Crazy Communion

When it begins, the concluding story of John’s Gospel feels like the kind of joke an old man tells. “So, these seven guys are in a boat about a hundred yards from shore. They fish all night and don’t catch a thing. Then, this other guy comes up and shouts . . .”. When the punch line comes, the old man laughs and you laugh with him, not because the joke is funny, but because he enjoys telling it so much.

Six verses in, though, and you know this is more than an amusing tale.  The “other guy” tells them that if they throw their nets on the right side of the boat, they’ll find fish. They do and do they ever! So many fish flounder into the net that the seven working together can’t haul it into the boat.

“It is the Lord,” says John, which is another clue that this story is going to take some crazy twists. Peter is usually the first one to say something – even if something doesn’t really need to be said. Maybe he was as impetuous as we’ve always heard or maybe his brain just ran at a faster clock speed than everyone else’s. Who knows? At any rate, John says it first and as soon as the words tumble across his lips, Peter, wearing only his underwear, tumbles into the sea and swims the hundred yards to shore. The commentaries offer a few explanations for this unpredictable behavior. My sense is that when we’re guilty, we go a little crazy.

The others follow in the boat towing the heavy net behind them. When they land, they find fish and bread already cooking over an open fire. The other guy says, “Bring some of the fish you have just caught.”

So Peter, dripping wet and silent as a sheep before his shearers, climbs back into the boat and manages to do by himself what the other six were not able to do together. He drags the net up on the shore. Crazy silent. Crazy strong. I think he was crazy with guilt.

Facing someone you have sinned against, even if they are full of mercy, is maybe the most awkward, awful thing in the world . . . if you can actually face them. Usually, all they see is the top of your head. All you do is stare at the floor wishing you had laser beam vision so you could bore a hole beneath you and fall through it. You want to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this. You feel hot from the inside out, hotter than mid-August asphalt. Hell hot. You sweat like a beast, your mouth dries up and your nose drips. Every sense tingles with heightened awareness; you smell the carpet, you hear the tick of a watch across the room, you notice a nick on the inside sole of your left shoe. The only part of you that isn’t hyper-aware is the part that thinks of things to say. It shuts down completely. Whatever you ate last wants to come out, an itch burns in the middle of your back, and at some point in the encounter you wonder if this is what insanity feels like.

Then John turns this kaleidoscopic story once more. The other guy — Jesus — serves communion to the seven. It’s an unconventional Eucharist, to be sure. But John’s punch line leaves little room for other interpretations: “Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them.”

That may be the most bizarre twist of all. The one sinned against invites the sinners to the table and serves them. A lot of what we do in Sunday church is weird. We sing. We tell stories about a dead man and talk about him as if he is among us. We pinch off a piece of cracker and call it a body. We swallow a thimble full of grape juice and call it blood. But the most abnormal thing that happens on Sundays isn’t something we do; it’s something The Other Guy does. He invites sinners to the table. And serves us.