The children gathered round the Sunday School teacher. The theme was the need to put on the full armour of God when sharing God’s Word. The teacher explained that Satan wants to stop us from sharing about Jesus by attacking us with fear, discouragement and unbelief.

For this reason, the teacher explained, God has provided us with armour to thwart these attacks and to assure us that our work will prevail. To illustrate this, the teacher had one of the children put on the armour, explaining what each piece meant and that with the armour on we could go and evangelise.

So after one young boy had put on the helmet, sword, breastplate, sandals and belt, the teacher asked the children, “What do we say to him now?” And another lad scrutinised the clumsy-looking armour and said, “Good luck!”

Well, after the events of that first Holy Week – the giddy heights of Palm Sunday, the utter despair of Good Friday, and the sweeping up to the heavens by the glory of the resurrection, a bit of mundane fishing would help to over come the emotional roller-coaster they had lived through.

The seven day festival of the Passover is completed and like everyone else, the disciples go home. Good luck to them, really.

To be honest, what else would you have done? Both the angels by the empty tomb and Jesus had even told them to go back to Galilee (Matt 28:7, 10) where he would meet them again. But they hadn’t a clue what their purpose was or how they were to achieve it. All most of them knew about was fishing, so they went to fish.

The observant among you would have realised last week that the ending of John 20 suggests a conclusion to the Gospel, and then we have this 21st chapter, with its own concluding ending. It is as if John decided that his original ending wasn’t enough, and scholars reckon that John 21 was added very soon after John 20, so soon in fact that it was always considered an integral part of the Gospel.

And it needed this ending, because it deals with rehabilitating Peter, the future of Peter and John themselves, as well as the future mission and purpose of those disciples. It wasn’t a case of Jesus saying, “Good luck, then!” but a case of Jesus preparing and equipping them for a future with a purpose.

So let’s look some of the detail of our story to get a handle on what is happening. The disciples are in Galilee – Sea of Tiberias is another name for Lake Galilee – and we have 7 of the 11 disciples gathered. We could call them the Galilee 7 because they all come from that region.

Isn’t it encouraging when we look down that list – they are so like us, but still used by God:
· Peter the failure, the deny-er of his Lord
· Thomas the doubter, now keeping close to the action not wishing to miss out again I guess
· Nathaniel, loyal and faithful, quietly there
· The sons of Zebedee, James and John, both rather ambitious and perhaps a bit touchy about their status
· The two others, probably Andrew, Peter’s brother, and Philip, the other disciple from Galilee and friend of Nathaniel, both so background they don’t even get named.

We can probably see ourselves in this list. And they went fishing. Nothing else to do, I suppose. Probably would have played football in the church car park today. They needed a safe place and the hope of a good night’s fishing. From their mountain top experience in Jerusalem, they are down to the mundane of a working day.

They have a rotten night and then to cap it all some stranger, standing on the shore, offers them advice about how and where to fish! Every fisherman knows that fishing is better at night and seasoned practitioners like these Galilee 7 knew where fish were.

Our story raises a number of issues for them:-
· They didn’t recognise Jesus. They had been with him for 3 years, worked with him, eaten with him, laughed with him, and they didn’t know it was him.
· The story is wonderfully full of eye-witness testimony – John really was there and he remembered it well. The lack of a catch, the huge number of fish, the charcoal fire burning – just like that charcoal in the High Priest’s house when Jesus was arrested, the food of bread and fish – just like the feeding of the 5000 and the 4000.
· Peter, and the others to some extent, needing forgiveness and wanting acceptance again after fleeing their Lord, denying their Lord, abandoning their Lord.

To get them ready for world evangelisation, to take the Gospel to the nations, starting at Jerusalem, then Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the world, needed more than just “Good luck.”

Going fishing was the right metaphor but the wrong purpose. Fishing is symbolic of mission in the Gospels and the disciples’ ministry began with a fishing trip based on advice from Jesus: Luke 5:4-7
When [Jesus] had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch."
Simon answered, "Master, we've worked hard all night and haven't caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets."
When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

But at the time they went fishing in John 21, they were going with the wrong purpose. Imagine two sailing boats approaching one another, moving steadily and speedily in opposite directions - yet driven by the same wind. The boat’s direction is determined not by the wind, but by the set of the sail.

The disciples set their sail back to every day work, but Jesus comes on the scene and takes their every day work and gives it new purpose or new meaning. Their understanding and attitude were to be changed completely.

Jesus was there, revealing himself at his time and place, not at the disciples’ choosing by the way, to give them a new, right purpose.

He tells them to try fishing once again, but now it’s at Jesus’ command. Immediately the net is full of fish, so many they cannot haul it in and they have to tow the net ashore. It is John, a young man still so with better eye-sight, who sees it is Jesus. It is Peter, the impetuous one, who leaps in the water to swim ashore to be with Jesus. Actually, later in John 21, Jesus deals with Peter’s need for reconciliation and renewal.

The story is as we have seen such a reminder of that day some three years previously. Again they are fishermen. Again they catch a huge catch of fish. Again they cannot haul it in. Again it is at the command of Jesus. This was the purpose reiterated again: they are not to catch fish but to catch men. The size of the catch is amazing for them. This was the right purpose: to catch men and women for Christ.

I went into shipbroking by mistake really. It wasn’t my intention. It was good but I always knew it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing when I was 40, so to speak. I did look around at other city careers, but nothing came of them. I tried to get better jobs in shipping but nothing came of that. All around this time – some 10 years I guess – I was sometimes loudly and sometimes hardly hearing the voice of God saying what my purpose in life should be. I was good at ignoring it, until it became so insistent that I couldn’t do that anymore.

Just like those disciples on that lake shore. They may have gone back to their mundane routine, but Jesus had a purpose for them, an eternal purpose, an eternal purpose he has for all who love him and follow him: to catch men and women for Christ, to make disciples or as our mission statement puts it:
To enable everyone to become mature followers of Christ, who experience and live out God’s love in every part of their lives.

That’s what the disciples were to do as well. Jesus offers them their future purpose, clearly laid out in this event by the Lake Galilee.

The scope of their purpose was huge. The catch was an astonishing one, far beyond these disciples’ expectations: large number (v.6), full of fish (v.8), full of large fish, 153 (v.11). The disciples may have thought that Jesus was only for Israel: in Acts 1:6 they ask Jesus, “"Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"

But Jesus wanted to show them that their purpose was to be huge, like the catch of fish. It’s going to be a great harvest among the nations, tough one that will never be too great to accommodate. We can look back 2000 years and see this happening: the church is in every nation, brothers and sisters in Christ are found throughout the world.

But there was a secret to this scope of mission purpose, a secret revealed in this story. There is a stark contrast between the disciples going out on their on initiative and catching nothing and going out at Jesus’ command and catching a huge net of fish. As Jesus said, “Apart from me you can nothing.” (John 15:5).

We may have all the technology, all the resources, all the communication tools, all the conferences and seminars and teaching sessions, but apart from Jesus we can do nothing. The growth of Christianity in the West is to be poorly compared to the growth of Christianity in the developing world. With all our know-how, we have a tendency to trust in it, rather than in Jesus.

That’s not to say that we can sit back and do nothing. Jesus wants our contribution. Note in the story by Lake Galilee that when they landed they found Jesus already with a fire cooking fish, with bread nearby (v.9). But he says, “Bring some of the fish you have caught.” (v.10). He didn’t need their help in providing fish for the barbeque, but he still asks for their contribution.

As Tom Wright puts it in his commentary:-
How dreadfully easy it is for Christian[s] … to get the impression that we’ve got to do it all. God, we imagine, is waiting passively for us to get on with things. If we don’t organize it, it won’t happen. If we don’t tell people the good news, they won’t hear it. If we don’t change the world, it won’t be changed. “He has no hands but our hands”, we are sometimes told.

What a load of rubbish. Whose hands made the sun rise this morning? Whose breath guided us to think and pray and love and hope? Who is the Lord of the world anyway? We may be given the Holy Spirit to enable us to work for Jesus; but the holy breath is not independent of the master who breathes it out, of the sovereign God, the creator. … Jesus welcomes Peter’s catch. He asks him to bring some of it. But he doesn’t, in that sense, need it.

Of course we are to work hard for the Kingdom of God; there is no excuse for laziness or half-heartedness. But it’s not upto us, as if poor Jesus couldn’t lift a finger unless we do it for him.

That is the purpose he laid out for the disciples, and that he lays out for us today. To serve him in the eternal advance of his Kingdom, such that one day:-
“in the morning light we shall see Him standing on the … shore. The ‘Pilot of the Galilean Lake’; who will guide our frail boat through the wild surf that marks the breaking of the sea of life on the shore of eternity; and when the sun rises over the Eastern hills we shall land on the solid beach, bringing our ‘few small fishes’ with us, which he will accept. And there we shall rest, nor need to ask who is He that serves us, for we shall know that ‘It is the Lord!’” (A. Maclaren)