Part 1 — Hunger and Disorientation
There is a particular kind of confusion that comes after everything you hoped for has already happened.
It is not the confusion of despair.
It is not the confusion of disbelief.
It is the confusion of now what?
That is where John 21 begins. The resurrection has already occurred. The tomb is empty. Jesus has appeared. Death has been defeated. And yet the disciples are not triumphant.
They are disoriented.
John tells us they return to fishing.
This is not backsliding. This is not unbelief.
This is what human beings do when the future becomes unclear — they return to what is familiar.
Fishing is muscle memory. Fishing is competence.
Fishing is something they know how to do when everything else feels uncertain.
And they fish all night.
Night in John’s Gospel is rarely just about time.
Night is often the space of misunderstanding, fear, and incomplete vision.
They work hard. They do what they know. They apply skill and effort.
And they catch nothing.
Which is exactly how many faithful people experience the aftermath of loss, failure, or even success.
You do what you know. You keep moving. You stay busy.
But nothing fills the net.
Some of the most dangerous spiritual exhaustion doesn’t come from rebellion — it comes from faithfulness that no longer knows where it is headed.
These men are not far from Jesus.
They simply don’t know how to locate themselves anymore.
And that is often where grace meets us.
At dawn, someone stands on the shore.
John is careful: they do not recognize Him.
Jesus is present before He is recognized.
That alone is worth lingering over.
He does not announce Himself.
He does not reclaim authority.
He does not demand acknowledgment.
He asks a question. “Children, have you any fish?”
It is not an accusation.
It is not sarcasm.
It is an invitation to honesty.
And their answer is brutally simple. “No.”
No excuses.
No explanation.
No theology.
Just truth.
That one word is the doorway into everything that follows.
Grace does not require eloquence.
Grace requires honesty.
Jesus tells them to cast the net again.
Not because the technique is magical — but because obedience, even when tired, creates space for gift.
The net fills.
Recognition follows provision.
It always does.
But notice this carefully:
Jesus feeds them before they fully recognize Him.
Grace precedes clarity.
Belonging precedes understanding.
Relationship precedes resolution.
And then — before any conversation about the future — Jesus prepares breakfast.
---Part 2 — Why the Risen Christ Eats
One of the quiet shocks of this passage is not that Jesus appears again. It’s what He does when He appears.
He eats.
That may not strike us as unusual at first, but for the ancient world—and for the way religious people often think—it is deeply significant.
If you were inventing a resurrection story, you would probably not include breakfast.
You would include light.
You would include power.
You would include transcendence.
You would include something unmistakably otherworldly.
But John tells us the risen Christ builds a fire, cooks fish, breaks bread, and eats with His friends.
Why?
Because resurrection is not an escape from the physical world. It is the redemption of it.
In the ancient imagination, spirits did not eat. Ghosts did not chew. Visions did not share meals.
Eating is stubbornly physical. It requires a body. It assumes hunger. It involves time, touch, smell, and presence.
By eating, Jesus is not just proving that He is alive. He is declaring what kind of life resurrection brings.
This is not salvation as escape from humanity. This is new creation.
The risen Christ still inhabits a body. Still bears wounds. Still participates in ordinary human life.
Which means creation is not disposable. The body is not a mistake. And everyday life is not beneath the concern of God.
Christian hope does not move away from the world. It moves toward it—healed, restored, and reconciled. That matters, because one of the lies sin tells us is that we are on our own.
Sin destroys relationship and leaves us alone in a world that tells us,
“If you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will.”
That lie thrives where life becomes abstract—
where faith is reduced to ideas,
where spirituality is disconnected from bodies, meals, and shared time.
Jesus answers that lie not by arguing,
not by explaining,
but by sitting down to eat.
And notice what He eats. Fish.
Not sacrificial meat.
Not festival food.
Not temple imagery.
Just breakfast.
That tells us something important.
Resurrection life is not lived in constant ecstasy. It is lived in ordinary faithfulness.
Grace does not require a special environment. It meets us where we already are.
These men are fishermen. This is their world. Jesus does not shame them for returning to it. He meets them there.
Later, He will talk about calling. Later, He will say, “Feed my sheep.”
But first, He feeds them.
Calling comes after nourishment. Mission follows mercy.
John includes one more quiet detail that matters.
Jesus already has fish on the fire.
He does not need what they bring.
And yet He invites them to add to the meal.
“Bring some of the fish you have just caught.”
Grace does not erase participation.
It redeems it.
You do not earn the meal.
But you are welcomed into it.
Some of us live as though we must provide everything.
Others live as though we have nothing worth bringing.
Jesus corrects both.
“I already have what is needed.
And there is room for what you bring.”
This is not performance.
It is fellowship.
And that is exactly what sin destroys.
Sin reduces people to roles—
to usefulness,
to self-protection,
to competition.
Grace does the opposite.
Grace restores fellowship.
Grace creates shared life.
Grace brings people back together around something given, not earned.
That’s why this scene matters so much.
This breakfast is not a sacrament replacing the Lord’s Supper.
Jesus is not instituting a new rite here.
This is the sanctification of everyday fellowship.
The Lord’s Supper gathers us to remember Christ.
This meal shows us how Christ stays with us when the gathering is over.
Holiness does not retreat into ritual.
It spills into kitchens,
into shorelines,
into ordinary mornings after long, empty nights.
Which means the Christian life is not meant to be lived alone.
Sin isolates.
Grace reconnects.
Sin leaves us standing, guarding ourselves.
Grace invites us to sit and receive.
And the risen Christ does not hurry this moment.
He eats with them.
He stays.
He lets the fire warm them.
He lets the meal do its work.
Because some things are not healed by explanation.
They are healed by presence.
--- PART 3: The Fire That Remembers
John tells us something here that sounds like a passing detail, but it carries enormous weight.
When the disciples step onto the shore, there is a charcoal fire burning.
That phrase appears only one other time in John’s Gospel.
The last time Peter stood near a charcoal fire, it was night.
The air was cold.
And three times, he said words he never imagined he would say:
“I do not know Him.”
That fire was lit in fear.
This one is lit in grace.
But grace does not pretend the past didn’t happen.
Grace remembers — differently.
Jesus does not avoid the place of Peter’s failure.
He recreates it.
Same kind of fire.
Same man standing nearby.
But this time, the fire is surrounded by breakfast, not accusation.
That matters, because shame lives in memory.
Shame is not just the recollection of failure.
It is the belief that failure has permanently defined us.
And sin feeds that belief.
Sin destroys relationship and leaves us alone in a world that tells us,
“If you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will.”
Shame whispers the same lie, only more quietly:
“You are on your own now.
You’ve ruined this.
You don’t belong anymore.”
Peter knows that voice.
He doesn’t need to be reminded of what he did.
He has replayed it enough times already.
And Jesus knows that too.
So notice what Jesus does not do first.
He does not interrogate Peter.
He does not demand confession.
He does not ask for explanations or promises.
He feeds him.
Grace always moves before repair.
Presence precedes correction.
This is how relationship is restored — not by rushing past the wound, but by staying near it long enough for it to lose its power.
The fire warms.
The food nourishes.
The silence settles.
John tells us something else here that is easy to miss:
“None of the disciples dared ask Him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord.”
They knew — not because He argued it, but because He was doing what only Jesus does.
He was staying.
He was feeding.
He was making room.
Some truths are not proven.
They are recognized.
And this is one of them.
Peter does not yet know what Jesus will ask of him.
He does not yet know how his story will continue.
But for now, he knows this:
He is still welcome.
That is not a small thing.
Because sin fractures relationship in two directions at once.
It distances us from God.
And it isolates us from one another.
We withdraw.
We guard ourselves.
We learn to survive alone.
And the longer that isolation lasts, the more believable the lie becomes:
“This is just how life is now.”
Grace confronts that lie not with argument, but with belonging.
Jesus does not restore Peter by pretending the denial never happened.
He restores Peter by refusing to let that denial be the final word.
The fire that once witnessed Peter’s collapse now becomes the place where his relationship is held open again.
That is how grace redeems memory.
It does not erase it.
It reclaims it.
And that is something only relationship can do.
Ideas cannot heal shame.
Principles cannot restore trust.
Distance cannot repair rupture.
Only presence can.
That’s why this moment lingers.
Jesus is not in a hurry.
He is not anxious about Peter’s future usefulness.
He is not trying to salvage leadership.
He is repairing fellowship.
And that order matters.
Because calling without belonging becomes pressure.
Mission without relationship becomes performance.
Responsibility without restoration becomes cruelty.
Jesus will speak to Peter.
He will ask him hard questions.
He will entrust him with care for others.
But not yet.
First comes breakfast.
First comes warmth.
First comes the assurance that failure has not ended the relationship.
Grace restores what sin tried to dismantle.
Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
But faithfully.
This is not the restoration of Peter’s résumé.
It is the restoration of Peter’s place.
And that is what most of us need more than anything else.
Not to be impressive.
Not to be useful.
Not to be explained.
But to know we still belong.
--- Conclusion: Stay, Eat, Belong
Nothing dramatic happens at the end of this scene.
No thunder.
No sermon.
No altar call.
No rush.
John simply tells us that Jesus took bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish.
And that is how resurrection life is introduced.
Not as spectacle.
Not as pressure.
But as presence.
That alone should correct some of our instincts.
We are often tempted to think that faith must always move forward, always escalate, always prove itself. We measure spiritual health by motion, by clarity, by usefulness.
But the risen Christ does not hurry this moment.
He does not say, “Now let’s talk about what you did wrong.”
He does not say, “Now let’s fix your future.”
He does not say, “Now prove you’re ready.”
He stays.
He eats.
He lets the fire burn.
He lets the silence do its work.
And in doing so, He tells us something essential about the heart of God.
God is not primarily interested in extracting something from you.
He is intent on being with you.
Some of us are tired not because we have failed, but because we have been standing for too long.
Standing in explanations.
Standing in expectations.
Standing in self-protection.
Standing alone.
And what we need is not another command.
We need permission to sit.
---
Sin destroys relationship and leaves us alone in a world that tells us,
“If you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will” —
but grace restores fellowship and brings us back to the table.
---
That is not a metaphor.
It is a way of life.
It means faith is not lived in isolation.
It is sustained in community.
It is nourished in presence.
It is healed in shared space.
You do not have to arrive full.
You do not have to arrive certain.
You do not have to arrive impressive.
You come hungry.
You come honest.
You come tired.
And that is enough.
The fire is already lit.
The meal is already prepared.
The invitation has already been given.
“Come and eat.”
So don’t rush past this moment. Don’t turn it into a task. Don’t explain it away.
Just hear the invitation.
Sit.
Receive.
Make yourself at home and stay awhile.
Resurrection does not pull us out of the world.
It gives the world back to us
— healed, reconciled, and shared.
Sometimes the holiest thing we do
is not stand taller in the field,
but gather around the table.
