When the Wars Are Done

Third Sunday of Easter

John 21:1-19


The start of baseball season brings the usual acknowledgement of Jackie Robinson’s 1947 breaking of the color line in Major League Baseball. The pleasant plaudits often mask the upheaval, furor, and continuing effects of that event in history.

In his acclaimed elegy to the 1950’s Brooklyn Dodgers, sports journalist Roger Kahn, writing from the perspective of 20 year-hindsight, says,

That time seems simpler than today, but mostly because the past always seems simpler when the wars are done. Jackie Robinson was a focus. At big, dark Number 42, forces converged: white hatred for his black pride, for his prophetic defiance and simply for his color, contested with black hope, the same black hope which Southern whites said did not exist (Boys of Summer, emphasis mine).

“The past always seems simpler when the wars are done.”


(The same is true, of course, with the generic cultural appreciation for Martin Luther King, Jr. “Ironically, his martyrdom has undermined his message,” Tavis Smiley laments. “He is no longer a threat, but merely an idealistic dreamer to be remembered for a handful of fanciful speeches.” (from Death of A King) No wonder references to the anniversary of his April 4 assassination, and to his “A Time to Break Silence” speech exactly one year earlier, have been few and far between).

I wonder if the mindset of “times are simpler when the wars are done” affects the way we read Jesus’ words in John 20-21: “Peace be with you,” “As the Father has sent me…,” “Do you love me?” I wonder if our response to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is little more than a good-natured, general acknowledgement of his achievement, an acknowledgement that does not deal with the upheaval, furor, and continuing effects of this event in history.

Certainly the tone of John 20-21 can lull us. David Ford calls John 21 “John’s low-key ending of his Gospel” (all references are from Ford’s The Drama of Living: Becoming Wise in the Spirit). Both chapters are marked by understatement. For example, the giving of the Holy Spirit is not a sound like the rush of a violet wind (Acts 2); instead, Jesus “breathes on them.”

Yet, Ford claims, these chapters continue the daring theology of John’s Gospel, a theology that rewrites the tradition by pairing Peter with the mysterious, unnamed “beloved disciple.” To be sure, Peter is the upfront leader, the face of the church, the one who dies for his Lord. However, the unnamed disciple, who seems to have an even deeper understanding of Jesus, “stands for those to whom Jesus means a great deal and who lead a far more ordinary life.” Both of these disciples draw us deeper into a “God-centered drama that is still going on.”

The script of the Gospel is that of “eternal life,” which for John means not so much “life after death” as “life after the death and resurrection of Jesus and the giving of the Holy Spirit.” This is the life inaugurated at the foot of the cross, as Jesus brings together the two people closest to him, both unnamed - his Mother and the disciple called ‘beloved – “into a new household community that might be seen as carrying the DNA for the church as a family transcending family.”

The church of the unnamed lives the life of “abiding,” the daily ongoing of the life of faith. Most of this kind of ordinary life is out of public visibility, and is sustained by the habits, routines, practices, promises and commitments that carry forward the ongoing drama of living and loving with Jesus.

This is the context of Peter’s forgiveness and restoration. Jesus tells Peter three times to feed his lambs and sheep. Ford interprets,

So Peter is directed to the daily, repetitive, essential task of sustaining and nourishing the community of those who follow Jesus. His life as a public leader, his testing…, his predicted death by which he would glorify God – are all in the service of loving Jesus and serving his community year after year till he is old and then is executed.

Whenever I’m prone to read the past with false simplicity; whenever I forget what forces converge in life after the death and resurrection of Jesus; whenever I start to doubt the wisdom, power, and long-term effects of “feeding my lambs” (i.e. the daily, repetitive, essential task of sustaining and nourishing the community of those who follow Jesus), I try to remember the witness of the Christians in Le Chambon in south-central France. The day after France surrendered to Nazi Germany, Pastor Andre Trocme spoke from his pulpit, “The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the spirit.”

Over the next four years the little congregation lived out a dramatic script. Their resistance to Nazi violence took the form of hiding and sheltering thousands of Jewish refugees, a risky, costly action of love. Years later, when someone would compliment or congratulate them for what they had done, the believers could only shrug, as if to say, “We only did what was natural.”

Phillip Hallie tried to explain: “We fail to understand what happened in Le Chambon if we think that for them their actions were complex and difficult… For certain people, helping the distressed is as natural and necessary as feeding themselves” (Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, quoted in Charles Campbell’s The Word Before the Powers).