What Really Happened on That Shore
Rev. Joyce Rodgers
April 12, 2026
Wandering Heart — Week 8 | John 21:1–19
You know the feeling.
You’ve sat through an entire Marvel movie — two and a half hours, every credit, every name you don’t recognize — because you will not miss the post-credit scene.
Chapter 21 of John reads exactly like that.
Chapter 20 wraps up. The credits begin to roll. And then — suddenly — we are standing on a beach with seven disciples in the early morning fog, and Peter is looking at the water, and something is about to happen that will change everything.
Not for the first time. But maybe for the last time in the way it needs to.
He Went Back to the Boat
If I were sketching storyboards for this scene, I’d draw six disciples scattered in the sand — some sleeping, some poking things with sticks — and Peter off by himself. Looking out at the water. Thinking about the first time Jesus called him here, to this same lake, and said something so strange it had to be either foolish or divine: I will make you fish for people.
He doesn’t talk about it. He just sits. And then he stands up and announces: I’m going fishing.
Some scholars think it was practical — food, income. I think he went fishing because it was something he knew how to do. Something he was good at. Something that did not require him to be the rock, or the confessor, or the one who had looked Jesus in the eye on Good Friday and said: I do not know him.
Shame does that to us. It doesn’t always look like a dramatic rejection. Sometimes it looks like going back to the boat. A smaller and smaller life organized around avoiding the place where everything fell apart.
They fish all night. They catch nothing.
The Figure on the Shore
In the early dawn, as the boat makes for shore, a figure calls out from the beach: Try the other side.
If that sounds familiar — it should. Luke 5. The original call. The failed fishing trip. The instruction to recast. The overwhelming abundance that followed. Jesus is reaching all the way back to the beginning.
The nets fill so fast they start to break. They need the other boat. Both boats fill until they’re at risk of sinking. And John records a detail so specific it can’t be accidental: one hundred and fifty-three fish.
Not approximately 150. Not a symbolic 40. Precisely 153.
At the time of writing, the Romans had cataloged 153 known species of fish. In other words, at Jesus’s direction, they caught one of every kind. If the disciples had been called to fish for people, scripture has just defined the ministry field of the new church. No one is excluded. The outsider. The outcast. The enemy. Every kind.
John puts two and two together first: It is the Lord.
And then he stays in the boat.
Peter says nothing — and is in the water before his brain catches up with his body. No waiting. No finishing what he started. The gap between where he is and where Jesus is becomes intolerable, and he is in the water.
Think of Forrest Gump jumping off the Jenny when he sees Lt. Dan on the pier. He doesn’t think. He doesn’t calculate. He sees someone he loves on that pier, and he is in the water before anything else registers. The boat just keeps going.
Peter even pauses to put on his outer garment first. Even in his most impulsive moment, the instinct to look the part flickers — and then he jumps anyway. Soaking wet. Undignified. Fully himself.
The garment is soaked the moment he hits the water. You cannot look the part and swim to Jesus at the same time. Eventually, you have to choose.
He arrives on shore and finds Jesus already there. Already cooking. A fire is going. Bread. Fish.
And then everyone sits down to breakfast.
The Charcoal Fire
Notice the word John uses for the fire.
Anthrakian. Charcoal fire.
This word appears only one other time in all the Gospels — John 18:18. The courtyard. The night of the arrest. The slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it warming themselves — Peter also was standing with them and warming himself — and in the very next verse, the first denial.
It is not a coincidence. Jesus has chosen this fire deliberately.
Hold that thought.
Three Questions by the Fire
Breakfast finishes. Jesus looks at Peter — and doesn’t call him Peter.
He calls him Simon. Simon, son of John. The name before everything. Before the calling. Before the rock. Before the designation. All the way back to who he was before any of it happened.
Simon, son of John — do you love me more than these?
Peter answers: Yes, Lord — you know that I love you. And Jesus: Feed my lambs.
A second time. Simon, son of John — do you love me? Same answer. Tend my sheep.
The third time — and John tells us plainly that it hurt — Simon, son of John, do you love me? And Peter: Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you. And Jesus: Feed my sheep.
Three questions. Three answers. Three commissions.
The disciples sitting around that fire probably thought Jesus was asking whether Peter loved him more than fish. But Peter knew exactly what was being asked. And so do we.
We Have Been Reading This Wrong
Now. I want to suggest something.
We have spent our whole lives reading this scene as a restoration story. Peter failed. Jesus restored him. Second chance granted. Back to work.
That framework isn’t wrong. But it isn’t big enough for what is actually happening on this shore.
What the Fire Was Actually For
Go back to that charcoal fire.
Anthrakian. Only twice. John 18 — the courtyard — the denial. John 21 — the shore — the breakfast. Jesus chose this deliberately.
But notice what he does with it.
He does not use it as a confrontation. He does not wait for Peter to approach and confess. He has already built it. He has already prepared food. He feeds Peter before he asks Peter to feed anyone.
The smell. The warmth. The firelight. Jesus has reconstructed the entire sensory environment of the worst night of Peter’s life — and filled it with something the trauma had no answer for.
Not an accusation. Breakfast.
Not a loyalty test. Presence.
Not judgment. Care.
Psychologists who work with trauma speak of reintroducing a difficult stimulus within a safe and supported environment — giving the nervous system a new and stronger experience connected to the same trigger. The goal is not to erase the memory. It’s to give love the last word in a moment that had been owned by shame.
Jesus is doing exactly this. With extraordinary intentionality. Across the entire scene. The charcoal fire, the fish, the number three — every element of the worst night of Peter’s life, reintroduced within a completely different relational context.
Same fire. Same smell. Same number. Everything around it was transformed by love.
But this is more than good psychology. This is the incarnational logic of the entire gospel operating at the most personal level.
The Word became flesh — not the Word became a very good idea. Flesh. Susceptible to cold and hunger and grief and the specific weight of being betrayed by someone you love. And on this shore, Jesus is doing what the incarnation always does: entering the human place of deepest pain and filling it with presence.
God does not cause the pain. Through Jesus, God enters it. And the entering is what transforms.
The Word Peter Wouldn’t Use
Now the threefold question opens differently.
In Greek, there are multiple words for love. Jesus asks Peter: “Do you agape me? — sacrificial, complete, unconditional, self-giving love. The largest word in the vocabulary.
Peter answers with phileo. Dear friend. Deep affection. Fond of you.
He doesn’t reach up to match Jesus’s word. He offers what he actually has.
He had every incentive to say agape. That was the right answer. The answer with no asterisk. The answer that performs well.
He doesn’t say it.
And this refusal is the most faithful moment in the entire exchange.
Consider Peter’s previous grand gestures: Though all become deserters, I will never desert you. Lord, not just my feet but my hands and my head as well. The sword in the garden. Always the biggest word. The grandest gesture. The declaration that outpaced what he could actually sustain.
Now there is nothing left but the true thing. The denial has done something to his self-knowledge. He has been broken enough by his own failure to stop performing a love he isn’t sure he possesses.
The third time, Jesus comes all the way down to Peter’s word: do you phileo me?
And this is what breaks Peter open: Lord, you know everything. You know what has happened. You know who I really am. You know how far I can go right now — and you are here anyway. You know that I love you.
This is a moment of confession. Not affirmation.
And Jesus commissions him from exactly where he is. Not from where Peter wishes he were. Not from the agape he cannot claim. From the honest phileo he actually has.
You do not have to be the finished version of yourself to feed the sheep. You have to be the honest version.
Not Restoration — Release
Here is the reframe that changes everything.
Restoration implies something was taken away and given back. It implies a transaction — you failed, you were demoted, now you are reinstated. That framework makes the denial the hinge on which everything turns. It makes Peter’s failure the most important event in the story.
What was needed on that shore was not the restoration of a call. It was a release from shame.
The call was never revoked.
Before Jeremiah was formed in the womb, God knew him. Before I formed you in the womb I knew you — before you were born I set you apart — I appointed you as a prophet to the nations. The call preceded the person. And when Jeremiah protested — I am only a child, I do not know how to speak — God did not revise the call. God said: You will go where I send you. Do not be afraid. I am with you.
The Psalmist knew the same truth from the inside: For you created my inmost being — you knit me together in my mother’s womb — your eyes saw my unformed body — all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. (Psalm 139:13–16)
Before one day had been lived. Before a single choice had been made — faithful or faithless. Before Peter walked on water or sank. Before the declaration or the sword or the charcoal fire in the courtyard — God knew him. The call was already written.
The shame Peter carries on that shore is operating on far less information than the God who knit him together. Shame looks at Good Friday and calls it the final word. God looks at the unformed Peter — at every day before they came to be — and the call is still there. It was always there. It was there before Peter was.
Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter — the rock — before any of this happened. He didn’t call a proven man. He called a fisherman in an ordinary moment and said: You are already something you don’t yet know.
The enemy of Peter’s ministry was not the absence of a call.
It was the presence of shame.
Shame doesn’t always look like dramatic rejection. Sometimes it looks like going back to the boat. A smaller and smaller life organized around avoiding the place where everything fell apart.
Jesus does not come to reinstate the demoted. He comes to insist to the ashamed that the demotion never happened.
A Young Man in a Triage Room
Not all pastors look like you think they will. Not all ministry moments happen at church.
This week I talked with a young man — a CNA — in a triage room. He had left the church. Struggled with addiction. Had been in a serious accident. Was trying to find his way back to something, not sure what. Not sure if what he had dreamed for himself was still available after the sideways years.
The conversation happened because I was my normal, slightly sarcastic self. He found out I was a pastor when I told him I needed a Covid test because I am a pastor who doesn’t want to kill her elderly congregants — because I’m a good pastor that way. The snark opened the door.
He asked why I wanted to be a pastor. I told him it wasn’t so much a want to as a have to. He asked about the big holy call moment. I told him I was barefoot vacuuming a hallway during family nap time — not exactly a mountaintop, but clear.
We joked about the prosperity gospel and student loans. He talked about his original plan — ER nursing — and how life went sideways. How the gap between where he was and where he thought he was supposed to be felt too wide.
I told him: even if it seems overwhelming, even if it won’t make you rich, even if it is so hard — you have to do what you’re built for.
And then he handed me the thermometer to put in my own mouth so he didn’t accidentally jab me. And he said: You’re a good pastor. I’m a good nurse.
He already knew. The call was already there. What he was carrying was the accumulated shame of a life that had gone sideways. What he needed was not a new calling — he needed someone to insist that the original one was still intact.
Before one day of that young man’s life had been lived — before the choices that went sideways, before the addiction, before the accident, before the dream that seemed to have an expiration date — God knew him. The days were written. The call to be an ER nurse who understands suffering from the inside was already written before he had lived a single day that could confirm or deny it.
God did not cause the addiction. God did not cause the accident.
But through Jesus — who enters triage rooms and charcoal fires and all the ordinary places where shame has set up residence — God used it. Is using it. Will use it. Not because the harm was necessary. But because God refuses to let the harm be the final word.
Here Is My Heart
I have spent years feeling like whatever I was born with, I somehow spent before I knew what I had.
I have stood at charcoal fires. I know what the smoke smells like. I have gone back to the boat — retreated into what was familiar and manageable because shame is persuasive, and the familiar feels safer than the call.
And yet the call has been there. Not because I earned it, not because I protected it, not because I got everything right. Just there. Persistent. Patient. Waiting for me to stop listening to shame long enough to hear it.
I am not the finished version of myself. I am the phileo version. And Jesus said that was enough to begin.
This is the last message in our Wandering Heart Lenten series — a series that began on Ash Wednesday with Jesus Sought Me — prevenient grace pursuing Peter before he was paying attention. It ends here. With the wandering heart finally, freely, fully held out and offered back.
Not because the wandering is over. Not because the prone-to-leave is cured. But because the God who knit us together before we were formed is patient enough — and good enough — and present enough — to keep meeting us at the shore. With breakfast. With fire. With a question that goes all the way back to our name.
Do you love me?
Answer with what you actually have. Not what you wish you had. Not the grand gesture you’ve been performing. The honest, smaller, truer word.
Here it is. This is what I have. It is yours.
And hear him receive it. Not with disappointment. Not with a reminder of how far you still have to go.
With: Feed my sheep. Follow me.
The call is still there. It was always there. It is not contingent on your choices. It is who you are. It is where your real joy rests. Shame — for all its noise — is operating on far less information than the God who formed you.
Come, thou Fount of every blessing — Let thy goodness like a fetter Bind my wandering heart to thee. Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it — Seal it for thy courts above.
What charcoal fire have you been avoiding? What boat have you gone back to — the familiar thing, the smaller life, the retreat from the place where everything fell apart? The One who built the fire and made breakfast in the middle of Peter’s worst moment is still doing that. Still entering. Still asking. Still commissioning from exactly where you are — not from where you wish you were.
Feed my sheep. Follow me.
