Peter could never forget the number.
One hundred fifty-three.
It is such a strangely specific detail to cling to.
Not that fishermen aren’t sometimes obsessed with the size of their catch. I get it.
But if you had asked Peter exactly how many fish he had caught on any other day, he’d struggle to remember.
He’d probably have a fair guess… “we caught about 40 that day”, or “I don’t recall, maybe around 80?”
153 is not a vague memory, it’s a detail from that day which is permanently seared into not only Peter’s memory, but every one of the disciples’.
153.
Not 154. Not “about 150”.
One-hundred and fifty and three.
But that wasn’t the most memorable number from that day.
The number that Peter would never be able to forget was the number 3.
That was the number of times Jesus had to ask Peter, “do you love me?” before Peter finally began to understand what Jesus was trying to say…
I imagine him many years later, telling the story for the thousandth time.
“We were out all night,” he says, hands moving instinctively as if he can still feel the rope burns. “Nothing. Not a thing. The others wanted to call it, but I said, ‘One more cast.’”
He smiles then, the corners of his eyes creasing with the kind of joy that has passed through grief and come out the other side.
“And then we heard him from the shore. We didn’t know it was him at first. ‘Children, do you have any fish?’”
You know the story. They answer no. He tells them to try the right side of the boat. Suddenly the net is heavy, groaning with the weight of more fish than they have any business catching. John’s eyes widen. “It is the Lord!”
Peter does not wait for the boat. He is in the water before anyone can stop him, thrashing his way toward the familiar figure on the beach.
He remembers that detail too, as if it happened yesterday. 100 yards from boat to Jesus. Well, about 100… hard to measure exactly…
But yeah, it was a 100 yard splash.
There, on the shore, is a charcoal fire.
The last time Peter had warmed his hands at a charcoal fire, it was in the courtyard of the high priest. That fire saw his three denials.
“I do not know the man.” Once. Twice. Three times.
Just the smell of charcoal must have made his stomach lurch.
Now, on the other side of the cross and the empty tomb, Jesus stood on the other side of a charcoal fire.
Same smell.
But what a different purpose!
Normally they’d have counted a catch like that right away, but Jesus beckoned them, “bring some of those fish over here. It’s time we eat breakfast.”
Obviously they’d count their fish, but that could wait. What the Lord asked, they did.
The fact that Jesus would even be willing to sit down, peacefully, and share a meal with them after they’d all abandoned him to the cross. It was grace upon grace.
But for Peter, especially, the moment had meaning.
What Judas had done was horrible. But Peter surely felt like he’d done no better than Judas.
He didn’t deserve breakfast with Jesus any more than he’d deserved that catch of 153 fish.
There is no way Peter saw what was coming.
I’m not talking about the breakfast.
That was exactly as you’d expect. Broiled fish and some bread.
Somehow, another detail they’d never forget, Jesus already had some fish on the grill. How?
Maybe on an ordinary day that might’ve been a question. “Hey Jesus, where’d you get your fish?”
But this was no ordinary breakfast. Nothing short of redemption was being served.
First, Jesus feeds Peter some fish for breakfast. Then comes the full forgiveness of sins.
By the time Peter had endured the same excruciating question, “do you love me?” for the third time, he’d also heard Jesus’ reply:
“Feed my sheep”.
Poor Peter.
You can’t blame him.
None of us would have figured it out quickly.
Yes, Jesus had displayed some amazing grace. He’d also been known to rip right into those who rejected him.
Peter had every reason to think this breakfast was prelude to his dismissal.
But finally it hit.
“Feed my sheep.”
This is what it takes to restore faith.
Once Jesus has sent you on His mission, you know you’ve had your faith restored.
And Jesus was asking Peter to do for others what He had just done for him.
Feed my sheep.
Peter’s experience with Jesus follows the same cadence of the Divine Service.
Christ comes. Christ speaks. Christ gives. And then Christ sends.
For us as Lutherans, this moment by the sea stands very close to what we believe about Absolution and the Office of the Ministry.
Christ does not simply restore Peter’s feelings of faith. He restores him by a Word spoken from outside himself – a Word that both absolves and ordains.
“Follow me,” Jesus says at the end, echoing the first time he called Peter years before.
The grace that forgives is the same grace that sends.
Sometimes we imagine that our failures disqualify us from serving. We think, If I really loved Jesus, I would never have done that. So what right do I have to teach, to lead, to speak, to serve?
But on that beach, the risen Christ places a shepherd’s staff back into trembling hands. The authority does not come from Peter’s track record. It comes from Jesus’ promise: “My sheep… my lambs… feed them.”
That is how vocation works under the cross. Our ministry, whatever form it takes – parenting, pastoring, neighboring, showing up at council meetings or high school football games – is not grounded in our spotless performance but in Christ’s decision to keep using sinners whom he has forgiven.
So what about you?
Maybe you have your own “courtyard” memory: a conversation you wish you could redo, a season where you walked away, a habit that wrapped itself around your life like a net you cannot break.
And what is your 153?
What oddly specific little detail anchors that memory you would rather not revisit – and yet, in God’s strange mercy, became the very place He met you again?
The beauty of this breakfast story is not that Peter’s sin gets brushed under the rug.
Jesus never says, “don’t worry about it…”. After all, sin is why Jesus suffered and died.
The beauty is that Jesus walks straight into the place of Peter’s sin – the smell of charcoal, the echoes of denial – and rewrites the scene.
That is faith restored.
A prayer
Risen Lord Jesus,
You know everything.
You know the nights we caught nothing,
the fires where we denied you,
the stories we tell about ourselves to hide our shame.
Thank you for meeting Peter on the shore,
for feeding him before questioning him,
for restoring him with your Word
and sending him again to care for your sheep.
Do the same with us.
Call us to your table.
Speak your forgiveness into our particular failures.
Restore our faith,
and send us back into the ordinary work you have given us to do,
trusting not in our strength,
but in your promise.
Amen.
