Breakfast Was Already Cooking

Somebody says I am going fishing, and six other men say we will come too, and that is how the whole evening gets decided.

It is one of the most recognizable sentences in the Bible and almost nobody stops on it. Seven grown men, in the strangest fortnight of their lives, having seen the Lord alive twice in a locked room, and what they do with the following Tuesday is go and do something practical, at night, on the water, because at least it is a plan and at least it is something their hands already know how to do. Anybody who has ever come out the far side of an enormous week knows exactly why they went. You cannot sit in a room discussing it forever. At some point somebody stands up and says he is going to sort out the guttering.

And they caught nothing. All night. Seven professionals with the right boat and the right nets on the water they had worked their whole lives, and the sun came up on an empty deck.

Then there is a man on the beach, a hundred yards off, and he calls out and asks whether they have any meat, and they answer with one word. No. That is the whole reply. It is the least talkative sentence in the Gospels and every person who has ever had a bad night at work knows the tone of it.

He tells them to put the net over the right side. They do, which is its own small mystery, because that is not advice you take from a stranger on a beach after eleven hours. And then the net cannot be pulled in.

And John says, It is the Lord. And here is the detail I love more than almost any other in Scripture, and I love it with no smile in it at all: Peter is stripped for work, and when he hears who it is, he puts his coat back on and jumps into the sea. Coat on, into the water, and swims. He could not get there fast enough and he could not arrive undressed either, and John writes it down without a word of comment, the way you write down something you watched a friend do.

You know that beach. You know what it is to fill a night with something practical because you do not know what to do with yourself. And if you have ever had something with the Lord that has never been spoken about out loud, you know why a man would put his coat on to swim.

The Fire Was Lit Before Anybody Swam

Here is the verse that changes the whole shape of the morning, and most of us read past it going for the conversation.

As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread.John 21:9

Read that again. Before the net went over the right side. Before anybody swam. Before one word was said about anything that had happened in a courtyard. There was a fire going on that beach, and there was food on it, and somebody had knelt down in the dark and built it.

He did not need their catch. There was already fish on the coals. And then, with breakfast cooking, He says to them: bring of the fish which ye have now caught. He asks for theirs as well. Not because the meal was short. Because a man who has been out all night with nothing needs to be able to put something down on the sand beside the Lord's fire, and He knows it.

You were fed before you were ever questioned, and that order has never once been reversed. John 21:9 puts the fire before the conversation, and the Holy Spirit has been putting it in that order in every life since: the provision first, the table first, the warmth first, and only then the talking. Nobody on that sand was interviewed at the waterline. They were called over to eat.

And now the detail that most people feel before they can explain it. John says a fire of coals. He uses that exact phrase twice in his Gospel and only twice. The first time is in a courtyard on the worst night of Peter's life, where the servants and officers had made a fire of coals, and Peter stood with them and warmed himself, and three times said he did not know the man.

John does not draw the line between the two fires. He simply puts them both in the same book and leaves them there, and no reader has ever managed to leave them there.

You are not brought back to the place of your worst night to be punished in it. Scripture says He restoreth my soul, and Psalm 23:3 uses a word about bringing something back to where it belongs, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the bringing. The smell of charcoal at dawn on a beach is not an accusation. It is the Lord starting the conversation at the exact place it stopped.

Three Times, and Not One of Them an Accusation

Now watch what He actually does, because it is not what any of us would do.

He does not open the file. He never says you denied me. Not on the beach, not later, not once anywhere in the record. He asks a question about love, three times, and every time Peter answers, He hands him animals to look after. Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep.

That is a job. That is not an apology being extracted. The man is being handed back the very thing he would have assumed he had disqualified himself from, and it is being handed back over breakfast, with his clothes still wet.

The third time, John records something he does not record anywhere else in the exchange: Peter was grieved. It is the only emotion in the scene. And Jesus does not stop, and He does not soften the third one, and He does not explain Himself. He asks it, He takes the answer, He gives the commission, and He tells Peter plainly what following will cost him at the end. Then two words: Follow me.

You have been given work, not a probation period. Scripture says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, and Romans 11:29 means He does not take back what He handed out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man in a calling on the mornings he cannot see why he is still in it. Sheep were put into Peter's hands on that sand. Nobody watched him for a season first.

There is something else in this scene worth having, and it is the small ordinary sentence in the middle. None of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord. Which is to say: seven men sat around a fire eating fish, in an enormous silence, all of them knowing exactly who was handing round the bread and none of them able to say a word. That is not a failure of faith. That is what human beings are actually like in the presence of something too large for the size of the morning.

You are allowed to be quiet in front of Him without it meaning anything is wrong. The written word says be still, and know that I am God, and Psalm 46:10 was not addressed to people who had run out of things to say by accident, and the Holy Spirit does some of His steadiest work in a silence nobody has filled. Seven grown men ate their breakfast and said nothing, and the Lord kept passing the bread.