This week saw May 1^st, May Day, which is traditionally the first day of spring for so many regions around the world. Today is the third Sunday of Easter. We celebrate the resurrection of what we thought was lost. We look forward to what might be made out of our own lives. But in the Gospel reading this morning, we see Peter failing to catch any fish after being out all night. He’s wrestling with failure as a fisherman, and he’s still wrestling with his failure as a disciple, turning over and over the events of Good Friday, particularly his own threefold denial of Christ.

That dark, early morning, standing outside the Temple as his teacher was questioned and tortured, Peter stood by a brazier to keep warm by the charcoals (John 18:18-27). The hostile strangers around him asked if he was a follower of Jesus, and he said to them that he did not know Christ, and after his third denial, the rooster crowed, and he realized his deep shame.

The disciples faced many painful realizations that day of crucifixion. And we acknowledge them on Good Friday each year, though not everyone is able to attend that service. We don’t explore them in depth on a Sunday – not during Lent, not during Easter, not during the course of the year. And if we don’t mention them, if we skip ahead to focus only on new light, new life, and the proclamation that Christ is risen, then I do worry we might miss the message, a reckoning of guilt and forgiveness, and we’ll start to think that not only did Jesus never encounter suffering in his life, but neither should we.

We do much in our lives that we end up regretting. We behave selfishly, undermining our highest held ideals, and hiding our most basic priorities from our loved ones. We wish we could have it all: the esteem of others, the fulfillment of our goals, and ultimately our own self-preservation, however we understand it. The trouble is that in trying to secure for ourselves our status, safety, and unassailability, we end up living a kind of false life, a lie and a deception, and those we love struggle to recognize who we are.

Life inevitably shatters our facades and our hypocrisy. Our hidden betrayals come to light, a light into which we, too, are dragged, and a calamity of shame befalls us. The truth of who we are – our self-interest, which overrules our professions of faith and fidelity, commitment and integrity, honesty and noble purpose – the truth of who we are becomes known, for the first time, and we despair of ever being accepted again. Peter faces this shame on Good Friday.

The Easter miracle captures for us the mysterious marriage of the resurrection of Christ and the shame of a world that rejected him and sent him to his end on a cross. The tension between the failure of humanity and the resurrection of life and love is all around us, and it makes me think of something my wife says about our first son, Walker, often when we are amazed at who he is.

Before he came into this world, my wife and I didn’t know anything about him, not his gender, or if he had 10 fingers and 10 toes, or his likes or his dislikes, or his birthday, or his hair, eye, or skin color. Who he would be was a mystery to us, unknown and unknowable. All we knew was that he was coming. And even after he was born and we learned more about him, that he was a healthy weight, had healthy measurements, and was progressing along just fine, we still could only imagine what he would be like.

Now my older son has been on this earth for almost nine years, and we’ve gotten to know his likes and dislikes, the way he smiles, and what he laughs at. And my wife, still, after almost nine years, often says to him in wonder, “It was you, it was you the whole time. We didn’t know it would be you.”

In time, we have been graced to move from mystery to recognition, from making room in our hearts for something still secret to us, to welcoming into our lives something revealed, a child, with a particular set of preferences and habits. We welcomed into our midst something which was once hidden in darkness but which finally came into the light.

That’s how I understand the shift in expectations from one of dejection to one of rejoicing: with the disciples saying, “It was you (Lord), it really was. We didn’t know if it could really be true.”

The disciples, like the crowds who had gathered in Jerusalem for Passover that spring, had expected a true Son of David, a violent revolutionary to overthrow the Roman Empire. Even after following Jesus for years, they couldn’t imagine that Christ’s kingdom really was not of this world. They wanted a king who could make them a great nation once more, so much so that Peter even drew a sword to bloodily protect his teacher after their last supper together. 

The resurrection shows how wrong the world was, how much it had hemmed in God on every side. The world rejected and despised Jesus, and the mystery to me is how God can forgive the world. Now that I have children, as a father, it’s even harder for me to understand how God can forgive the people of God for the violence committed against the Son of God. Now that I have Walker and Arthur in my life, I cannot understand how God can have mercy on the world, despite how violently the world rejected the Word of God. The mystery deepens for me the more I get to know my sons, the more I love them each day, the more I realize that my care for them extends beyond reason. I cannot comprehend God’s forgiveness; I cannot wrap my mind around God’s grace – for anyone who would jeopardize the future of a little one.

But that’s what God does. The mystery of forgiveness deepens as each of us grows, as we encounter just how difficult it is to forgive those who trespass against us, and how difficult it is to forgive ourselves, as we trespass against others. We can’t fathom how God can love us so much. But that’s the enduring promise of God: We are forgiven; we are accepted, just as we are.

And God doesn’t leave us to our own devices. God doesn’t leave Peter to go back to fishing. The Gospel promises something more demanding of the disciples, in Jesus’ reinstatement of Peter. He describes to Peter his own future, how we will be spread out on his own cross one day, bound to it, and crucified upside down, as punishment for following after his Risen Lord.

Because his witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ is a threat to every fear-mongering regime, every empire built on intimidation and coercion, every power and principality which ignores the grace of God and the dignity of every person made in God’s image. Peter’s witness to the truth of things will lead to his own suffering, and in that way he really will be a disciple following after Jesus Christ. In that way, he will find meaning and purpose in his life. In that way, the way of following after God, he will be remembered from generation to generation.

So what about you, you who are a disciple of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world? Will you accept God’s acceptance of you, and will you follow Christ, not only outwardly but also inwardly, too? Will you persevere, come what may? I pray you will. Amen.