can all be of one mind about something bad.

That can happen in families, nations and globally: just because everyone agrees doesn’t make something beautiful, good or true.

It’s what Aquinas calls ‘the peace of the wicked’, what we might call today ‘groupthink’.

It’s a false peace, as the prophet Jeremiah says:

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace’. (Jeremiah 6.14 and 8.11)

That is the peace the world gives.

We’re onto it when we say ‘peace is not an absence of war’: there’s more to peace than not fighting and there’s more to peace than just agreeing.

True, but imperfect, peace is when the guns fall silent, when killing ends and calm returns, but it is imperfect.

If in peace our aim is not to kill each other it is a short-sighted aim, and is always susceptible to breakdown.

And that is where perfect peace is the peace offered by Christ, ‘my peace I give you, not as the world gives you.’

This peace we receive when ‘the chief movement of the soul finds rest in God.’

And this brings us back to the first two promises.

True peace - shalom, eirene –comes when we seek not our own ends but God’s.

True peace comes when we direct our appetite and passions towards what is truly good, when we can say ‘Christ is our peace.’

When we can say that, then we are ready to allow Christ to be at the centre of our lives, and he makes his home in us and we have welcomed him, for then our lives are ordered in harmony, tranquillity and unity with God’s purposes, the storm is stilled, and we ourselves become channels of peace.

This harmonious, tranquil ordering of our lives spills out into the harmonious, creative, fruitful ordering of the city, and of the world.

‘Let there be peace on earth,’ says the children’s song, ‘and let it begin with me.’

Let there be Christ’s peace on earth, the peace which passes all understanding, and let it find a place in my restless heart. Amen.

Jesus in the den of life

A sermon preached at Choral Evensong

Daniel 6.1-23; Mark 15.46-16.8

+

Daniel in the den of lions is a much-loved story in Sunday Schools and children’s Bibles. Often when we’re a bit older we think we’ve outgrown it, but here it is tonight, along with the women coming to the tomb of Jesus: what’s going on?

Daniel’s place as a ‘high official’, given that he was a foreigner in Babylon seems quite remarkable.

But then Daniel, and his fellow Israelites were not in Babylon by choice.

Daniel was a Hebrew, an Israelite, who along with ‘brightest and best’ of Israelite society had been forced to leave their homeland to work at the heart of the Babylonian Empire.

This was something Empires did, and do.

Nowadays it’s more likely to be in the form of a brain drain, the bright Brit going to work in Silicon Valley: the Israelites weren’t migrants by choice in Babylon taking the jobs of the natives: they were forced labourers, even if in some very significant positions.

Some Jews had been left back in Judea, in and around Jerusalem, but they were the farmers and certainly not the elite.

So Daniel was both bright and good at his job, a trusted lieutenant of the king.

And, as is a perennial issue for migrants, even those who have been settled for some while in a country, resentment breeds.

The native elites don’t like it when others break into their positions of influence and power or who won’t toe the line of the elite groupthink.

So it was that the other ‘high officials and satraps sought to find a ground for complaint against Daniel with regard to the [running of the] kingdom, but they could find no ground for complaint or any fault, because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in him. ⁵ Then these men said, “We shall not find any ground for complaint against this Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God.” (Daniel 6.4,5)

So they approach the king and manipulate him, through flattery, into making a ludicrous, irrevocable law - what we might recognise as a law that seeks to restrict religious freedom - ‘that whoever makes petition to any god or man for thirty days, except to [the] king, shall be cast into the den of lions’. (Daniel 6.9b)

This is the only way they were going to get him.

Freedom of religious conscience is one of the deep principles of our society and born out of Christian teaching:

[The human] response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will. (Dignitatis Humanae 9, 10)

Notwithstanding examples in history, it is not Christian to coerce belief, but to invite belief from the heart, as a loving response to the God who made us and loves us.

That is where Marxist-Leninism was so anti-human, it sought to force everyone to think and believe the same things, things that were palpably untrue and unreasonable.

Yet that spirit lives on in those who cannot tolerate the religious perspective and voice in society.

Secularism talks of diversity but pushes religious faith into the private sphere and refuses to listen to that voice, fooling itself into believing that a ‘neutral society’, by which it means one that holds to dominant secular mores and norms, is desirable.

Inconvenient Christian voices written off as backward, irrational, bigoted or just tiresome.

Daniel knew different; the practice of his faith was not to be privatised but something under obedience and conviction he would carry on practicing.

So he consciously and intentionally resisted.

Knowing precisely what the law now was, ^‘he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously’. (Daniel 6.10)

He walked purposely and boldly into the trap set for him.

The trap springs, much to the king’s distress, who seeks a way out.

But the king has tied his own hands: the all-powerful king is the trapped one, not Daniel; Daniel, shut in the lion’s den, is free.

Famously Daniel walks free from the den of lions.

The goodness, beauty and truth of God cannot be locked up, and even if they are temporarily suppressed, they will walk free because they cannot be constrained.

All this is why Daniel is a ‘type’ – a precursor - of Christ.

Daniel trusts in his God against the powers; Jesus Christ remains faithful to the Father in the face of Roman tyranny.

Both Daniel and Jesus trust in God to deliver them.

The king didn’t believe Daniel guilty and Pontius Pilate finds no guilt in Jesus but allows those who plot after his life to have him killed (Luke 23.4).

In St John’s Gospel Pilate says this three times, ‘I find no guilt in him’. (John 18.38; 19.4;19.6)

Yet both Jesus and Daniel are sent to their death.

And that’s where parallels cease.

Daniel doesn’t die; he is miraculously protected, as you might expect a hero to be.

Jesus, unheroically, dies on the cross.

And what is found, after Daniel goes to the den of lions and Jesus’ body laid in the tomb, is different.

Just as the king rose at break of day to go to the den of lions, so the women go to the tomb ‘very early on the first day of the week’ (Mark 16.1).

No king comes to seek Jesus, but Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.

The women don’t come to see if they have got away with a miscarriage of justice like the king, but to anoint Jesus’ dead body.

The king finds Daniel there alive; the women find the tomb empty.

The king is relieved; the women filled with holy awe because of the message they are told: ‘He has been raised; he is not here’.

Life itself, the majesty of creation, the prophets and scriptures all hint at resurrection in the general sense, but in Christ’s triumph over death, proclaimed in this Easter season, Creation itself is renewed, human life animated to the glory of God and each person given the possibility of living life in all its abundance.

May we remain faithful, to our belief and practice, in proclaiming the victory of Christ over sin and death, and always seek to shape our lives after his example, reflecting the lively life that deathless shall persevere.

Of sheep and shepherds

Acts 13.14,43b-52 ‘Behold, we are turning to the Gentiles’

Revelation 7.9, 13a,14b-17 ‘The Lamb will be their shepherd and will guide them to springs of living water’.

John 10.27-30 ‘I give eternal life to my sheep’

 

I give eternal life to my sheep. Alleluia.

 

+

 

The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide, today, is traditionally known as ‘Good Shepherd Sunday’.

 

That’s because the Gospel, psalm and other readings feature the image, the motif, of the shepherd.

 

And shepherds in the scriptures, and the life of the Church, are all judged against the measure of the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ.

 

The shepherd is the dominant image of Christian leadership and the Good Shepherd the source and inspiration of it.

 

It’s a very different model from the ‘strong man’ leadership we see in some parts of the world today or indeed the ‘anything goes’ style.

 

The word ‘pastor’ is the Latin word for ‘shepherd’.

 

I am charged with the duty and joy of being your pastor, your shepherd, who, as a priest prays for you, teaches you, leads you and offers the Eucharist with you.

 

As a pastor – a priest for you and a Christian with you - my vocation, my calling, reflects in the local that of our Bishop, Christopher, and his care for us across our Diocese, on the worldwide level the new Pope, Leo XIV, has a pastoral care for his people.

 

Priests are told at their Ordination, ’hold the example of the Good Shepherd always before you’.

 

A good place to start considering this pastoral charge, is through the special stick carried by shepherds and by bishops: the shepherd’s crook , known in church as the ‘pastoral staff’.

 

Traditionally shepherds who look after sheep carry them, and so of course do Bishops, the shepherds, the chief pastors, of the Church.

 

The crook is used – with a flock of sheep and the flock of the Church - in various ways: to rescue, to guide, to obstruct, to protect and to lead.

 

The shepherd uses the curve of the crook to rescue by using it to scoop up a lamb or sheep stranded in a ditch or caught in a thicket.

 

So too Christ through his death and resurrection rescues us, from the gates of hell and the valley of the shadow of death, by lifting us up and rescuing us from sin.

 

The pastor in the church is called to seek out and then lift people out from the ditch of sin, despair, sadness and lack of hope where they could quite easily die spiritually.

 

This is done by proclaiming the forgiveness and reconciliation of Christ the Good Shepherd to those who cry out for life.

 

If your life is like that, stuck in a ditch of pain, then Christ the Good Shepherd, through me his priest, seeks you out to bring the healing medicine of the Gospel.

 

That might be through what’s called a ‘pastoral conversation’ (a bit like counselling) or even more significantly through a formal time of confession – that is when Christ, the Good Shepherd, gets in the ditch with you and lifts you out.

 

As the sheep are led to fresh pastures the shepherd uses the crook to guide, gently steering the sheep, pointing the way.

 

The Good Shepherd leads us to be spiritually nourished and fed guiding us along the lifegiving path that we find in his teaching in the Gospels.

 

His priests and pastors are trained and formed to make that guidance life giving and clear.

 

A pastor in the Church needs to know where to find spiritual nourishment so as to be able to point others to the ‘green pastures’.

 

Those green pastures are feeding on the Word of God and the sacraments which are channels of grace and power in our lives.

 

The shepherd’s crook is also to obstruct.

 

It blocks the way of predators who threaten the flock, or sheep who are separating themselves off.

 

The priest is told to be ready to admonish which is an old-fashioned word which means ‘urge by warning’.

 

I am not a good admonisher, I know, but there are times when being nice doesn’t cut it.

 

No one is saved by niceness but by Truth: it’s often observed that if Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was a parish priest he’d be a very unpopular one: he didn’t hesitate to rebuke and admonish.

 

The shepherd uses the crook to protect.

 

The shepherd’s task in ancient times was to fend off wolves and bears from attacking the flock.

 

King David, whose first calling was as a shepherd boy, wrestled predators to protect the sheep, before slaying Goliath to protect the people.

 

The Christian pastor is charged with resisting and obstructing all that threatens the spiritual wellbeing of the flock of Christ.

 

That means in teaching and reading the ‘signs of the times’, those currents in culture and society hostile to the Gospel or antithetical to Christ.

 

The priest calls out that which is evil and spiritually corrosive: and believe me doing that comes at a cost of disdain or hostility, not unlike the apostles Paul and Barnabas encountered on their missionary journeys, but hostility did at least fill them with ‘joy in the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 13.52).

 

And finally, the crook is to lead: it points the direction.

 

Flocks in the Holy Land in Jesus’ day, and even now, are not driven from behind, dogs snapping at their heels, but are led by the shepherd who calls out to the sheep.

 

The shepherd sets the direction and calls.

 

The Good Shepherd, Jesus, says in the Gospel, ‘My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me’ (John 10.27)

 

The task of the Christian pastor is not to decide his own way arbitrarily, but prayerfully to seek, with his people, the way, the truth and the life of the Good Shepherd.

 

The pastor, as shepherd, is to keep his eyes fixed on the good pasture, life in Christ, and continually to call the flock home to him.

 

And where are we going as a flock?

 

Our second lesson captures it: the vision of heaven, that is to say life in deeper union with Christ in this world, and life with him in the world to come.

 

St Paul says elsewhere, ‘I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus’. (Philippians 3.14)

 

He presses on because he knows our citizenship is in heaven. (Philippians 3.20)

 

That’s what the vision of Revelation describes:

 

I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. (Revelation 7.9)

 

And there is the Good Shepherd at the heart of things, the Good Shepherd who is also the sacrificial Lamb whose body and blood is the food and drink of the Christian life and whose blood washes those who are his witnesses in tribulation and trial and have died to sin to live with Christ.

 

Witnesses to the life of the Gospel as the ‘sheep of [Christ’s] pasture’ (cf Psalm 100) will have their hunger satisfied; their thirst quenched; and be shaded from harm because:

 

the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd,

    and he will guide them to springs of living water,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (Revelation 7.17)

 

 

O God, our sovereign and shepherd,

who brought again your Son Jesus Christ

from the valley of the shadow of death,

comfort us with your protecting presence

and your angels of goodness and love,

that we also may come home

and dwell with him in your house for ever.

(Common Worship: Daily Prayer, p. 679)

The power of His Name

Acts 5.27b-32, 40b-41 ‘We are witnesses to these things and so is the Holy Spirit.’

Revelation 5.11-14 ‘Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth.’

John 21.1-14 Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish.

 

+

 

‘Having called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name’. (Acts 5.40-41)

We’ll come back to that account of the apostles being beaten up and yet somehow emboldened by the experience.

The Acts of the Apostles is the story of the very earliest days of the life of the Church after the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus.

That’s why the first reading at the Eucharist during Eastertide is from the Acts, rather than the Old Testament – had you spotted that?!

Acts is volume two of the Gospel of Luke, as Luke writes to the man who commissioned his work, called Theophilus (a name meaning, ‘Love of God’ or Loved by God),

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. (Acts 1.1-3)

Those forty days after the Resurrection take us to the Ascension of the Lord when the Eleven remaining disciples, with the Virgin Mary, wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost – more of that in thirty-five days’ time.

We began with a beating, a thuggish attempt by the authorities, known as the council, to silence the Apostles from speaking about Jesus, and in the name of Jesus.

They took it, and were emboldened.

This is all a matter of weeks after they had fled Jesus’ sham trial and abandoned him as he hung dying on the Cross.

What a change: from deserters to strong witnesses!

What changed them?

The answer comes in three stages: the Resurrection, when Christ was raised from the dead; the Ascension, when he ascended into heaven; and Pentecost, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

These coming days of our observance of Eastertide reveal the transformative power unleashed that means the Apostles would willingly take a beating, risk death and actually rejoice ‘that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name’.

The Resurrection gave the Apostles the insight to see their lives afresh and make connections with a man who could just have been an inspired guru, wonder worker or insightful teacher, but whom they come to recognise as Son of God.

The recognition is made real on the shore of the Sea of Tiberius, also known as the Sea of Galilee.

There Jesus appears unannounced, unrecognised, at first, until they saw a miraculous haul of fish; they gathered in more fish than they could catch in their own power, even as experienced fishermen.

I wonder what connections went through their mind, now it was interpreted by his Resurrection?

He told us that we were no longer fishermen but fishers-of-men: now we see our task is not to be on the Sea of Galilee but to be drawing people to the life of God in Christ.

All this echoes in our hearts.

He multiplied fishes when he fed the five thousand, now he multiplies the catch from our boat: it’s worth counting them on the shore, 153: is there significance in that number? We just know for us it’s a lot, and the net wasn’t even torn.

All this echoes in our hearts.

He fed the crowd with loaves and fishes that day and now he says, ‘come and have breakfast’ and he gives us bread and fish.

All this echoes in our hearts.

It’s the third time he is revealed to them.

He had already appeared to Mary Magdalene, but the first time Jesus came to the Apostles was in the Upper Room, doors anxiously locked, when he came bringing shalom, deep peace, and breathing the Holy Spirit upon them. (John 20.19-23)

The second time was back in that Upper Room, doors still locked, with Thomas wanting to see what the others had seen the first-time round: and on seeing that it was the Crucified One raised from the dead, with his sacred wounds, Thomas exclaimed, ‘My Lord and my God’. (John 21.24-29)

Now they see him on the Sea of Tiberius, Galilee, their skills are enhanced by him and they are fed by him.

Three appearances.

Once might have been a mistake, twice might have been an accident, three is surely a pattern.

They’re getting it!

He is everything he claimed to be.

He is, for them all, in Thomas’ words, ‘my Lord and my God’.

They’ve come a long way.

And the patterns they see, and that are offered in John’s gospel as we have heard from Easter up to and including today, and will go beyond, are offered to us to make connections with the patterns of who Jesus is and the power he exercises in our lives.

Bear in mind that St John writes immediately after Jesus’ second appearance to the apostles and immediately before the third:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20.30-31)

That’s telling us that we don’t need and won’t get every last detail, but that we are invited to spot the patterns, make the connections, so that we may believe and have life in his name, the very name that the apostles where speaking in the incident we began with.

That’s telling us that we don’t just need to fill our heads with information about God, about Jesus Christ, but that we come to believe and to declare ‘It is the Lord’ when we see wondrous things in our lives.

If all we glean from the readings today is some interesting detail that we may not have known or may have forgotten, then my job as a preacher is not done well.

But if our hearts have been moved to see Christ more clearly in our lives and in our world, then things are happening.

How do you recognise and see Jesus Christ moving in your life and in the world?

Can you see that he will strengthen you in timidity, still your seething fear and satisfy your deep hunger?

Jesus invited the disciples that day to come and have breakfast: now he invites you to be fed by him in his Body and Blood, to believe in his Name and step into his way, and truth and life.