May 2, 2004

The Resurrection appearances of our Lord combine elements deeply mysterious and ordinary. The apostles went back to fishing after they had seen Him the second time in the Upper Room (John 20). It was a normal psychological response to the world’s most extraordinary event, a way of reconciling joy and fright. By way of very homely and incidental parallels, last Sunday I recalled how Bobby Thomson entered the baseball history books on October 3, 1951 with his famous hit against the Dodgers at the Giants’ Polo Grounds, the “shot heard ’round the world.” When the game was over, he paid the ten cent token and simply went home by way of the subway and Staten Island ferry. After Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated president, he had to wait his turn for dinner in the hotel where he was boarding. When Queen Victoria returned in the golden coach to Buckingham Palace after her coronation in Westminster Abbey, the trumpets still blaring in her ears, she removed her royal robes, put on an apron, and gave her dog a bath. Routine can help keep one’s feet on the ground. After Peter saw the Risen Christ he said, “I am going fishing.”

Eye-witness accounts of the Resurrection are graphic: In the Upper Room our Lord eats a honeycomb and baked fish. At the third appearance to the apostles, the dawn is just breaking, and one boat is at least a hundred feet from shore when the Voice calls, “Children, have you caught anything?” John is the first to recognize the sound. Peter is lightly clad. On the shore Christ has prepared a barbeque and some fish are already cooked. Peter hauls the net ashore unaided. There are one hundred and fifty-three fish. Commentators have proposed meanings for that number (reading a meaning into a text is called “eisegesis”) and these may or may not be significant, but the importance consists in this: There were specifically one hundred and fifty-three fish. This happened. In a legend, there would have been a million, and the fish would have been gossamer or golden or not fish at all but sparkling stars. The fishermen never forgot the details. As architects say, God is in the details.

Very often, elderly people begin to forget what they did a moment or two ago, as they begin to remember in detail events of their childhood. Such is the way of the Church, for after two thousand years, she may become neglectful of some immediate events in the joy of Easter as she recalls sharply the first dawn light apparitions of Christ which explain why we are here. All this happens in a mixture of mystery and commonplaceness, which is why nothing is trivial, and the humdrum routines of our daily life and “parish business” are shining parts of God’s glory.

Fr. George W. Rutler