Two Coal Fires/Easter 2007

Introduction:

The presence of the Lord Jesus, alive just as He promised He would be, transforms everything. We can see this very clearly in the fall and restoration of the apostle Peter after the resurrection.

The Text:

“And the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coals; for it was cold: and they warmed themselves: and Peter stood with them, and warmed himself” (John 18:18).

“And the other disciples came in a little ship; (for they were not far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits,) dragging the net with fishes. As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread” (John 21:8-9).

Overview:

These two verses are just a few pages apart, and the Greek for the charcoal fire is identical (anthrakian). The apostle John is a very careful writer, and I believe we are being invited to compare and contrast the two settings.

The first fire was built by the enemies of Christ (18:18), and the second was built by Jesus Himself (21:9). Peter was present in both settings, and he was present because of something that had been said by the apostle John (18:16; 21:7). Jesus was present in both settings. In the first He was on trial for His life (John 18:27; cf. Luke 22:61), and in the second He has conquered death (21:1 ). In the first, Peter denied the Lord three times, just as Jesus had predicted (18:17,25, 26), and fell into sin. In the second, he affirmed his love for the Lord three times, and was reinstated (21: 15,16,17). In the first, Peter received something from wicked men (warmth), and in the second he received something from the Lord (food, and forgiveness). In the first, Peter does not compare favorably with the disciple that Jesus loved—John was more influential “at court,” John didn’t deny the Lord, and John didn’t run away. In the second, Peter has all comparisons put to rest (John 21:21-22). “What is that to you?”

153 Fish, and Big Ones Too:

This is not a mystical or supernaturalist reading of the text–— it is a literary reading of the text. The issues are placement, foreshadowing, parallelism, conventions, and so on. To illustrate the difference, consider another detail from this text—when Jesus called out to His disciples fishing about 100 yards offshore, He told them to put their nets down over the right side of the boat, which they did. When they had done so, the result was a huge haul. This was a way of Jesus identifying Himself. When He had first called them to ministry, He had called them away from their nets (Matt. 4:18-22) so that they could become fishers of men. And when Jesus had done a similar miracle like this one before, the response that Peter had had was that of being overwhelmed with his own sinfulness (Luke 5:8). This scene in John has a return to both elements—Jesus deals wonderfully with Peter’s sin and fall, and Jesus recommissions him to ministry as a fisher of men. He tells him three times to “feed the sheep” (21:15, 16, 17). We should have no trouble seeing the fish as emblatic of the coming haul at Pentecost. The nations were to be brought into the boat, and Jesus indeed made His disciples fishers of men. In this case, Peter had jumped out of the boat, and the others had brought the fish in. But Peter is soon to rejoin them in the work.

But what is it with the specific number of fish? This is a good place to illustrate the difference betwen a careful literary reading and mystical reading.This number has been the occasion of a goodly amount of ingenuity to be spent on it. Some of it has been fanciful, some of it sober, and some of it pretty pedestrian.

Bear With Me:

The pedestrian reading is that 153 is mentioned because that’s how many fish there were, darn it, and John was simply interested in adding an irrelevant little detail. A fanciful reading is that when you add the ten of the commandments to the seven of the seven-fold Spirit, as Augustine urged, you get seventeen, and 153 is the triangular of 17. This means that if you add the numbers 17 to 16 to 15 to 14 and so on down to one, the sum is 153). The problem here is that you can also get 153 from Seventeen magazine, and that doesn’t mean that John is talking about the challenges of adolescence. This is the kind of thing that John Calvin called “childish trifling.”

But 666 is the triangular of 36 (and 36 is 6 times 6). The biblical writers did make some of their points with numbers, and John particularly did. The fact that it is unusual to us doesn’t make it unusual or odd to them. We already have solid grounds forunderstanding the fish as representing the Gentile nations. We have the “fishers of men” call that Jesus gives Peter and Andrew, James and John. We have the fact that throughout Scripture, the sea represents the Gentiles and the land the Jews. No one in the Old Testament is shown eating fish, but in the New Testament fishing (and the eating of fish) comes to the front and center.

On the day of Pentecost, how many nations are listed? Well, 17 actually (Acts 2: 7-11). And we have to remember the practice of encoding numbers in names (called gematria) was common in the ancient world. They could do this in a way that we cannot because they used the same symbols for letters and for numbers. We have Roman letters and Arabic numbers. But in Hebrew, the first nine letters corresponded to 1-9, the next nine were 10-90, and the last five were100-400. So? Well, as Jim Jordan points out, the prophet Ezekiel promised that the time of the New Covenant would be a time of glorious fishing. “And it shall come to pass, that the fishers shall stand upon it from Engedi even unto Eneglaim; they shall be a place to spread forth nets; their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea, exceeding many” (Ez. 47:10). The prefix En simply means spring, and so if we look at the numerical value of Gedi in Hebrew, we find that it is 17, and the value of Eglaim is 153. Ezekiel is talking about the salvation of the Gentiles under the figure of fish, and he uses these numbers. John refers to this, and it has the same meaning as the explicit meaning given to it by Jesus in Luke. This means that 153 is a symbolic number for the Gentile nations who will be brought into the kingdom of God.

Back to the Charcoal Fire:

Remember that Peter is being restored. The antithesis is very clear here. The charcoal fire built by the enemies of Christ is not really a good place to warm yourself—and it ends with snarling, cursing, devouring, bitterness, and tears. The charcoal fire built by Christ is built in order to feed the disciples, and then, as Peter is being restored, he is commanded (in his turn) to feed the Christians who will follow him.

The resurrected Christ forgives and feeds. Our responsibility is to be forgiven, to be fed, and then to forgive . . . and feed.