Feasting and Feeding

Feasting and Feeding – Today is Confirmation Sunday and we are confirming/baptizing seven youth who have been through the confirmation process. Today’s scripture is the familiar story from the Fourth Gospel of the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus to seven of his disciples who are fishing. As part of this story, Jesus fixes them a meal so that when they come ashore he feeds them. After the story of the resurrection in the previous chapter, we might feel like the story of Jesus is over, but this story underscores Jesus’s challenge to the disciples to carry on what Jesus had been doing throughout his ministry. First, they are nourished, and then, most especially with the conversation between Simon Peter and Jesus, they are commissioned to go forth. In many ways, it is a model for our own baptism and commissioning, and it is demonstrative for the confirmands who are being baptized and brought into church membership today. The questions and challenges Jesus has for Simon Peter reflect that the basis of nourishment to him, to the other disciples, and to us is the love Jesus gives. Then the direction to “feed my lambs” gives us the mission with which we, like those disciples, are charged.