Sermon preached by Dr. John A. Huffman, Jr.
March 30, 2008
Copyright © 2008, John A. Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved.

He said to him the third time, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" Peter felt hurt because he said it to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep." (John 21:17)

I came across two very significant quotes that pretty well summarize both the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In one by Miroslav Volf, former professor at Fuller Seminary, now on the faculty of Yale Divinity, in his book Free of Charge, he writes:

@QUOTIND = Christ's death doesn't replace our death. It enacts it, [the apostle Paul] suggested. That's what theologians call inclusive substitution. Because one has died, all have died. As a substitute, he is not a third party. His death is inclusive of all. . . . What happened to him happened to us. When he was condemned, we were condemned. When he died, we died. We were included in his death.

Then, from David Ford, in his book Self and Salvation about the resurrection, he writes:

For the New Testament the resurrection is an ultimate, eschatological event of overwhelming joy for which God is responsible. It is therefore an event than which none better or greater could be conceived. . . . God acts; Jesus appears; the disciples are transformed.

Against this deep theological statement of both the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I'd like to give a communion meditation that zeroes in on the Last Breakfast, in the context of what we have heard many times of the Last Supper.

We know that many a message has been given about that time that Jesus gathered His disciples together in the Upper Room and shared that supper with them. But we see, in this account of John, an account of the Last Breakfast. I must admit I've never heard a sermon on this, nor have I ever heard it referred to as this. I asked if anyone on staff had ever heard a sermon on this, since I hadn't found one sermon on it. Oh, there are many, many sermons on the last part where Jesus says, "'Peter, do you love me?'" but not on the breakfast part of the Scripture. Last night, one person raised her hand and said she had. After the service, she came to the door and said that Charles Swindoll just talked on this topic this week on his radio program. I asked for a copy of it and said, "The sermon could be much better tomorrow morning, perhaps, if I can get a copy!" But she couldn't. Another person at the door said, "I heard him this week, too." If you get a copy, let me know. I'd love to see what he did with this text.

The reality is that, as I've been wrestling with this over the last week, I've come up with five bullet points--five words that I'd like to share with you, also, because I hope that they will be appropriate to you, as we come to the communion table, words from this, the Last Breakfast.

The first bullet point is: How quickly things go back to normal.

We have our crises in life, do we not? We plead to God for help. We get His help, and we almost forget that we ever had the crisis.

These disciples were a disheartened group of people. They had been together in the Upper Room. Although we don't know exactly, because the Scripture doesn't clearly say what agendas each of them had for Jesus, we do know, if we study the first century and the Roman domination of the land, that there had to be a nationalistic aspiration on the part of some of them that Jesus would be the Great Deliverer from Rome. Certainly, they didn't view His agenda to die on the cross. He kept telling them He was going to die, but they didn't understand it. They argued with Him about it, and they sort of climbed into the woodwork after that Last Supper in the Upper Room. Then, there was the betrayal at Gethsemane. And Peter, the one who tagged along, you know what he did.

Now the word had come that He had risen. They had already seen Him risen. They had been in the Upper Room, and they had seen him there without Thomas, and then they had seen Him with Thomas. So this isn't the first time they had seen Jesus since the resurrection.

Now the question is, what do they do with the rest of their lives. They went back to things as normal. Some of them went back up to Galilee, and they went back to doing what they knew. At least for some of them, it was fishing. We see in verse 3, Peter invites the rest of them. He says, "'I am going fishing.'" And they said to him, "'We will go with you.'" How quickly things can get back to normal.

One of the great preachers of America and who was my predecessor in the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church, Ben Haden, was a former CIA agent. He was a lawyer. He also was a newspaper publisher. A cynical kind of person, he really was resistant to matters of the faith, until his wife sort of tricked him into going to hear Billy Graham preach. The Holy Spirit used Dr. Graham's message, and Ben was dramatically converted, and his life was changed. He went on to seminary. He had a unique preaching style. He didn't use a pulpit; he took it out of the Key Biscayne Church. He had a legal pad and a pen that he would tap against the legal pad, even making notes while he was preaching, and he would stride around as he preached. Billy Graham, one Sunday, was seated over to the side of the front row in this church-in-the-round, and Ben came right down to Billy with his direct eye contact. Billy said, "I have good eye contact, and Ben just peered into my eyes and I peered back to his, and he just kept preaching until finely I winced." Probably the only person to get Billy Graham to wince with eye contact.

Ben Haden once said to me, "You know, John, most people, even after they come to Christ, in stress situations under pressure, tend to go back to the way they were before." Stop and think about that. It doesn't mean that God doesn't transform our lives. But, in a stress situation, a person who had a temper before they came to Christ will probably react with that temper, if they're not really open to the Holy Spirit in a very conscious way.

This is what the business of transformation is--the process of sanctification over a period of time. God shapes us into the people He dreams of us being, if we are open to being shaped into that. But if we're not careful, we can just revert to life as normal, even if we believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We in the trade--and I don't like to refer to us that way, but there's a guild of those of us who are ordained clergy men and women--tend to talk about Easter as "high Sunday" and the Sunday after Easter as "low Sunday." In fact, most pastors take the Sunday after Easter off, because they don't like coming down to earth in quite as abrupt a way. Where are all the people who were shouting, "Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed!" We're back to the faithful, aren't we? And even we can revert to things as normal.

I'm grateful for those 51 people who handed me their business cards or wrote their name and address on an envelope last week. I'm in the process of getting Chuck Colson's book, The Faith, to send to them, based on whether or not they had accepted the Lord last week or were wrestling with that. Pray for them. I'm sure some of you are in the room today, and that's the important thing. That's why we fish for the souls of men and women and don't just give pleasant platitudes on Easter and talk about the lilies and how the tulips all come up in the spring, but we talk about the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet how quickly things can go back to normal.

The second bullet point I've been thinking of this week is: The Resurrected Christ has a way of surprising us with His presence at times we don't expect it.

Some of us will be in Galilee next month, and some of you who have been there already know that the Sea of Galilee is a beautiful, beautiful sea, a large lake. You can see all the way across it. Most of the time, it's quite calm, but it can get stirred up with the strong winds that come funneling down from the Golan Heights and northern Galilee. I love to take a long walk and then go swimming in the Sea of Galilee at sunrise, and I'll probably do it again this year. It's normally so placid, so calm.

The disciples had already seen Him twice. Now things are back to normal, and they've gone fishing. They fished all night but caught no fish. There's a man on the shore, and he shouts out to them, "I see you haven't caught anything. Throw your nets on the other side, on the right side of the boat." Now, this is a miracle, and I'm not here to explain away miracles. But you can read in H. B. Morton and other writers of the Middle East, and I've been there enough to see, that it is possible, in calm waters like that, for someone with a little bit of perspective to see the troubling of the waters where there's a school of fish on the other side. We don't know whether Jesus used His supernatural powers to do that or just observed the troubling of the waters, but they threw their nets on the other side.

Not fully understanding who this is on the shore, John says, "Peter, do you know who that is? It's Jesus." The shock comes to them, because that's the last place they expected to see Jesus. We see Peter, impulsive, the one who defended Jesus, saying, "I'll go to death instead of you." But Jesus said, "Oh no, in fact yet tonight, you're going to deny me three times." This is the same Peter. It says in the Bible that he was naked, but it probably doesn't mean stark naked. He probably had a loin cloth on, being in fishing mode. The commentaries I've read on this say it was customary, when you saw a person, that you would put some clothes on before you went to them. Then, Peter jumped in the water and got soaking wet, as he goes to see Jesus. We see, in verse 7, John writes, "That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, 'It is the Lord!' When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea." Verse 9 goes on, "When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread," and verse 12, "Jesus said to them, 'Come and have breakfast.'"

That's a good word, isn't it? Jesus often comes to us at the time we least expect it. The reality of the resurrection is driven home. They had already heard about it. They had already seen Him; but Jesus now was hunting them down, because He wasn't finished with them--and He's not finished with you and with me.

The third bullet point I've been wrestling with this week is: Jesus has prepared a meal for us.

He prepared a meal for them there. He had prepared a meal a few days before on that Holy Thursday, as we call it, in the Upper Room. He had gone into meticulous preparations for that meal. It was the Passover. They were honoring 1400 years since God had delivered the Jews out of Egypt. There was the unblemished lamb, the unleavened bread, the paschal wine; and Jesus had picked up the bread at that meal and had broken it and said, "'This is my body, broken for you.'" And He had poured the wine and said, "'This is my blood shed for the remission of sin.'" That was a dramatic moment--that meal--because He was breathing into it brand-new significance. The Last Breakfast was simply a nutritious meal. The Last Supper was the celebrating of that which had been sacramental in Jewish history but now became a sacrament for us.

What is a sacrament? The sacrament is an outward sign of the inner working of God's grace in your life. That's about as good a definition as I know. Or another way of saying it is it's show-and-tell time.

The Roman Catholics have seven sacraments. The Quakers have none. Protestants in general have two sacraments--Baptism and the Lord's Supper. The outward sign of the inner working of God's grace in one's life. In the Roman Catholic understanding of it, when the priest consecrates the elements, what happens to them? They believe that they literally become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. In the free church Baptistic tradition, what happens? Nothing, but they're important symbols. In our Presbyterian heritage, we believe in what is called the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. Not that the bread becomes the literal body, not that the wine becomes the literal blood--but that, as we come with integrity to the table, to the meal He has prepared for us, we must handle sacredly those elements and come worthily, because Jesus Christ is here in the very person and work of His Holy Spirit. This, my friends, is a sacred moment, a sacramental moment.

I realize there are semantics involved in this view and this view and this view. But the question is, are you prepared to be confronted by the One who surprises you and the One who has prepared a meal for you? This is not just a moment to yawn our way through.

And then we come to two more bullets, but these are challenges.

The first challenge is: Jesus challenges you and me to love Him.

I love this dialogue with Peter, and this is where you've heard many messages. "'Peter do you love me?'" Some say the word was "filio," which means do you really care for me like a brother/sister, like friendship love. "'You know, Lord, I do.'" "'Then feed my sheep.'" Then, in verse 16-17, "A second time he said to him, 'Simon son of John do you love me?' He said to him, 'Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.' Jesus said to him, 'Tend my sheep.' He said to him the third time, 'Simon son of John do you love me?'" This time, perhaps it was "agape," a stronger word for love--Do you really love me, unconditional love? "Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, 'Do you love me?' And he said to him, 'Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.' Jesus said to him, 'Feed my sheep.'"

Sometimes, Jesus has to confront us, not just once, but twice or three times. In the case of Peter, He had a tradition of three times, didn't He? In the Upper Room, when Jesus said He would give His life, Peter said, "No, I'll give my life." Jesus said, "No, Peter, before this night is over, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times." I would think with that kind of warning, you'd be extremely careful, wouldn't you? But Jesus says, "Peter, I love you. Let the past be past. The fact is do you love me now?"

He asks you and He asks me, "Do you really love me, or are you just jumping through hoops?" Like last Sunday when we said, "Christ is risen," we're trained to say, "Christ is risen indeed!" and smile real big. Do you really love Jesus?

As you come to the table, ask yourself that question, do you really love Jesus?

And, as you come to the table, come with the second of these challenges. That is: Jesus challenges you and me to serve others in His name.

Jesus challenges us not just to love Him, not just to have a Jesus and me deal. Are you prepared to go from the table into the world in servant ministry of others. As the question is put to him, Peter responds. He gives the right answer. "'Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?'" And Peter said, "'Yes, Lord, you know I love you.'" Then Jesus said, "'Feed my lambs'" (John 21:15). The second time, "'Do you love me?'" "'Tend my sheep.'" The third time, "'Come on, Peter, do you really love me?" He said, "'Lord, you know everything. You know I love you.'" "'Feed my sheep.'"

My friends, not only are we to re-engage the Crucified and Risen Lord at the table with our love, we're challenged to respond with our service for Him. Are you serving others in His name here and throughout the world?

A footnote as we come to the table. This time, Peter meant business. Track his life in the biblical narrative of the synoptic Gospels and the Book of Acts and his other writings, 1, 2 and 3 Peter, and what is said about him, and you'll discover that he meant business this time. He didn't crawl into the woodwork anymore. One of the most reliable pieces of church tradition is that, whereas the Apostle John lived to a ripe old age and wrote this story probably a number of years after Peter had given his life, Peter ended up being crucified himself. As he went to the execution area, he requested that he be nailed to the cross upside down. Yes, he loved his Lord with all he had. He had fed His sheep. He had become a fisher of men and women.

As we come to the table, let us ask ourselves seriously, are we people who just go back to normal things very quickly? Let us remind ourselves that the Resurrected Christ has a way of surprising us with His presence. He's prepared a wonderful meal for us, and He challenges us to love Him and to serve others in His name.