Gone Fishing

So what do you do with your life on Easter Monday? We spend so much time building up to the resurrection, but what is life like when the grave is empty?

Remember that not long after the actual resurrection, we see the disciples. At first, they are hiding in the Upper Room, trying to figure out what to do with themselves. Jesus appears to them there. But soon after that, we see them again - some of them are walking home down a long road; some of them are fishing. 

The Bible tells us that the disciples were fishing. It doesn't tell us which disciples were fishing or how many of them there were. Naturally, we assume that at the very least, Peter and Andrew, James and John were fishing. They were fishermen when Jesus called them, so it only makes sense that if the disciples were returning to their former lives, going back to the status quo, to the way things were, then these four disciples are very likely to be the ones out fishing. 

And isn't that just like us? 

How many of us, on Easter Monday morning, simply went back to work? Back to school? Back to mowing the yard and washing the dishes and running the errands and chasing the kids and walking the dog and scooping the kitty litter and just back to the life that we've always lived, the life we know best, the routine that is still etched somewhere in our veins somehow? 

I think this highlights just how little we understand about the resurrection, how little we can understand about the resurrection. It's something. Maybe it's everything. But we can't really fathom what we're supposed to do with it. 

Back in the Gospels, as the story seems to be ending, we know that it was just beginning, but the disciples couldn't have understood that. They couldn't have known where the story was going to take them next. They didn't know how to live and love and do ministry and spread the Good News without Jesus leading them. 

How do you just keep putting on the same show when the headliner is noticeably absent? The crowds were never pressed into the streets to see Andrew; they came to see Jesus. No one stood at the side of the road and cried out to Simon the Zealot; they cried out to Jesus. When someone was sick or dying or dead, messengers were sent for Jesus of Nazareth, not Nathaniel, who was called from under a tree. 

In fact, we have to mention that there was a time when Jesus sent out His disciples to do His work in the region, and it didn't go stunningly well. Most famously, there was a father with a child with a demon, and he brought his child to the disciples, but they "couldn't drive the demon out." Jesus had to do it.

The disciples probably vividly remembered that moment - and probably dozens of others like it that we don't know about - when it suddenly seemed that the rest of the story was up to them. 

Welp...that was a good run. No way this thing keeps going if it's up to us. 

...Time to go fishing. 

And so, bam! The greatest, most miraculous event in the history of the world, the fulfillment of a promise hundreds of years in the making, a new promise for an eternity to come, and Peter, Andrew, James, and John are back on a boat, casting their old nets into the old waters living their old lives the way they always had. 

Sound familiar?