Jesus went to Heaven. Now what?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So throughout the Easter season, I’ve been looking, fittingly enough I think, at the resurrection, all the different resurrection appearances recorded in the New Testament. And the core of that has been about saying, “Can we trust these?” And that’s for a simple reason. If the resurrection is true, everyone should be Christian, right? Jesus claims to be the son of God. If he then proves that by dying and rising from the dead, then every time you get to one of those teachings where you say, “I don’t know about this, this isn’t what I would’ve thought,” you can stop and say, “Well, the person saying it is God. He’s the son of God, he’s the second person of the Trinity. We know this because he rose from the dead. Okay, I guess I’ll take his word rather than mine.”

So all of the other teachings fall into place if the resurrection’s true. On the other hand, as St. Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 15, if the resurrection isn’t true, then Christianity is wrong. So it all comes down to this one teaching. There’s obviously more to Christianity than this one teaching, but this one thing, Jesus rose from the dead, proves or disproves Christianity simply. However, there’s more to the resurrection appearances than that. That might sound strange to say, but the point of Jesus rising from the dead and appearing to the apostles for 40 days is not just to show them, “Look, I really did rise from the dead.” It wouldn’t take 40 days to do that, right? That’s the first reason we can say there’s more to it than that. The second is that we’re told there’s more to it than that. In Acts 1, Acts of the Apostles, Saint Luke’s second book, he talks about how for 40 days Jesus presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to the apostles during 40 days and speaking of the kingdom of God.

So for 40 days, Jesus is with them and he’s teaching them something about the kingdom of God. So when we say, “Okay, the resurrection appearances are about more than simply proving Jesus really rose from the dead,” you might say, “Okay, what is that more?” And Luke has started to answer the question, that more is going to be something about the kingdom, something about the church, something about the ascension itself. Because after 40 days, Jesus is going to ascend into heaven. This is his final time with the apostles in his humanity and he’s teaching them something even there. We get that from a few verses later in Acts 1. After Jesus goes up into heaven, two men, clearly angels, then say to the apostles, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

So there’s something about this connected to the Second Coming, that Christ ascending into heaven is a reminder to us that he will also return to earth, that he’s not going away forever. But then this question of going away really gets us into some more theologically deep waters. As Saint Augustine points out, Jesus did not leave heaven when he came down to us, nor did he withdraw from us when he went up again into heaven. In other words, I get why the apostles are staring up, maybe not loving the fact that their Lord and Savior who they’ve seen risen from the dead is now seemingly leaving them. But it’s worth remembering that he’s not really leaving them. And what do I mean by that? If Jesus really is who he says he is, if Jesus really is God, he doesn’t leave heaven in the incarnation.

Someone anywhere in the world could pray to God and be heard, could pray to Jesus by name and be heard anywhere, anytime, any place before the incarnation, while Jesus is on earth, the incarnation, and after the ascension. None of that changes. In fact, this is one of the major mistakes early opponents of Christianity made. There is an argument, essentially, “Look at how absurd this is. Your God left heaven. Why did he do that?” And the answer is, “Well, he didn’t.” That when we talk about the word becoming flesh, we don’t mean the second person of the Trinity leaves the Trinity and abandons divinity for a while and then becomes divine again. That misunderstands the basic theology of the Trinity, that misunderstands what it is to be God. He doesn’t just have a God switch he turns on and off. He is fully God and fully man during the incarnation, at all moments.

And so even as he’s walking the shores of Galilee, he’s also able to hear the prayers of everyone everywhere. He’s still holding the cosmos together. Through him, all things were made. That remains true even while he’s in his own creation. So if that’s true, if Jesus doesn’t leave heaven when he comes down to us in the incarnation, it’s also true that he doesn’t then leave us when he returns to heaven. So what’s really going on isn’t so much a return to heaven as an enthronement. And Jesus presents it this way actually. In the Gospel of Luke, right before the passion, he says that, “From now on, the son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” So he’s foretelling there will be some sense of him being enthroned and we’ll see this again more explicitly connected with the ascension.

But that’s what’s going on. On Ascension Thursday, Jesus is enthroned in heaven. Well again though this is not Jesus’ divinity returning into heaven. This is rather Jesus’s humanity going into heaven, that there is a marriage of divinity and humanity that happens in the incarnation called the Hypostatic Union, that divinity and humanity come together in this way where neither humanity nor divinity is compromised but they are united. They’re united in the person of Jesus Christ. And as the Catechism points out in paragraph 659, Jesus’ final apparition, meaning his final appearance to the apostles, ends with the irreversible entry of his humanity into divine glory. That’s what’s going on. Jesus’ humanity is now ascending into heaven where he’s seated henceforth at God’s right hand. And that’s what we see in Acts of the Apostles. When Stephen is being martyred, he looks up and he sees Jesus in heaven, the right hand of the Father.

So that’s what the ascension’s about. The union begun on earth, the incarnation, with humanity and divinity now glorified in heaven. This is not about Jesus abandoning the apostles. This is not about Jesus shedding his humanity. This is not about Jesus leaving us. This is quite the opposite, that now the God-man who walked among us is enthroned in heaven where he belongs, reigning over everything. He will come again in glory. This is, again, his return. We would say, in technical terms, his local presence, that he has a body. And unlike his divinity, which is everywhere, his body isn’t just everywhere. So he has a local presence that will return in the Second Coming, but there’s a lot to happen between Ascension Thursday and the Second Coming of Christ, and that’s what the 40-day preparation is about. So how do each of the four evangelists, Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, tackle this subject?

What does it say about the kingdom, about the church, about the role of personal faith, about the role of evangelization during Jesus’s kind of 40 days? And I want to start with the Synoptics. Now the Synoptics are Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and they tell a kind of common story, and we might describe the common story this way, evangelize to the end of the world. Now I purposely write that in a kind of grammatically ambiguous way because it means both, evangelize geographically to all corners of the world. It also means evangelize temporally until the end of the world. So evangelize to the end of the world geographically, evangelize to the end of the world temporarily, evangelize everywhere, forever and then Jesus will come back. And this is I think really interesting particularly in the Gospel of Matthew because Matthew begins in this kind of stark startling way where Jesus seems to be very focused just on Israel.

So for instance, in Matthew 10, when he sends out the 12, he tells them, “Don’t go anywhere among the Gentiles, enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And preaches, “You go saying the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” So you’ve got the message of the kingdom, which is going to be a really central theme, but it’s being presented to Israel. Now reading this, I remember in college being really kind of shocked and scandalized by this. I’m a Gentile, right? Does Jesus not care about me? Does he not care about my salvation? Because at times in the Gospel of Matthew, it kind of seems like he doesn’t. In Matthew 15, there’s a Canaanite woman who says to him, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David. My daughter is severely possessed by a demon.”

Severely possessed by a demon, this seems like the obvious, “Let me heal you,” kind of case. And Jesus originally doesn’t answer her. She continues to beg him. She continues to kind of plead to him. And then he tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” This seems like a really stark startling rebuke, especially taken out of context because if you keep reading the account, you see that Jesus actually does grant her request and he praises her faith. And so it’s clear he does not actually mean to spite or ignore the Canaanites, but he does have a particular mission. He is starting with Israel. So you may think about it like this. When D-day happened in 1944, the allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy. They didn’t just land everywhere in Europe. They didn’t just say, “Hey, everybody, show up wherever you want.”

They landed in a particular place for a particular reason. But that reason was not because they just wanted to liberate the beaches of Normandy. That reason was because they wanted to liberate all of Europe, but they wanted to start somewhere and spread out from there. Likewise, the plan of salvation, God starts somewhere. He starts with Israel, but this was always the plan that all nations would be blessed through Israel. This is what he tells Abraham. So from the beginning, literally from the start, of a chosen people that become known as Israel or the Jews, we’re told from the very beginning, before there even is like Israel because Israel is the grandson of Abraham, that this is a chosen people not for their own sake alone, but for the sake of the salvation of the world. And so Jesus is showing that really clearly in the Gospel of Matthew that he is starting with Israel, but if you don’t read the rest of Matthew, you can come away with the wrong impression, then he only cares about Israel and that’s not the case.

You keep reading, you realize that the plan is to go to the ends of the world. How do we know that? Because in Jesus’ final appearance in the Gospel of Matthew, he tells the apostles, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I’ve commanded you, and lo, I’m with you always to the close of the age.” Now, there are two promises here. One, you’ve got sort of the marching orders given to the church. It’s a trifold mission. Evangelization, you’ve got the proclamation of the kingdom. In the making of disciples, you will have the sacramental mission, particularly with baptism. And then you have the mission of catechesis, to teach everything Jesus has commanded.

But you also have the promise that Jesus is not, despite appearances, abandoning the church. “I’m with you always to the close of the age.” We already looked at that in terms of the ascension is not the loss of Jesus’s presence. He continues to be present in different ways. That’s the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel of Mark is more controversial because the oldest versions of the Gospel of Mark stop before the part we’re about to look at. And so understandably, some people say, “I don’t know what to make of this. We don’t know the original authorship.” Well, that’s fair enough. I’m going to ignore all of that and just say, “How does a longer version of Mark end?” How much stock you want to give that is a separate question. The church considers this inspired without answering the question of whether Mark wrote it, but nevertheless, Gospel of Mark ends with the proclamation that we should go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.

And I love that because it’s even bigger than go out to all nations. You have almost this image of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the animals that all creation is God’s domain. The kingdom of God is properly, not just over all humans, but over all creation because it’s all his. And then this mission of evangelization is connected with the sacramental mission because he says, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved.” He doesn’t just say, “He who believes will be saved,” as many Protestants believe. He says, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned.” He then gives some spiritual signs that will accompany the apostle’s mission. And then we’re told right after this that the Lord Jesus, after he’d spoken to them, was taken up in heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.

Remember, I said we’d get back to seeing the ascension as connected to the enthronement at the right hand of the Father. There you see it. The apostles then go forth in preach everywhere while the Lord worked with them and the message by the signs that attended it. So you’ve got them going out from Israel to all the world. Likewise, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells them, he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he says to them that, “Thus, it is written,” that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead. “The repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem.” He then tells them that they’re the witnesses of these things and he says, “Behold, I send the promise of my father upon you,” and he tells them to remain in Jerusalem till they are clothed in the power from on high.

That’s a reference to Pentecost. And then Luke’s gospel ends in kind of a strange way, just says that Jesus blessed them, parted from them and was carried up into heaven. The apostles worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem’s great joy and were continually in the temple blessing God. I say it’s a strange ending because Jesus has just said, “Wait, Jerusalem, something big is going to happen,” and Luke doesn’t cover the big thing that’s going to happen. He intentionally stops before there. You may have noticed from Act 1, Luke acknowledges this like, “Yes, I know I didn’t cover this part.” And then he has an entire book about the coming of Pentecost and the sending of the church to all nations. But this is a really important kind of thing to recognize. And so in Acts 1, Jesus is talking to them about the kingdom for 40 days, remember?

And they say, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He tells them, “It’s not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth.” Now, I love this passage because he’s just presented kind of four concentric circles. You’ve got the city of Jerusalem at the center. Then you’ve got out from there, Judea, this whole province. These are the faithful Jewish people. Beyond that, you have the Samaritans. These were the people who had a version of the Torah, but they were kind of a mixture of some Jewish beliefs and practices with some pagan beliefs and practices. And then you have beyond them the world, the Gentiles, the nations.

And so you have a ministry not just to the faithful Jews, not just to the faithful Jews in Jerusalem or even in Judea, but beyond that to the Samaritans, beyond that even to the Gentiles till all the world. Now sometimes you’ll hear Christians present this as a sort of Plan B. There’s the idea… Because you remember that line about restoring the kingdom to Israel, so there’s a sort of dispensationalist theology that says Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom and he was going to give that to Israel. But when Israel rejected him, he put the kingdom plan on hold and instead gives the church as kind of a backup option. And that totally misunderstands the idea of the church and the plan of God, that the church is the means by which the kingdom arrives on earth. And one of the reasons we know that is because the Old Testament prefigures that. For instance in Isaiah 56, God says, “Let not the foreigner who’s joined himself to the Lord say the Lord will surely separate me from his people.”

And instead he promises to foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, to be servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and is not profane and holds fast to my covenant, that he’ll bring them to his holy mountain, he’ll make them joyful in his house of prayer, that their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar. That is they won’t just be faithful followers, they’ll actually be priests. I think we’ve missed that, that it’s not just, “Okay, you guys can be fellow observant followers of the covenant.” It’s, “You can actually be priests of the new covenant. You can actually offer sacrifice.” And God concludes this by saying, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” That is it is not that the Old Testament was a promise for the Jews alone and the New Testament says, “What if the Gentiles got to be a part of that?”

No, the Old Testament promise was to start with the Jews for the sake of the whole world, including the Gentiles. And Isaiah 56 is a pretty clear presentation of that. So the incorporation of Jews, Samaritans, Gentiles in one covenant people, offering true sacrifice, that was actually the plan even in the Old Testament. Now we’re seeing the fulfillment of that plan. In Acts 28, the Acts of the Apostles closes with Paul’s arrival in Rome. And so this is one of the theories about that, that if Acts 1 gives kind of the marching orders of the apostles, they’re going to start in Jerusalem, go out to Judea, and from there Samaria, and from there all the world, it’s fitting that Acts closes with Paul arriving, proclaiming the kingdom of God in Rome, that is in the capital of the most powerful gentile power. This is the world, if ever a city could encapsulate the world. Remember, Pax Romana. At the time, everything, kind of all roads as it were lead to Rome and Paul arriving there is a clear acknowledgement that the gospel has now been preached to Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles.

So that is Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and by Luke I mean both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. John doesn’t disagree with any of that, but John emphasizes certain other themes that you don’t see as clearly at the end of Matthew, mark, or Luke. So we’re going to see two things in the Gospel of John. We’re going to see, one, the role of individual believers and two, the role of the Pope in the church. Now maybe you’re saying, “Where in the world are you getting that from the end of the Gospel of John? Well, just wait and you’ll find out.

I’m actually skipping, by the way, one important resurrection appearance in the Gospel of John when Jesus breathes on the apostles and gives them the ability to forgive sins. Now that is showing the sacramental mission of the church, that the apostles have the ability to actually forgive sins in the person of Christ. But that’s a big enough issue that I’m just going to mention it and not go into a little bit of depth on it. In John 20, we see eight days after that. There you have the famous event with doubting Thomas. There’s a beautiful Caravaggio picture. Thomas originally, because he missed the resurrection appearance, is dubious and he says he’s not going to believe unless he feels the wounds and all this. Jesus then appears to him and says, “Peace be with you.” And then he says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not be faithless, but believing.”

Thomas then cries out, “My Lord and my God.” That’s very famous. But the next line is maybe less famous that Jesus says to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” And I think a way of understanding this is almost a breaking of the fourth wall. If you’ve watched like a sitcom or something like The Office, there’ll be these times where they just turn towards the camera and it’s kind of an audience acknowledgement. This is an audience acknowledgement. Jesus is acknowledging the fact that there are going to be people who don’t have the ability to touch the side of Christ the way that Thomas does and yet will still be able to come to faith and he’s proclaiming a blessing. So this is a reminder of the role of individual faith, that we can talk about the big picture of what’s the church up to, we shouldn’t forget what are we up to and what we are up to is believing in these things we haven’t gotten to see with our own eyes.

Now, St. Augustine actually has a really beautiful kind of reflection on this because he asked, in short, “Well, is this unfair? They got to see all these things and we don’t.” And he points out, “Well, they got to see Jesus. They didn’t get to really see the church.” If you think about it, the church for them is just a handful of people. And so it’s easy to doubt that. He’s promising it’ll be the largest of all garden plants, like the church is going to become the largest institution in the world. It’s very clearly that the point of the parable of the mustard seed is about. The church is going to become the largest thing in the world from this tiny mustard seed.

The apostles don’t get to see that. Even by the time they die, the church is nothing like the largest thing in the world. It is now, but it wasn’t then. So we have the ability to see the church in a way they didn’t. We don’t have the ability to see Jesus as they did. They had the ability to see Jesus but not the church. So his point is we all have to take some part of this on faith because nobody’s seen the entire thing individually up close. That’s the part of individual faith. But then after this, the next verse in John 20 says now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which aren’t written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, that believing you may have life in his name. So again, it’s very clearly, “This is written for individual belief.” And scene, right? This reads like the end of the account.

And St. Augustine actually points this out. He says this paragraph indicates, as it were, the end of the book. I know what a conclusion looks like and this looks like a conclusion, but then something strange happens. But wait, there’s more. So John 21 begins, “After this, Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the sea of Tiberius and he revealed himself in this way.” So you might be saying, “What in the world? I thought we just finished the book. It looks like there’s another chapter. Did this get added later?” And so for a long time there were critical scholars and you’ll still find somebody, it’s less common now, there were critical scholars who suggested, “Oh, maybe this was a chapter added by somebody else.” And there are a lot of problems with that view.

One, John 21, unlike the longer ending of Mark, John 21 is found in every copy of the Gospel of John we have. There’s no indication that maybe somebody else wrote it and added it later, but moreover, the style reads like John and it resolves certain things that John has set up earlier in the gospel like the relationship of Peter and John that otherwise would just be kind of unresolved. And so it fits together really harmoniously. And so for instance, David Shepherd has a critical article on this that just says that the authorship and the historical relationship of chapter 21 to the bulk of the Gospel of John have been much debated. The suggestion that the chapter was consciously composed with John 1 to 20 in view is now rather less contentious.

In other words, it’s not that somebody else just wrote an unrelated kind of chapter. There are too many lexical, meaning like wording, and literary parallels. Father Raymond Brown is one of the ones who kind of catalogs this. It’s just too obvious that the style of John 21 matches the style of John 1 through 20, that it must have been written either by the author or at least by someone who has kind of copied or imitated the style of the author. Now from the perspective of critical scholarship, that’s all they can say. They can’t prove it was the Apostle John, but they can at least say the idea that was once popular, this was another kind of loose chapter that just kind of got added in or was kind of an editor’s note after the fact, that it doesn’t work. The Gospel of John is an organic whole and John 21 fits.

Instead, what we seem to have here pretty clearly is an epilogue by the author, meaning an epilogue that was planned, an epilogue that was part of the gospel from the beginning, but for a lot of reasons an author might include an epilogue. Well, why does this author include an epilogue? Why does the Apostle John seem to end the gospel and then add another chapter? Well, Augustine makes an argument that I think is correct, that he is dealing with the mystery of the church in John 21, that the miracle that we’re going to see in a second here is not, “Look, Jesus really did rise from the dead.” That is well established in John 20. But remember how Matthew, Mark, and Luke, after they describe how Jesus lived, died, rose and in some case, lived, die, rose and was ascended into heaven, they then ask, “And now what? And now what is the church’s mission?”

“Well,” Augustine says, “John’s actually doing the exact same thing, but in classic Johannine fashion, he doesn’t just tell you, he shows you.” And so you have this almost parable, meaning like John wants you to both take this as a historical event but also to understand that this event had a deeper significance. And so Augustine argues this is why John 21 has his own kind of prologue. “After this, Jesus revealed himself to the disciples by the sea of Tiberius and he revealed himself in this way.” That’s a new introduction to an epilogue. F. F. Bruce, the Protestant scholar, similarly, in his book the Gospel of John says, “The incident of the catch of fish,” which is what we’re about to look at, John 21, “is not expressly called a sign, but it looks like what John calls signs.”

Now John throughout the gospel refers to miracles as signs because the miracles are teaching us something. A miracle as a sign is a parable in motion. Jesus can tell you a parable or he can show you something that symbolizes something deeper. And so in the healing miracles, for instance, the external healings are parables, so to speak, of the spiritual healing that you can’t see. You see this really famously in the paralytic man. Jesus tells him his sins are forgiven and no one can see his sins being forgiven. We can hear it, we don’t actually get to see. You don’t watch sin leave the body. And so he tells the paralytic man to rise and walk. That is an external sign of an invisible reality, a kind of parable in motion.

This is also, by the way, how the sacraments work. You have an external sign, water, that symbolizes an internal reality you can’t see, spiritual cleansing. There is a correspondence between what you’re seeing and what you know by faith is going on internally but you can’t see the spiritual transformation by definition. So likewise, F. F. Bruce says, “In this case, the disciples’ haul of fish, there’s more than meets the eye,” and that the discourse that follows it, which is going to be the conversation between Jesus and Peter, helps to reveal the meaning of what we’re going to see. We’re going to see something, then we’re going to hear something and what we hear is going to help explain what we’re going to see. And what is the meaning?

Bruce says that it’s a sort of parable of the missionary activity in the time that lies ahead. So he is agreeing with Augustine’s basic point. This is about the church’s missionary role, but Augustine is going to say it’s more than just the disciples, that it’s about the missionary role from now to eternity. Now why is that? Well, you’ll see certain clues. Before we get there, I want to add one more detail because I keep mentioning the kind of sign value of events and I want to make sure that no one’s taking me as just saying, “It’s all a metaphor. None of this really happened.” I’m not saying that. I’m saying this. In John 13, when Judas gets up at the Last Supper to betray Jesus, we’re told that he immediately went out and it was night. Now John does not mean you to only understand the Last Supper happened at night.

If you understand anything about the Last Supper, you know it happens at night. It’s right there in the name supper. What he wants you to know is that this is a moment of darkness, this is the time when the powers of darkness seem to have won. Night has come. That’s a big thing, right? Like when Jesus says, “My hour has not yet come,” this hour is now here. It’s the moment in which Jesus is going to be betrayed by his closest friends, he’s going to be abandoned by his closest friends, he’s going to be persecuted, tortured, put to death. It is night. So there’s both a literal and a metaphorical meaning to that. In other words, just read John 21 in the same way, that John, when he tells you these details, wants you to say, “What’s the deeper significance of this? What is the sign of what I’m reading?”

In this case, we’re told Simon Peter, Thomas called the twin, Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together. There’s seven. We’ll get back to why that matters. Simon Peter says to them, “I’m going fishing.” They say to him, “We will go with you.” Okay, why seven? Seven is the number of completion eschatologically. As we’re going to see, it symbolizes the Sabbath rest, it symbolizes a completion. Remember, the seven days of creation. And so this is one of the reasons why Augustine argues this is pointing the church towards the end of the world. Remember, in the ascension, we have this pointing towards the end of the world. Jesus is going up, he’s going to come back. So now there’s a mission between now and the Second Coming, and that’s what this is about. And then number seven signifies that.

What about the fishing part? Well, we’re told that actually fairly explicitly. In Matthew 13, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a net thrown into the sea that gathers fish of every kind, gathers good fish and bad fish. And when they get to shore, says, “When it was full, men drew to shore, sat down, and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad.” So it’ll be that at the close of the age, the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire. There men will weep and gnash their teeth. There are a couple details to notice here. First, the kingdom of heaven on earth has both the saved and the unsaved. Many Protestant churches pride themselves in having a church just of the elect. That’s not the church of Christ because Christ’s church, pretty clearly in Matthew 13, includes good fish and bad fish here on earth.

It won’t always, but here on earth it does. What signifies the end of the age? Well, the bringing of the boat to shore, bringing the net to shore. They draw it ashore. What’s the “it?” It’s the net. So when the net is drawn to shore, that signifies the kingdom or church now arriving at the end of time. That’s the final judgment. That is significant because we’re going to see John 21 is all about bringing the nets to the shore. But just note, I’m not just making up this biblical imagery, Matthew and Jesus gives us this biblical imagery and he doesn’t just do it here in Matthew 13, he also does it in Luke 5. In the first miraculous catch of fish, there’s four of the apostles who are present there and there’s this miraculous catch. Simon Peter then falls at Jesus’s knees and says, “Depart from me, for I’m a sinful man,” and Jesus then responds to Simon.

Now notice, he’s there with James and John. We also know he is there with Andrew. Jesus then singles out one of the four apostles and says, “Do not be afraid, henceforth, you will be catching men.” That’s in the singular. There’s two things to notice there. First, if the net represents the church or the kingdom, then fishing of course is representing evangelization. You’re bringing more people into the net, you’re bringing more people into the church, you’re bringing more people into the kingdom. The second thing to notice is there’s a special connection with Peter here, that Peter is being particularly told that he’s to be a fisher of men. Now you might say that’s a coincidence because Peter’s the one who said, “Depart from me Lord.” Fair enough. But there’s a second miraculous catch of fish where it’s a catch of just one fish with the temple tax and this time Jesus gives a miracle to Peter where Peter’s supposed to go and catch a fish with a coin to pay for his tax and Jesus’s and nobody else’s.

So in the first miraculous catch of fish, Peter is singled out. In the second miraculous catch of fish, Peter is singled out. We’re now at the third miraculous catch of fish and already we see a special role of Peter. He says, “I am going fishing.” The other six say, “We will go with you.” Now that’s the whole theology of the church’s ministry, that the bishops are successors of the apostles in their own right. They’re not just middle management, they’re not just vicars of the pope, but they are nevertheless called not to form their own separate churches or something like this, but to fish with Peter, that they’re to be in union with the pope. So the other six are showing they are in union with Peter as they go on this mission of fishing. None of this is coincidental, none of this is just like happenstance and it’s all the intentional.

Why else does John take the trouble to explain that Peter said, “I’m going fishing,” and that the others say, “We will go with you?” Why does he specify they are seven? Why does he do any…? None of these details matter unless there’s something deeper going on here. He could have just said, “One time the apostles were out fishing,” or, “One time seven of the apostles were out fishing.” That would’ve been good enough. But no, he gives the whole background of, “I’m going fishing,” “We’ll go with you.” That matters. It’s significant. Augustine points out that this seven also signifies the end of the world as I already pointed out, and he says there’s a revolution of all time in seven days, that the week represents the whole cycle of creation. We get this also in Hebrews 4 about the Sabbath rest for the people of God. This seventh day, the notion of seven for the number of completion is significant and that we should therefore strive to enter that rest. So we’ve got a journey towards the seventh day.

Okay, so Peter’s going fishing, they’re going with him. Initially, they’re unsuccessful. They go out, they’re with the pope, but they’re not going with the Lord’s command and they’re unable to catch anything. As day is breaking… Now notice daybreak is also a sign of the end times. The rising of the sun in the east, this is advent… When we talk about the first advent, the second advent, this is signified with the east, “O Orions, O east, O daybreak.” So it’s significant that now day is breaking. Jesus is standing on the shore.

Remember the bringing of the nets to the shores is going to be relevant. They then tell them they haven’t caught anything. He then tells them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, they’ll find some. There’s a miraculous catch of fish. The Apostle John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, then says to Peter, “It is the Lord.” Augustine says that, what I’ve just said, there are additional clues here about this meaning the end of the world. The fact the morning has come, the fact Jesus is standing on the shore, and the shore is the limit of the sea so it signifies the end of the world. If you imagine the journey of the church like a boat, the shore represents the end of the journey.

Going back to John 21, Jesus is standing there. When they catch the fish, there’s a large quantity of fish, so large they’re not able to haul it in. We get that in the passage we just looked at, right before John says, “It’s the Lord.” They catch this miraculous catch, they can’t even bring it in. This is an important detail, we’re going to get right back to it. Simon Peter then jumps into the sea and he swims for Jesus. The other disciples come in the boat, dragging the net full of fish. Why are they dragging it? Because they can’t bring it in and it says they’re not far from the land but about a hundred yards off. So they’re not able to bring the nets ashore. We’re going to return to that too. When they get out on land, there’s a charcoal fire there with fish lying on it and bread. Jesus says to them, “Bring some of the fish that you’ve just caught.”

Now this is the kind of, I want to say almost like the rebuke part. Why? Well, for a couple reasons. First, because there’s a charcoal fire. And second, because Jesus already has fish. Why does the charcoal fire matter? Because there’s only one other appearance anywhere in scripture of the phrase charcoal fire. And that is in John 18, three chapters earlier, when Peter stands by a charcoal fire and denies Jesus. So now you’ve got Jesus standing next to the charcoal fire and we’re going to see right after breakfast that Peter is going to affirm his belief in Jesus three times, echoing him standing beside the charcoal fire and denying Jesus three times, that we should see this parallel, that the charcoal fire matters. John is extremely attuned to details as I said. This is not a coincidence. These are the two moments you see a charcoal fire, that in both of them Peter stands and makes a threefold proclamation, one an evil one, one a good one. But second, there’s a sort of rebuke in that, Jesus doesn’t need them. They’re unable without him to catch any fish.

He without them can catch all the fish he wants. So this is an important thing to remember. When we talk about the role of the church, when we talk about the role of the Pope, when we talk about the role of any kind of human endeavor, Jesus doesn’t actually need you. There are some things that won’t happen unless you cooperate in this world, but that’s not because God is too powerless to do them without you, it’s because he chooses to work through you. Likewise, he chooses to make the apostle’s net full of fish. He didn’t have to. If he wanted to just have a net of fish himself, he could have done that. But we don’t just have the kind of implicit rebuke of the charcoal fire and the fish. You also have Jesus’s proclamation to bring some of the fish. And so Simon Peter goes aboard and he hauls the net ashore full of large fish, 153 of them.

And although there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus then says to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now why does that matter? Okay, remember we saw on Matthew 13 that the eschatological vision of the church approaching eternity is the image of a net full of fish drawn to the shore and that the apostles without Peter were unable to draw the net to the shore. But at Jesus’ command, Peter single-handedly draws the net to the shore. Remember all seven of them couldn’t do it. The six of them without Peter couldn’t do it. Peter, by himself, at the Lord’s command can do it. That is not a coincidence. And frankly, it’s very funny when you read certain Protestant commentators who just think this means that Peter was really built, that he was really super muscular, he was stronger than the other six of them combined. That is a ridiculous reading.

The whole point of this is not, “Look at how strong Peter is physically.” The point of this is, at the Lord’s command, Jesus can bring the nets to shore. And notice there in Greek when it says the net was not torn, the Greek word there is from the root schizo, to tear. Schizo, you know the words like schizophrenic, to have a torn mind. It’s also the root of the word schism, to tear the church. So if the nets are the church, it’s the kingdom on earth. If you stay with Peter in the net, there’s no schism. Peter will draw you to Jesus on the shore. That’s the rule. Not because he’s just such a holy guy by himself. Because it’s at the Lord’s command. That’s the whole model, because occasionally you’ll find people who say, “Well, okay, I see that Peter has a special role in the New Testament, but why should we believe that this role continues after the time of Christ?”

And the answer is right here. That between now and the Second Coming, there is this mission of Peter going fishing, with the apostles going fishing with him, and Peter at the Lord’s command will draw the net of the church to the shore, which Matthew 13 tells us is the close of the age, the end of the world at which there will be the final judgment, the separation of the good from the wicked. That’s all right there. Additionally, right there, you’ve got that line, “Come and have breakfast.” That’s going to be significant as well. Before we get there, Augustine, I want to point this out, also says, “The end of the world is shown by the act of Peter in drawing the net to land that is to the shore.” So this is not just my own take. Augustine also notices Peter bringing the net as shore clearly signifies the bringing of the church to the end of the world, but that, “Come and have breakfast,” should also have some end of the world kind of vibes to us.

In Revelation 19, we see the final consummation of things presented as the wedding feast of the lamb and the bride, the church. We’re told the marriage of the lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready, wearing the fine white linen, the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel says, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the lamb.” So the entire fulfillment of the union of Jesus in the church is in this communal meal, which is prefigured by the Eucharist, but is then brought to an even higher kind of consummation. So that’s why, “Come and have breakfast,” is this great news. It’s the meal, but it’s the meal at dawn and the difference between the imagery in Revelation 19 and in John 21 is Revelation 19 is the image of a marriage supper.

John 21 is the imagery of a communal meal at dawn because it’s representing the end of the world. But in both cases, the idea of the communal meal is central. It’s the union of Jesus and the church. So we’ve now gotten through the first half of John 21. We’ve now gotten through breakfast. Immediately after this, Jesus then singles out one of the seven. Surprise, surprise, it’s Simon Peter and he says, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” What a question! Not just, “Do you love me?” “Do you love me more than these?” Peter says, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He says, “Feed my lambs.” Second, he says, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He says, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He says, “Tend my sheep.” The third time he says, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”

And Peter’s grieved this time because the third time he says, “Do you love me?” Now that doesn’t make sense to us in English, but the point there is he switched from agápē. First he says, “Do you agápē me more than these?” Peter says, “Yes, Lord, you know I philia you.” Next he says, “Do you agápē me?” “Yes, Lord, you know that I philia you.” Then he says, “Peter, do you philia me?” Now Peter is hurt because he switched to even that philia. Now you’ll find scholars who disagree that that agápē to philia switch matters because it is fair. There are plenty of times in the Gospel of John and throughout scripture where agápē and philia are used seemingly interchangeably. Here it seems like the switch matters because Peter seems stung when Jesus switches words from a higher sounding love to a lower sounding love. We don’t want to over-exaggerate that.

People often exaggerate agápē to mean this totally pure, incredible love, and in the Bible, it’s more complicated than that. You can love sin with agápē. You can agápē the world and all of that. Just know don’t lean on that branch too heavily but there does seem to be some kind of wordplay here between agápē and philia where there’s a sort of, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you like me?” In any case, Peter is hurt. He says, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” He’s still using philia. Jesus says to him, “Feed my sheep.” Now, there are a couple things to notice here.

One, there is a threefold affirmation of Peter’s love for Jesus that certainly recalls Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus in John 18. Many times you’ll find Protestants who claim this is the reinstatement of Peter, and that is biblically unsupportable for a couple reasons. One, if abandoning Jesus is enough to be no longer an apostle, then Jesus has no apostles because everybody abandons him. Sure, John makes it back to Calvary. He comes back quicker than the others do, but everybody abandons him. We read this in Matthew’s account of the gospel. So if that’s enough to just render you no longer an apostle, then Jesus has no apostles.

But in John 20, we also see pretty clearly that he’s breathing on the apostles and he’s giving them spiritual powers before this alleged reinstatement. That includes Peter. We also know from the Gospel of Luke that Jesus has already individually appeared to Peter. There’s all these references to Peter still being an apostle. So that is just an untenable kind of interpretation. So we don’t have Peter’s reinstatement as an apostle. He already was an apostle. The other apostles were already following his lead. We saw that at the beginning of John 21. They’re going fishing with him. What do we have here instead if not Peter’s reinstatement? We have Peter being entrusted the entire flock of Christ. Think about this. Three times Jesus just said, “Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep.”

Now, some exudates have made the point that you have both the lambs and the sheep being entrusted to Peter. The lambs would represent something like ordinary Christians, the sheep represent bishops and other grownups or whatever. You’ve got the little Christians and the big Christians both being entrusted to Peter. That may be right, it may be wrong. I’m not going to lean too heavily on that interpretation either. But it is very clear here that the entire flock of Christ has three times been entrusted to one man now, Simon Peter, and that there is no corresponding passage where the entire flock of Christ is entrusted to anybody else, not to any of the other apostles, not to Paul, not to… You name it. The entire flock of Christ is entrusted to Peter. Why does that matter? Well, within the Gospel of John, we already find an answer to that. Back in John 10, Jesus foretells.

He says, “I’m the good shepherd. I know my own. My own know me as the Father knows me, and I know the Father and I lay down my life for the sheep, and I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also and they will heed my voice so there shall be one flock, one shepherd.” It sounds like, “Okay. Clearly it’s all just going to be the flock of Christ.” And in one sense that is absolutely right. The one shepherd is the good shepherd, Christ. But immediately before that, something much stranger happens. Jesus gives another kind of parable. He says, “Truly, truly I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief, and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him, the gatekeeper opens, the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”

And then just in case we don’t get it, he clarifies, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.” Hold on a second. Take that and go back to the parable. He’s promising that a false shepherd is one who just climbs into the sheepfold and tries to lead sheep without being called by Christ, the door, while the true shepherd, he who enters by the door, Christ, is the shepherd of the sheep. So he’s promising that there will be a shepherd to guide the sheep that isn’t him personally, but is someone that he’s calling. He says, “I am the door.” He goes on… He’s very clear that in this passage, he’s the door. Now, by all means, he’s a good shepherd.

He is the perfect shepherd. But it is nevertheless true. Back in Jeremiah, you’ve got the promise that there will be shepherds after Christ who are after God’s own heart. So there will be a shepherd for the entire flock that isn’t Jesus, but is someone called by Jesus who is the shepherd of the sheep. Who is that shepherd? John 21 answers it three times. It’s Simon Peter. Jesus has entrusted the entire church to Peter. So all that’s to say, when we’re talking of the resurrection appearances, the point of them is not only, “Hey, look, Jesus rose from the dead.” The point of them is also, “Now what?” And that, “Now what?” Is we’re on a mission of evangelization that lasts until the Second Coming. The mission is governed still by Christ enthroned in heaven, but it’s got this special role for Peter, to bring the nets ashore.

So for all those reasons, I think it’s important to recognize in the resurrection accounts that there is, in addition to a clear affirmation of the resurrection of Christ, also a clear affirmation of the indispensability of the church, of the indispensability of faith, of the indispensability of evangelization that we should all be doing, and of the indispensability of the Pope. That this is not a negotiable part of the church’s structure. This is not something that we can just take or leave based on whether we like the Pope. This is something that’s built into the structure of the church to bring the net ashore to avoid the sin of schism. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Hope you enjoy. If you do, please like, comment, do all that stuff, subscribe. God bless you.

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