Fish

 3 Easter Sunday B April 14, 2024
Acts 3:12-19 Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7 Luke 24:36b-48

Lectionary Link

We are used to seeing on car license plates the fish sign, as a way for a person to announce that they are followers of Jesus.  Indeed the fish is an ancient symbol for Christ, perhaps older than the cross.

The fish is an acrostic as the letters of the Greek word for fish ichthus, are the letters for the names and titles of Jesus:  Jesus, Christ, God's Son, Savior.

The fish is then a symbol of Christ.  It is a single word symbol.  Can we understand also that the New Testament and the Gospels in particular are many worded symbols to express within the early Christ communities the meanings of the life of Jesus.

In the history of the church, we have continually applied the meanings of the New Testament writings within our various contexts and we have harmonized and used New Testament writings so that they might be relevance in the many subsequent settings where people have been explicating in their settings the meaning of Jesus.

The modern setting for the reading of the New Testament has been the Enlightenment era which brought scientific reason to be the throne of the preferred standard of truth.  What is the dictum of modern science when it is expressed in the logic of propositional philosophy?  A statement or proposition is meaningfully true, if and only if it was or could be empirically verified.

And so the natural laws of science became the criteria for reading ancient writings and their "meaningful truth" status.

So scientists who read biblical narratives with occurrences which violate how we understand natural laws say these things could not have happened.  Christians who realized the truths of modern science have doubled down by professing that everything that is in the Bible is true using the scientific criteria of empirical verification.

This has created a double falsehood that has been devastating for Christians and for scientists.  A scientist believes that the fundamentalistic or literal ways of reading Scripture is the only way that Scripture can be read, and they end up limiting their notion of what can be experienced as truth.  At the same time, they might be moved by music, art, poetry and acknowledge aesthetic truth.  If they would allow themselves to see biblical writings more in the realm of aesthetic and moving truths rather than scientific truths, they could be poets and scientists at the same time.  Christians who say that everything that is narrated in the Bible has to have been empirically verified, end up agreeing with the limiting of truth status to the scientific model.  They give up the profoundly moving truth of story and narrative art.

Can we appreciate the false opposition which has been created by both scientists and fundamentalists between biblical narrative and scientific discourse?

Forgive the digression, but I would return to the topic of fish and Jesus for us to appreciate the meaningful truth of the New Testament writers.

The meaningful truth of the New Testament is that many, many people were having sublime experiences, moving experiences, and these experiences were given context and meaning within their communities as experiences of the Risen Christ.  What was the empirical fact?  These experiences were happening, seemingly spontaneously and mysteriously.  The Christian community had explanations for these sublime experiences, as different as they seemed to be.

Many different people can attend a live performance of Beethoven's Ninth with complete choral performers.  And they might each have and explain the sublime effect of that artistic event differently.  But that people are effected and confess a sublime experience is a verifiable truth.

This is how we should understand the continuing occurrence of people's experiences of the sublime with explanation as being the presence of the Risen Christ.

The Christ is confessed to be Word from the beginning who is God who became totally intertwined with human flesh in a unique way in the person of Jesus.

Word is the main truth of human life as we know it.  The Gospels are textual words about Christ as the word of God.  It is undeniable that having words is the continuing sublime presence of continuing meaningful life.

Gospel writers wrote that the coming to words of the physical world in our constant perception and conscious, is in fact a symbol of the main reality of life itself, namely word always being known in the flesh and the exterior mapping of our lives.  Word as interior is also life as Spirit;  Word is really real.

But we grow up instinctually and we come to regard the external world as things which seem to have a separate existence from the entire system of words which creates the knowing of the external world as possible.  The Gospel writers and writers of all ages use the physical world as a metaphor of substantiality.  If I can see, taste, eat, touch, and hear something, I take this to be the substantial evidence of its existence.

St. Paul is the earliest New Testament writer and he did not see Jesus in the flesh.  He had a visionary experience of the Risen Christ.  In that experience Jesus did not eat with him; Jesus did not eat, bread, or fish with him or drink wine with him.  But St. Paul believe that his vision was a sublime event which changed the direction of his life.  It was a profound word paradigm shift in his life.

The early followers of Christ were a group of people who had sublime experiences which they named as experiences of the Risen Christ.  The New Testament literature occurred in the Jesus Movement decades after he lived to create a community identity for inculcating the values which surrounded the supreme event of having an experience of the Risen Lord.

And that brings us to the Risen Christ eating fish as a spiritual literature of persuasion about the substantiality of experiences of the Risen Christ.  The Risen Christ portrayed as eating fish, is an appeal to our child like sense of what is substantial.  Would we believe something is real if and only if it occurred as a seeing, touch, taste, hearing event?

Eating fish is a real physical event.  Christ is presented as doing so to prove his Risen presence.  This is the early Church writers saying, believe the reality of your experience of the Risen Christ, in the same way that you would believe an event you witnessed with seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing.

The fish eating story of the Risen Christ, is an invitation for the hearers and readers of the Gospel, to believe the really real significance of the many kinds of presences of the Risen Christ who is always already known as the Eternal Word which endless guides the insides of humanity in it interactions with each other and the world outside of each human epidermis.

Dear friends, accept the sublimity of your experience of the Risen Christ.  Amen.