Third Sunday of Easter (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 30, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil
April 30, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily:

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us on the third Sunday of Easter. Last week, as you remember, we pondered the Lord’s Divine Mercy and reflected on Jesus’ rehabilitation of the faith of Saint Thomas the Apostle. Today we ponder that same mercy and Jesus’ rehabilitation of St. Peter. Peter didn’t have the same doubts as Thomas about the resurrection. He was the first to enter the tomb. He saw the Lord enter through the closed doors of the Upper Room. Together with the other ten apostles, he rejoiced at Jesus’ triumph over death. But he still wasn’t whole. The obstacle was that he still wasn’t able to forgive himself for what he did on the night Jesus was betrayed. Peter sincerely thought that he would die for the Lord. He tried to defend him in the Garden of Gethsemane with a knife, even cutting off the ear of Malchus, the high priest’s servant, but as Jesus had told him earlier in the Garden, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” (Mt 26:41) and we would just how weak Peter’s flesh was in the High Priest’s courtyard when in response to a conversation with a maid who recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter denied three times that he even knew who Jesus was. That’s when the cock crowed. When Jesus was brought out and looked at him, Peter, remembering Jesus’ prediction, went out and wept bitterly.
• The pain of that experience was very much with Peter even after Resurrection. Mary Magdalene, when she finally recognized Jesus as he called her by name in the Garden on Easter Sunday, rejoiced so much that she clung to his feet never wanted to let him go. The disciples on the road to Emmaus, as soon as they had recognized Jesus in the breaking of the Bread, ran seven miles uphill in pitch-black darkness to share the joyful news of Jesus’ resurrection with the other disciples. And even though the evangelists tell us that the disciples rejoiced when they eventually recognized that Jesus wasn’t a ghost on Easter Sunday evening, Peter still harbored his humiliation and was struggling to forgive himself for having been a spiritual Benedict Arnold. That’s what Jesus needed to address.
• As we see in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus did it first through a miraculous catch of fish. Peter had gone back to what he knew well, probably to divert himself from his sorrow as well as to get some food. He and the other disciples, however, worked all night and caught nothing. In the morning, a seeming stranger on the shore — whose appearance and it seems also his voice had changed after the Resurrection — told them to cast the net onto the other side of the boat. They did and caught an enormous draft of fish. That’s when St. John, who was present on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus originally called him and his brother James, Peter and his brother Andrew three years earlier, grasped that it was the Lord. That original scene of their calling is highly significant to the post-Resurrection scene. Peter, Andrew, James and John had on that previous occasion worked all night and had caught nothing. They had come in, had cleaned their boats and net, and Peter had allowed Jesus to use his boat as a pulpit to move a little from the shore because the crowd was crushing him. After that favor, Jesus told Peter to put out into the deep water and lower his nets for a catch. Peter was almost certainly exhausted and ready to crash in his bed after having worked all night. Everything was clean. And Jesus’ command was basically crazy. Fish were caught in the Sea of Galilee at night in shallow water and this carpenter from Nazareth was telling him to go into deep water in broad daylight. But after protesting his fatigue and frustration, Peter said, “At your word, I will lower the nets.” He rowed back out into deep water far from shore, lowered the nets, and caught such a miraculous draught of fish that the nets were about to break. When he finally made it back to shore, he fell down at Jesus’ feet and said, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man!” And Jesus told him, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will be fishing for men!” (Lk 5:1-11). Jesus, in recapitulating this miracle after the resurrection, was essentially telling Peter, who was still a sinful man and very much felt the ongoing sting of his betrayal, that he still wanted him to be a fisher of men, giving him confidence that if he did what the Lord said, he would bring in huge numbers of fish. The number 153 of fish caught in this Sunday’s Gospel scene was not just a historical fact but a richly symbolic number, because 153 were the number of nations known at the time of Jesus as well as the number of known species of fish. Jesus was basically indicating through the unbroken nets of 153 large fish that Peter and the others would catch every type of man and woman in every nation on earth.
• The second way Jesus reconstituted Peter in his mission was, as we will see, through the one-on-one dialogue after breakfast. Jesus didn’t call him “Peter,” the new name he had given him, because Peter felt anything other than a solid, firm “rock,” which is what Peter means. Jesus used his birth name, Simon son of Jonah, and asked him whether he loved him. Jesus wanted to give him three times to affirm his love to make up for the three times he had denied him. But in the Greek of St. John’s Gospel, something much deeper is going on as well. When Jesus asks him, “Do you love me more than these?,” the word Jesus uses for love is apagein, the same word he uses when he says, “Love one another as I have loved you” and “No one has any greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” Agape means a total self-sacrificial type of love, the type of love Peter had promised he had for Jesus on Holy Thursday, a love willing to die for the one loved. Jesus now was asking Peter if he had that type of total love. But Peter, still wounded by the memories of his own weakness, wouldn’t exercise what he must have deemed bravado once again. His weak flesh was too apparent. So when he replied, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” the word he used for love was not agapein, but philein, meaning the love between friends. In other words, he said, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you as a friend.” Jesus asked him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me with a total self-sacrificial love?” and Peter replied, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you as a friend.” So Jesus in his third approach downgraded the level of commitment and said, “Simon, Son of John, do you love me with philia?” That’s why Peter was stung. It was like he had betrayed the Lord again, that he couldn’t even commit to loving him to the point of death. And so he replied, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you as a friend.” But Jesus wasn’t going to leave Peter there nursing his wounds. Jesus wanted to strengthen him for his mission. So he gave a powerful prophecy. “Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, [an idiom that in Greek means to be crucified] and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” That’s why St. John comments, “He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God.” Even if Peter out of shame was unwilling again to promise he would die for Jesus, Jesus was telling him he would in fact give his life out of love for him. Jesus concluded the dialogue by saying the words he had said to Peter when he had first made him a fisher of men: “Follow me.” And Peter did in fact follow him all the way until his own crucifixion, upside down, in the Circus of Caligula and Nero in the ancient area of the Vatican in October of 64 AD.
• Like Peter, all of us have betrayed Jesus, too, one way or another. But Jesus doesn’t give up on us. Just like he reconstituted Peter in his vocation and mission after his fall, so Jesus wants always to reestablish us in our baptismal vocation and mission. He wants to engage in a one-on-one conversation, which he does in prayer and especially in the one-on-one dialogue of the Sacrament of Penance, to give us a chance to ask for his forgiveness and impart to us resurrection through reconciliation. Jesus wants to ask us by name, “Do you love me more than these? Do you love me more than everything else? Do you love me with the total self-sacrificial type of love with which I love you?” He wants to send us the Holy Spirit to instill in us the same gift of courage that he gave to Peter on Pentecost. He wants to help us to show our love for Jesus by the way that we cast our nets for others.
• That love for Jesus and for others is nourished at Mass. Jesus doesn’t prepare for us a breakfast on the seashore of toast and fish; rather he gives us his Body and Blood under the appearance of bread and wine. He strengthens us from the inside to love others as he loves us. He asks us whether we love him. This Sunday we have the chance to say, “Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you with a total self-sacrificial agapic love,” as he sends us out with his blessing as fishers of men to all nations and all types of human beings and seek to bring them all in with the Church’s untearable net.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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