Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Breakfast on the Beach
Ordinary guys, ordinary work, and the extraordinary holiness of abiding in Christ
We are coming to the end now in our study of the Gospel of John. This is our penultimate message in the series. I just like saying penultimate. I think that’s a cool word.
So we’ve got this week and next, and then we will somehow have finished this entire Gospel in about nineteen weeks. Not too shabby, I suppose. And you have persevered well through it.
We pick it up in chapter 21, the last chapter — and scholars wrestle with it, because John’s Gospel really seems like it should have ended at chapter 20: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Done. Finished. Great job, John.
And then we get chapter 21. It kind of feels a little bit tacked on — the guys fishing, Jesus hanging out on the beach, and Peter’s reinstatement, which we’ll get to next week.
We don’t know why it’s there. Maybe it was part of the Gospel all along, and with parchment being expensive, John finished chapter 20 thinking he was done — then went, “Ah, what was I thinking? I’ve got to tell this last story. This is just too good.” Maybe the chapter circulated later because people were asking, “John, what happened with Peter?” We’re never going to know. And that’s okay.
The easy thing would have been to sanitize it — some monk going, “That verse doesn’t fit, let’s take it out.” They didn’t. They left it messy. The Bible is messy: not always clean, neat, and easy, because these texts were written a couple thousand years ago. And part of the fun of taking the Bible seriously is that we get to ask why — and dig in, and study, and wrestle with it. I’m going to leave that unresolved for you. It’s part of the process.
“Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Galilee. It happened this way: Simon Peter, Thomas (also known as Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. ‘I’m going out to fish,’ Simon Peter told them, and they said, ‘We’ll go with you.’ So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.
“Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. He called out to them, ‘Friends, haven’t you any fish?’
“‘No,’ they answered.
“He said, ‘Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.’ When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish.
“Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ As soon as Simon Peter heard him say, ‘It is the Lord,’ he wrapped his outer garment around him (for he had taken it off) and jumped into the water. The other disciples followed in the boat, towing the net full of fish, for they were not far from the shore, about a hundred yards. When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread.
“Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish you have just caught.’ So Simon Peter climbed back into the boat and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’ None of the disciples dared ask him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord.
“Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time Jesus appeared to his disciples after he was raised from the dead.” (John 21:1–14)
The two other disciples
Can we pause at the guest list? Simon Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee — and two other disciples.
How would you feel about being one of the two? You get your copy of John’s Gospel, reading along — “yeah, Peter; Nathanael; Thomas; the sons of Zebedee, yep” — and then: and two other disciples. You’d want to find John at the next gathering and say, “Jerk. You left me out.” Those two guys were still alive.
Nothing in the nets
Jesus has appeared to the disciples twice now. They’re no longer hiding in the upper room, and they’ve had the Spirit breathed on them — but they’re still figuring out what any of this means.
And finally Peter just says it. You can almost hear the awkward small talk — “What do you want to do? I don’t know. What do you want to do? I don’t know.” — until Peter lands on the one thing they know how to do: “I’m going out to fish.”
Because that’s what they do. Peter was a fisherman. James and John were fishermen — generations of family expertise on the Sea of Galilee. The resurrection has happened, history has fundamentally split — and they still have to go back to work. They still have to eat.
They fish all night. And how many fish do they catch? Zero. Nothing. Nada.
Which is the whole illustration, because John 15 is hovering over this entire scene. “Abide in me, and I will abide in you. Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Here we get the picture: the guys drift back into their self-reliant routine, leaning on their own strength and professional expertise, and their nets come up empty.
Does that sound familiar? “Apart from me, you can do nothing.”
Do we not do the same thing? We go about our days leaning into our own strengths and abilities and levels of expertise, thinking we’re the ones who make everything work. I do it as a pastor. I work really hard at communicating, at studying, at showing up for people — and in some sense, yes, there’s an aspect of that. But if I am only doing it in my own strength, I will eventually fall short, and Jesus will be standing on the shore asking, “What’s wrong? Don’t have any fish?”
Whatever you do — teacher, nurse, tradesperson — if you think you’re accomplishing everything on your own strength, eventually you’re going to run out. We cannot make our lives work apart from recognizing the presence of Christ in every part of them.
Four feet to the other side
Dawn rolls around. Jesus is standing on the shore. “Friends, haven’t you any fish?”
Just imagine it: a group of guys in their late teens and early twenties, exhausted after fishing all night, and some joker on the shore yells out, “Did you catch anything?!” They had to be annoyed.
Then he says, “Throw your net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.”
Okay, put yourself in their shoes. You’re an expert professional fisherman. It’s dawn. You’re exhausted. And this knucklehead from the shore yells, “Just put the net on the other side.” My response would have been, “You put the net on the other side, pal. Swim out here and show us how it’s done.” I’m a bad person — that’s why I’m a pastor.
These nets were heavy, unwieldy, waterlogged. Hauling one in empty was brutal work, never mind flipping it over the other side and clearing out the seaweed. They must have been truly at the end of their rope, because they just went, “Fine. Whatever.”
And within what seems like moments, the net is filled to overflowing — because they moved it four feet.
You can almost hear Peter: “Told you guys.” And the sons of Zebedee: “No you didn’t, you’re slow.”
They listened. They heard something, and they trusted in faith. That is what abiding is: trusting Christ in every moment of our day, looking for his presence in our ordinary, everyday routine.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary
We live in a Christian world absolutely obsessed with being radical. Radical Christianity. Radical this, radical that. Be awesome. Don’t be normal.
And yet what we see at the end of John 21 are ordinary guys doing ordinary things, having an extraordinary encounter — because they trusted. They began to abide.
There’s a monk named Brother Lawrence. He went into the monastery with big dreams: the greatest scholar, the best books. He gets there and they’re like, “Go wash the pots.” And that’s basically what he did for decades. But in the midst of it, he learned what he called practicing the presence of Christ.
Throwing the net on the other side of the boat — were they going to trust, or not? Were they going to practice the presence of Christ right there in that moment, or not?
When you’re going through your boring, ordinary, everyday life, are you going to practice the presence of Christ? When you walk into the coffee shop, are you going to see the depth of everything happening around you — that every single person you come in contact with is an image-bearer of the divine? C. S. Lewis said that apart from the Eucharist, the most holy thing you come in contact with throughout the week is your neighbor. Do we believe it?
Because when we practice the presence of Christ, this black-and-white world turns to color. Everything becomes infinitely interesting. All of a sudden there is depth, there is radiance — because saying yes to moving the net four feet changes everything.
He put his clothes back on
Then there’s this moment at the end of the section. John whispers to Peter, “It is the Lord.” And Peter does something strange.
Now, I’m not talking about jumping off the boat and swimming to shore — I would have done the same thing. The weird thing is that Peter put his clothes back on first.
Out on the boat, doing hard manual labor, they would have stripped down to their undergarments — basically a pair of swim trunks. But before Peter jumps in to swim to Jesus, he wraps his outer robe back around himself. Robes! That’s hard to swim in.
Why? Because Peter had denied Jesus three times, and he recognizes this moment as holy. It would have been inappropriate to stand before Christ in just a pair of shorts. He wanted to show up ready.
Do you see it? When we practice the presence of Christ — when we abide in him, when we stay connected to the vine — there are no moments that are not holy. Even breakfast on the beach becomes holy fellowship.
This was breakfast — guys after fishing, around a campfire, with some fish and some bread. They had probably had this exact meal a thousand times. And yet it was holy, because they were present with Jesus, and Jesus was present with them.
Where have you closed off your routine?
So here’s my challenge. Where in your life have you closed off your routine to God’s presence?
I’m not saying quit your job or retreat to a monastery. But tomorrow morning — when you open your laptop, or make breakfast, or start your commute — take a breath and pray this: Lord, I am available to you right here.
When we become available to Christ in the most mundane, ordinary things, they become holy. That is what abiding in Jesus looks like.
We get that glimpse here, at a breakfast on the beach.
Heavenly Father, I pray we would lean into the reality that there truly are no ordinary or mundane moments when we are practicing the presence of Christ. Make us a people who each morning acknowledge your presence and invite you to remain with us, so that we might see in the most ordinary things the depth and beauty of Jesus making all things holy. Amen.