On the night Jesus was arrested, Peter followed at a distance into the high priest’s courtyard. It was cold, and the servants had made a charcoal fire. Peter stood with them, warming his hands, trying to look like he belonged. Three times someone asked if he was one of Jesus’ disciples, and three times he said no (Mark 14:54; John 18:15–27).
Some time later, after the resurrection, Peter and a few of the others were back in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. They worked all night and caught nothing. At dawn a man on the shore called out, “Children, have you any fish?” It’s the kind of question a person asks when he already knows the answer. They said no. He told them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, and the net filled so full they couldn’t haul it in. Peter had seen this once before. On the day Jesus first called him, he had fished all night and caught nothing, and Jesus had filled his nets that time too. Back then Peter fell down at Jesus’ knees and said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:4–11). John looked at the shore and said, “It is the Lord!” Peter, being Peter, put on his clothes and jumped into the sea, which is the opposite of what most people do before a swim (John 21:4–7).
When the others brought the boat in, they found Jesus had made a fire and was cooking fish and bread on it. John uses the same word for this fire that he used in the courtyard, a charcoal fire. That Greek word appears only twice in the entire New Testament, in those two scenes (John 18:18, 21:9).
I don’t think that’s an accident. John wants us to smell the smoke and remember the courtyard. Smell has a way of doing that. One whiff of a hospital hallway, and you’re back in a room you’d rather forget. The last time Peter stood next to a charcoal fire, he failed the man he loved most. Now Jesus has built another one and invited him to breakfast.
Going back to the boat
The fishing trip was Peter’s idea. “I am going fishing,” he told the others, and they said they’d come along (John 21:3). Maybe he needed the money. Maybe he just couldn’t sit still. Either way, after three years with Jesus and one terrible night by a fire, he went back to the boat and the nets, the work he was doing the day Jesus first called him (Mark 1:16–18).
I think shame sent him back there too. When a man fails badly, he usually pulls back. He quits returning calls. He finds reasons to skip the places where people saw it happen, and he goes back to whatever he did before, where at least he knows what he’s doing.
St. Augustine described sin as the soul bending in on itself. Centuries later the idea was boiled down to three Latin words, incurvatus in se, curved in on oneself. Shame bends a man even further. He caves in on himself, the way a roly-poly curls into a ball when a kid pokes it with a stick.
A man curled up like that can still go to work, still mow the lawn, still nod along in church. He won’t let anybody get close, though, and that includes God. He lies awake at night replaying what he did, and he spends the day trying to make up for it. That’s the man Jesus sat down to breakfast with.
Three questions
After breakfast, Jesus turned to Peter and asked, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15). “Simon, son of John” was what Jesus called him the day they met, before he gave him the name Peter (John 1:42). Anybody whose mother ever hollered his full name from the kitchen knows that feeling. Then Jesus asked a second time, and a third, and by then, John tells us, “Peter was grieved” (John 21:17).
Peter could count. He had said no three times beside one charcoal fire, and now, beside another, he heard the question three times. It hurt, and Jesus knew it would.
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