Homily for Third Sunday of Easter 22 April 2007

This Sunday’s Gospel reading is so rich in themes that the preacher is spoilt for choice, but all week long I have been obsessed by one aspect of it- the 153 fish! Why does the writer of this Gospel tell us there were 153 fish in the net? We can be sure of one thing, that for the first audience who heard this Gospel, that number meant something. St John’s Gospel as I have said before is the most literary of the Gospels, very carefully written, with every word full of significance and echoes and allusions that the evangelist expected his readers to pick up on. Ah ha! They said when they first heard this around the year 100, probably in Ephesus or somewhere along the Turkish coast of the Med, Ah ha! 153 fish- you see! Need we say more, we all know what that means, don’t we! Well, 1900 years later, in another world, we don’t. The number has been baffling people for years. Even our great St Augustine, in fourth century Africa, could only say to his congregation, “it is a great mystery”. But, a clever man, a contemporary of St Augustine, St Jerome, busy translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin in his cave in Bethlehem, came up with an answer. He discovered that the ancient Greeks believed that there were 153 types of fish in the world, that was the limit of their zoology. In other words, when the evangelist says there were 153 fish in the net, he is actually saying that every type of fish was in the net, every type of fish that existed in the world. What he means by that of course, is that the net, which I don’t have to explain to you is the Church, reaches out to and contains within it people from every type, every race, every nation on the earth.

Here at St Saviour’s we are part of that all-embracing net. Look around you- I bet that there are three nationalities in the pew where you are sitting. You see, this church is in London, in England, but it is not an English church, it is a Catholic church, and catholic means universal. We have the 153 fish right here! Just going through the alphabet, look at what we find: we have Albanians, the RCIA had a gorgeous girl from Brazil, there’s a lady from Cameroun, people from the Congo, our dear people from Cote d’Ivoire- bonjour, chers amis-, we have Bruce my friend who is English through and through, F is for our Filipinos full of faith, G – well, my cousin from Germany is down there, and moving on, we have India behind me, and looking down the church I can see our good Irish people who founded this parish long ago, moving on again we have M for Madeira, N for our Nigerians- who can imagine this parish without them? We have Poland in the sanctuary, we have Sicily in the choir, and under S we have of course our beloved Tamils from Sri Lanka… I’ve missed half of you out I know, but we’v e got the world here, haven’t we, from Australia to Zambia, from A to Z. We’ve got the 153 fish in the net!

So we are in the net all of us. Now when Jesus says to the disciples “Bring some of the fish you have just caught” he uses in the Greek a very unusual word for “catch”, he uses a word which means “arrest”- in fact it is the same word that is used when the Roman soldiers arrest Jesus in the Garden of Olives. So we are caught in the net, we are arrested by the Church. When we enter the Church, we are in a sense under arrest, Our Lord has taken us into custody, protective custody if you like. We are no longer swimming aimlessly about, a prey to all the tides of fashion and all the currents in our society, at the mercy of every crashing wave of sin that can break over our lives and swamp us- no, we are under arrest, we have been stopped in our tracks, and now we belong in the net, in God’s holy Church- and notice, the net does not break- “in spite of there being so many, the net was not broken”. The Church will not let us down, will not let us go- we are safe in her arms, she will bring us safe to the shore, safe to our salvation.

And now we must consider one more aspect of this fish saga. The Greek language has a good word for fish and I expect many of you know what it is, because it is the name of a small protestant sect – it is ichthus. Well, when this story opens, ichthus is the word that the evangelist is using every time we hear in our English version the word “fish”. But halfway through, he starts to use a different word, opsarion. James, I hear you saying, what does it matter? Who cares? Get on with it! But have patience with me a bit longer. Opsarion means fish that something has happened to, dried fish, cooked fish, grilled fish, cured fish, preserved fish. Ichthus is salmon, and opsarion is smoked salmon. It is very odd that what Jesus says is “bring some of the treated fish that you have arrested” . You see, once we are caught in the net, once we become members of the Church, once we have been stopped in our tracks by God, we will have to change, we will undergo a process of change that is like grilling fish or smoking it- we will become fish that can be kept, that won’t go off after three days and stink the place out, but fish that we can keep without it losing its quality. The contact with our Lord Jesus, who is waiting to deal with the fish that is in the disciples’ net, the touch of Jesus, will bring about in us a profound change, but one that will, however searing and painful the process may be, result in our preservation.

These altar rails are the seashore, on which at communion Our Lord is waiting for his encounter with you this morning. The contents of the net will be poured out as you surge forward to receive the Host. You do not need to ask “Who are you?”, for like the disciples you know quite well it is the Lord. May the Lord touch every heart today, every fish in the net of our dear St Saviour’s, and preserve them to eternal life. Amen.