A sermon on Acts 9:1-20 & John 21:1-19 by Nathan Nettleton

The apostle’s Peter and Paul have generally been regarded as the two most important founding figures of the Church, and to this day if you visit Rome, the city in which they both eventually met their deaths, the two most important church buildings are St Peter’s Basilica, built over Peter’s tomb, and the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls, built over Paul’s tomb. In our scripture readings tonight, we heard their respective conversion stories. Peter’s you might think of as a re-conversation story, since he has already been a follower of Jesus, but Paul’s is pretty much the archetypal conversation story: the persecutor of Christians who is knocked off his horse by a blinding flash of light and gets up again as a follower of Jesus himself. In some ways, Paul’s story is probably too well known and so has come to be some sort of measuring stick for comparing conversion stories, and we’d be better off without such a measuring stick. As I said last week, Jesus meets each of us where we need to be met, and how we need to be met, and so no two conversion stories are quite the same. Although at first glance these two stories are very different, they also have some interesting similarities, and looking at them together may give us a more helpful insight into the nature of our own experiences of conversion.

Fundamental to both these experiences of conversion is the experience of forgiveness, the receiving of mercy at the hands of the risen Christ. It is more explicit in Peter’s story, but we don’t have to scratch the surface too deeply to see it in Paul’s either. “Saul, Saul,” (his name was only changed to Paul after his conversion), “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul has been a hot-headed religious fanatic who was zealously trying to stomp out what he saw as a heretical sect that was a threat to the unity and integrity of his religion. The high priest seemed happy to harness the violent zeal of fanatics like Saul. When pragmatic religious leaders want to get rid of some opponents, a frenzied mob of fanatical young men is a very useful tool. But now Saul is knocked off his horse and confronted with the crucified and risen Christ asking “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” In Paul’s violent world view, where those who are right in the eyes of God are rewarded and sinners and heretics are humiliated, punished and even killed, he would expect that he’s now in for it. He’s been on the anti-God side after all, even though he intended to be on God’s side, and so now he would be expecting to get exactly the sort of violent reprisals he had been intending to dish out to those he thought were the anti-God side. Saul knew the rules. He thought he’d been policing them. So now he braced himself to be on the receiving end of them. But no reprisals or recriminations come.

Peter, on the other hand, has not been deliberately persecuting anyone. He’s a fisherman, not a religious fanatic. But actually, Peter has gotten himself caught up in the deadly violence of an angry mob too. He might not have been a hands-on perpetrator like Saul, but when the mob turned on Jesus and was driving itself into a frenzy of blood lust, Peter, who had been so sure of his unflinching loyalty to Jesus, so sure he would never deny him, lost his nerve and gave in to his fear and pretended he had no connections to Jesus at all. Right when Jesus most needed someone to stand up for him, Peter denied even knowing him, not once but three times. What is it they say? All it takes to enable evil doers to perpetrate great evil is for good people to turn away their faces and say nothing. That’s what Peter had done. That’s what we all have done. “What you did to the least of these, you did to me,” said Jesus on another occasion, and of course that is what is being implied when Jesus cries out, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” There are horrendous mistreatments of people going on that I am aware of, even in this country, and yet most of the time I do nothing more about it than complain over my latte that someone should do something. I don’t need the cock to crow to tell me I’m no better than Peter. And Peter knew that Jesus knew. He heard the cock crow and saw Jesus cast him a penetrating look, and he knew that he knew. And even then, Peter did nothing but flee into the night, a broken man. How could he ever face Jesus again after that? Of course the next day Jesus was dead and Peter had no expectation of ever having to face him again, and perhaps that was even worse. Sometimes we would prefer to be made to face those we have failed, to express our remorse and take our punishment and perhaps in some way feel that in suffering our punishment the ledger is squared and we are free to move on.

But now we have this encounter on the beach. The crucified and risen Jesus is barbecuing a fish breakfast and he calls Peter to join him. John the gospel writer ties these two stories together very clearly and deliberately. Where was Peter when he denied Jesus? Standing around a charcoal fire in the chief priest’s courtyard. And where does he encounter Jesus now? At a charcoal fire where Jesus is cooking on the beach. Do you know how many times John’s gospel mentions charcoal fires? Just those two. It’s no accident. And how many times did Peter deny Jesus? Three times. And how many times does Jesus now ask him if he loves him? Three times. It is like Peter is being taken back to the scene of the crime, isn’t it?

So what’s that all about? Is Jesus trying to rub his nose in it? If Jesus is forgiving him, what happened to ‘forgive and forget’? Isn’t this a bit humiliating? Why does he have to first rake over the coals, so to speak?

These are important questions, and they probably go to the heart of our frequent misunderstanding of forgiveness. The phrase “forgive and forget”, which by the way is not a biblical saying at all, has been responsible for an awful lot of misunderstanding and therefore an awful lot of grief and inability to forgive and let go. It has fuelled the mistaken belief that forgiveness means pretending that something never happened. Don’t talk about it. Don’t name it. Just pretend it never happened and get over it. The truth is that nothing is surer to compromise your ability to get over it than trying to pretend it never happened. Jesus is not on about sweeping things under the carpet and doing mental gymnastics to make denial of reality look like a virtue. But he is totally on about mercy and forgiveness. Full blooded, bracing, scene-of-the-crime forgiveness.

Real forgiveness is not about pretence, denial or forgetting. Real forgiveness is about bringing the offence into the light, naming and acknowledging it fully, and then choosing not to seek to make the perpetrator pay. It is relinquishing our rights to recriminations and vengeance. It is choosing to offer only love and honour in return for hatred and hurt that have been received, but naming the hatred and hurt all the same. Jesus doesn’t hide his wounded hands and pretend that nothing happened and none of us did anything wrong by him. He reaches out to us with torn and mangled hands, and there is no way for us to reach out and accept his embrace without touching those wounded hands that speak simultaneously of our failure and Jesus’ readiness to love us anyway.

So there we stand with Peter by that charcoal fire, the second one, just as we stood with him at the first one. There is no cheap superficial forgiveness here. Jesus wants to see us healed and set free, and he knows that we never will be if the scene of the crime is not revisited. If nothing is ever said, never named or spoken of, then we will forever live with the fear that resentment is still festering and that recriminations and retaliation have perhaps just been postponed. For true healing, we need to be taken back to the scene of the crime, to in some sense symbolically reverse and undo what we did. “Simon Peter, here by the fire where you denied that you even knew me, I ask you now, do you love me?” “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” This is excruciatingly intense and painful stuff. We know it is because the author even tells us that Peter is really hurting by the third time.

We go through these same moves in our liturgy here each Sunday. Sometimes we wonder why we need to include confessions of sin in the service every week. Isn’t that all behind us? Haven’t we been forgiven and now we can quickly forget it and move on? Well, yes, we have been forgiven. But Jesus wants to forgive and heal us, and that healing always begins with fully facing up to what we have done, with revisiting the scene of the crime. That was the genius of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. The forgiveness that reconciles rather than turning its back is born in truth telling. It is also the genius of 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. If you’ve got friends who are long term 12-steppers, they will be able to tell you how essential a full and bracing honesty about one’s own failures and the abusive consequences of those failures is to their journey of recovery and rebuilding. Denial never provides a platform that can bear the weight of a reconstructed life. I’m not going to pretend that our prayers of confession in the liturgy attain even a tiny percentage of the intensity of the truth telling of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions or even an AA meeting, but the message is the same. New life begins with facing up to the failures of the old, with revisiting the scene of the crime.

And of course, during this Paschal season, our liturgy also takes us to that second charcoal fire and as our service draws to a close, we hear with Peter that question, “Daughters and Sons of the Earth, do you love me? Feed my sheep.”

Why is it here, in this particularly intense exchange that Jesus starts talking about tending and feeding his lambs and sheep? Well there is a bit of cheeky humour going on here. Peter the fisherman is being turned into a shepherd by a carpenter who has just told him which side of the boat to catch fish from! But underneath the irony, there is something important happening too. You see, real forgiveness is never primarily a matter of words. Jesus doesn’t seem to mention forgiveness here, and he doesn’t in the encounter with Saul either. But real forgiveness is not in words, but in actions, and what more radical expression of forgiveness could there be than Jesus saying, “I want you to be my representative. Tend my sheep. Proclaim my message. I entrust my flock and my mission and my reputation to you. Not because I’m pretending you didn’t deny me or persecute me, but because we have revisited that and in the face of that, you have given me your love, and I have no desire to see you humiliated or punished. Come, be free, and be my people, my representatives. Feed my sheep.”

Perhaps there is an important reminder in the joke about the carpenter telling the fisherman how to catch fish too. “When you come and follow me and begin to feed my sheep, don’t fall back into thinking you can work out how to do it all yourself, and you can achieve anything if you just try hard enough. You can slave all night at something you are an undisputed expert at, and you will achieve nothing. You can’t do it on the basis of your own competence or expertise or effort. Just ask Saul where his competence and expertise and effort got him. Flat on his arse in the desert with his whole world crashing down around his ears. But follow me, and anything is possible. Cast your nets where I say, and taste the abundance of heaven. Feed my sheep at my bidding and you will pass safely through the valley of death. Go into all the world, and I will be with you.”

So here we are folks, standing around the charcoal fire, reminded of our crashing failure, but invited to breakfast with our crucified and risen Lord, who reaches out to us in broken bread that speaks both of the wounded hands of mercy and of the first taste of the bountiful catch, the overflowing banqueting table of heaven. So, here at the scene of the crime, where we have promised much, failed even more, and been loved far more still, in the spirit of that humbled but surprised-by-joy response of “Yes Lord, you know that I love you”, let us stand and affirm the faith of the church.