Dawn on Galilee

Dawn on Galilee

By Lindsay Grandison MacArthur

"But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus. Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any meat? They answered him, No. And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes. Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is the Lord. As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.”

John 21:4-7, 9-13

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After a long night of empty nets, seven weary disciples see a stranger standing on the shore. Matthew Henry observed that “Christ's time of making himself known to his people is when they are most at a loss. When they think they have lost themselves, he will let them know that they have not lost him.” They are wet, cold and hungry, and before the risen Lord says a word about their mission, He invites them to eat breakfast with Him. As Alexander MacLaren put it, “the first thing that He thinks about is to feed them.”

But John records one more detail, and it is no accident. The Greek word for the “fire of coals” that the Savior has prepared, anthrakia, appears only twice in the entire New Testament. The first time is in the high priest’s courtyard, where Peter warmed his hands and denied three times that he knew Jesus (John 18:18). The second is here, on the beach at dawn.

Smell is perhaps the sense that is most tightly bound to memory. Peter likely caught the unique scent of burning charcoal before he even reached the shore. That smell presumably carried him straight back to the worst night of his life—the cold, the fear, the crowing rooster, the moment the Lord turned and looked upon him. Jesus does not steer Peter away from that memory. Instead, he builds the same kind of fire with His own hands and invites Peter to sit beside it.

Then, three times, the Savior asks, “Lovest thou me?” Peter's three prior denials are offset by three declarations of love. Jeffrey R. Holland called this exchange “the crucial turning point” for Peter toward a “majestic life of devoted service and leadership.” And Christ does not merely forgive Peter, He shows him that He trusts him. Matthew Henry wrote, “Christ, when he forgave Peter, trusted him with the most valuable treasure he had on earth,” His sheep. We often forgive while keeping a careful distance. The Savior forgives and then places His flock in Peter's hands. Restoration is not only having the past erased, it is being entrusted with a future.

Fittingly, Peter's prior failures and redemption served to prepare him for this new mantle. Henri Nouwen reminds us that Jesus “wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as 'professionals' who know their clients' problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved.” The wounded and forgiven Peter is precisely the Peter that Christ sends out to care for the wounded and the lost.

Each of us has our own charcoal fires—places, sounds or seasons that summon the memory of our failures or shortcomings. The risen Lord does not ask us to pretend they never happened. He meets us there with breakfast already on the coals. He takes what once marked our lowest moment and makes it the place where we can reaffirm, “Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee.” And then He invited us, as He did Peter, “Feed my sheep.”

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