Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Yes Lord, you know I do.
Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Yes Lord you know I do.
Simon, son of John do you love me?
This time Peter is hurt. ‘Lord you know everything – you know that I love you.’

We need to read Scripture with three sets of eyes.
We need to listen to Bible stories with three sets of ears.
We, too, need to listen to the Lord until it hurts.

The first set of ears, and eyes, are those of a child. Children love stories; they can listen to the same story over and over again, mesmerised.
The child in me loves this story: the risen Lord cooking kippers on a beach. We are by the Lake of Galilee, and seven of his disciples have been out all night fishing.
Kippers? I hear you mutter: there were no kippers…
I’ll come to that in a minute.

It’s first light on the Sea of Galilee. You can hear the seabirds mew and call and cackle overhead. Listen to the waves slapping against the side of the boat. Although it is still only spring it is a warm night, for the fishermen have stripped off into – well, really next to nothing. It’s first light, and the sun glints of the choppy waters. First light, and there’s a plume of smoke on the beach, a small fire, and the shadowy figure of a man huddled over it. First light, and a glorious smell of grilled fish comes wafting over the waters. Or perhaps they didn’t find it so glorious after all: the seven disciples have been out all night and they’re hungry. The grilled fish reminds them of the fish they haven’t been able to catch.

Then a voice calls out: ‘So lads, you haven’t caught anything tonight, have you?’ It’s the man on the beach. He tells them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat and they haul up the biggest catch they’ve ever seen – 153 large fish – and somehow the net doesn’t break. At that moment John, the beloved disciple, recognises who this man is. No wonder the child in us loves this story! ‘It’s Jesus,’ he whispers to Peter. And Peter, goes off on one, as he always does: it pulls on some clothes, then takes a running jump into the lake.

Okay let’s stop there. It’s time to look at this story with another set of eyes – time to listen to this story with the ears of a grown-up. First of all, what was all that nonsense about kippers? And why 153 fish? Who’s counting? What’s more, the adult in us is bewildered, even perhaps annoyed, by Peter’s buffoonery. Who pulls on clothes before they jump into the sea? And what was Peter trying to do? Was he swimming towards Jesus, in his eagerness to reach his risen master? Or was he expecting to walk upon the water, as he tried to do once before? Some have even suggested that he was trying to swim away from Jesus, so ashamed was he for having denied any aquaintance with him on the night of his trial….

Unlike the child in us, the adult in us is sceptical, and has lots of questions. To bring to mind another post-resurrection story, the adult, like Thomas, isn’t going to believe a word of this – not until he has touched Jesus’s flesh with his own hands.

Of course, adult eyes can be very useful when we are reading scripture. They will point out that this story, of Jesus instructing the disappointed fisherman to cast their nets one last time, is uncannily similar to the one told by St Luke, though there it occurs at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry, and here in St John’s gospel, it is left to the very end. Adult ears might hear the echoes of the feeding of the five thousand, which is another story of a child and his fish. Adult eyes are going to notice that Jesus has begun grilling His fish long before the disciples even catch theirs, and he’s going to wonder where he got them from. And that’s when the child pipes up and says, ‘Maybe he bought some kippers!’

Yet neither the child’s ears, nor the adult’s ears are enough. We need to listen to these stories with a third set of ears.

But let’s stay with this story a little longer. After they’ve finished their breakfast, Jesus takes Peter aside for the little chat. You can imagine our Lord putting his arm around Peter and the two of them walking along the beach out of earshot of the other disciples. And now our Lord’s question, asked three times: Simon, son of John do you love me?
What is going on here? Certainly, we hear in Peter’s affirmation, his yes Lord you know I do, an echo of Peter’s three denials: ‘Jesus? I tell you, I do not know the man’. That was when? Just a few weeks ago? And where was it? In crowded, crazy Jerusalem, with its political intrigue, barbaric Roman soldiers, the nightmare of Gethsemane and Golgotha. It seems… indeed it was … a different universe. And every time Peter answers ‘Yes Lord, you know I love you’, Jesus gives him an instruction: then look after my sheep, take care of my lambs. Jesus is preparing Peter for the future. He is schooling Simon the Son of John for the time when he will indeed be Peter, the rock, the bastion of the church. Jesus is encouraging Peter to take ownership.
And that brings us, finally, to the third pair of eyes: we must listen to Christ, with the ears of an Easter people. The third pair of ears are those that hear a story not about Peter, two thousand years ago, but about us, now. We are the ones who were on the beach that day; we are the ones – for all our failings, for all our backslidings – to whom Jesus is saying ‘Feed my sheep’, ‘tend my lambs’.
But can we do it? Could Peter? The answer is, of course, is no. But I want you to listen up, and with your best Easter ears:
First of all, when Jesus asks Peter to look after others, to shoulder, quite frankly, huge responsibilities, he does so in the context of Peter facing up to his own total inadequacy. Of course Peter can’t do this – Peter hasn’t managed to do anything he said he would, ever! Peter, to use a phrase you hear in Yorkshire, ‘is all mouth and no trousers’. And now Peter has finally owned up and recognised this about himself.
Secondly, look at the context. Peter is having a private chat with the Lord just after they’ve shared a communal meal. They’ve had a shared meal together and now they are having a private intimate conversation. Doesn’t this remind you of something? Holy Communion and private prayer. Isn’t this the very model of the Christian life?
And thirdly, this isn’t end of the story: Not for us, and not for Peter either. There is still the Ascension – that’s the moment when the story of Jesus stops being about what he did then, to His being here, among us now. When it no longer about his rising from the dead on that first Easter Day, but becomes, instead about His being alive, and with us now. There is still Pentecost to come – that’s when Peter is empowered by the Holy Spirit. There is still all that we see of Peter in the Acts of the Apostles – a story of a man who is quite, quite different from the Peter we have met in the gospels.
So finally, let us review the ways we listen to scripture. We listen with the ears of a child; that is, a child listens to stories over and over again; and marvels at them; we must also live with the Bible, learn to read it, enjoy it and let become part of ourselves. We must listen with the ears of an adult: that is, we must ask questions, we must use our critical intelligence, we must take the trouble to become informed about it. And yes, there’s room too for skepticism. And finally, we must listen with Easter ears: that is to say, we must listen to scripture because it tells a story in which we have a part. This is the story of a God who makes promises to his people; it is the story of a Messiah, who calls to us to follow him; it is the story of a spirit that will transform us and empower us to play our part in that story.
Allow me to finish with three slightly flipant footnotes:
Do you remember that moment when Peter started pulling on clothes before he jumped into the lake? Well, maybe that was the moment when this man who up until then had been all mouth, finally got some trousers…
And why the 153 fish? A number of ingenius explanations have been suggested to explain this number, and if anyone is interested, I’d be happy to talk about it afterwards. However, the short answer, the basic answer, is simply that it’s an awful lot – and I mean that quite literally: it is an awe-inspiring amount – of fish.
Have you ever wondered where the Easter bunnies came from? What have bunny rabbits got to do with all this? It’s because of their ears: they have Easter ears.