Journey's end: Reflections on John 21:18-25

One last meal together

When you were young you dressed yourself and went wherever you wished, but when you get old you’ll have to stretch out your hands while someone else dresses you and takes you where you don’t want to go.” He said this to hint at the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. And then he commanded, “Follow me.”

Turning his head, Peter noticed the disciple Jesus loved following right behind. When Peter noticed him, he asked Jesus, “Master, what’s going to happen to him?”

Jesus said, “If I want him to live until I come again, what’s that to you? You—follow me.”

John 21:18-22, The Message

“In the next day or two Frodo went through his papers and his writings with Sam, and he handed over his keys. There was a big book with plain red leather covers; its tall pages were now almost filled. At the beginning there were many leaves covered with Bilbo's thin wandering hand; but most of it was written in Frodo's firm flowing script. It was divided into chapters but Chapter 80 was unfinished, and after that were some blank leaves. The title page had many titles on it, crossed out one after another...”

'Why, you have nearly finished it, Mr. Frodo!' Sam exclaimed. 'Well, you have kept at it, I must say.'

'I have quite finished, Sam,' said Frodo. 'The last pages are for you.'

“The Grey Havens” in The Return of The King by J.R.R. Tolkien

For the last year and a half I have been camped in the Gospel of John taking a meandering, slow devotional journey through it. Just the other day I came to the end of the road: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written” (v. 25, NIV). The writer of the last sentence, be it John or a later contributor as some suggest, is waxing eloquent. As Gary Burge notes:

With playful and delightful hyperbole, John says that even all the books of the world could not contain Jesus’ story. Such expressions were common in antiquity. Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, a first-century teacher, wrote, “If all heaven were a parchment, and all the trees produced pens, and all the waters were ink, they would not suffice to inscribe the wisdom I have received from my teachers: and yet from the wisdom of the wise I have enjoyed only so much as the water a fly which plunges into the sea can remove.” John ends his Gospel with similar humility. The story is larger than anything he can imagine. His effort, while glorious for us to read, pales in comparison to the glory of the Person whom his story describes.

The story ends where it began – at the shore of the sea. Though John doesn't mention it in his gospel, all the other gospel writers do (Matthew 1:18-22; Mark 1:16-20; Luke 5:1-11) sharing the origin story of the age-old Sunday School song “Fishers of Men” that I learned as a boy:

I will make you fishers of men,
Fishers of men, fishers of men.
I will make you fishers of men,
If you follow Me.

If you follow Me,
If you follow Me,
I will make you fishers of men,
If you follow Me.

Three years before Peter and John (along with Andrew and James) had been invited to leave their vocation as fishermen and apprentice themselves to this peripatetic rabbi who majored in story-telling and frequently confusing teaching that was validated by the miraculous again and again. They did drop their nets. They did turn their backs on their homes in Galilee and had followed Jesus of Nazareth all the way to the cross – and beyond. Now that journey had taken them back full circle to where it had all began. And just like then Peter and Jesus are walking along the shore of Lake Tiberius (John is the only one of the Gospel writers to refer to the sea with its proper Roman name) with John in tow. I imagine it's a cool morning at the lake and the waves are gently lapping along the shore. There's a bit of a breeze that gives a little bite to the air. Once again, Jesus turns to Peter and utters his all purpose invitation to all would-be disciples of every place and of every time: “Follow me” - through thick and thin, in good times and bad, even though it may cost you everything including your life – which it will. “You must follow me, Peter!” (v. 22) is how we're supposed to hear it.

All of us who read the story are silent witnesses of these three walking along the lake in the early morning. Church history is in the making. Peter and John both will follow Christ through the rest of their lives but the arc of their stories will follow different trajectories. As Bruce Milne puts it:

The ministries of Peter and John would be different. Peter would be the shepherd, John the seer; Peter the preacher, John the penman; Peter the foundational witness, John the faithful writer; Peter would die in the agony and passion of martyrdom, John would live on to great age and pass away in quiet serenity.

Both would follow Christ faithfully. In the early days of the movement known as the Church they would walk together ministering in both Jerusalem and Samaria. But eventually their paths would take them in different directions, John to Ephesus in modern-day Turkey (interrupted by several years spent in exile out in the Aegean) and Peter to ultimate martyrdom in Rome as Jesus had foretold. But at this particular moment in time all of that is in their future. Right now it is just Jesus and two of his most closest friends having a private conversation by the sea.

Mark's story ends with wonder in front of the empty tomb. Matthew's concludes with Jesus uttering “the Great Commission” to the Eleven. And Luke's finale is perhaps the most dramatic of all with Jesus ascending to heaven right before their eyes. But John's gospel, which many believe officially concludes with Thomas' declaration of Jesus being his Lord and God when the resurrected Christ appeared before him (John 20:26-31), is singularly unique in that it comes to an end in a quiet and yet emphatic invitation to follow the risen Savior to whatever end he has destined for each of us. With regards to Peter, Michael Card writes:

They had first met beside this very same sea, on this same shore. At first Jesus had to show Simon that the lake he thought was empty was indeed full of fish. Now he had done it once again. Now a new kind of fisherman is left standing there – beside not a lake of fish but a vast sea of souls. He will fish for men and women. He will tend and feed the flock of Jesus. He can accomplish all this now because, in his brokenness, he knows the certainty both of his love for Jesus and – more importantly – of Jesus' love for him. He is armed with the painful knowing of own end. He is ready. A Fragile Stone: The Emotional Life of Simon Peter

Tolkienphile that I am, the last verses in John wistfully remind me of chapter 9 in The Return of the King. The One Ring and Sauron utterly destroyed and King Elessar now enthroned in Gondor, the Third Age has ended. Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond and Bilbo are making one last journey to the Grey Havens to board the ship awaiting to carry them to Valinor. Frodo, accompanied by the faithful Sam, travels to the Havens, too, to bid farewell to this mighty company. Once there, however, Sam learns that Frodo plans on taking the ship as well. Crestfallen, Sam vainly tries to persuade Frodo to stay to no avail. Replies Frodo:

...I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you. And also you have Rose, and

The passing of the Red Book

Elanor; and Frodo-lad will come, and Rosie-lass, and Merry, and Goldilocks, and Pippin; and perhaps more that I cannot see. Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere. You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part of the Story goes on.

Peter's and John's (as well as James' and the others) part of the great Story would continue for many years to come. All but John would suffer and die for the glory of the Name but all followed Christ and allowed him to write His story in theirs. And unlike that melancholy good-bye among the members of the Fellowship of the Ring at the Havens, his spirit would abide and remain in them all their lives. As Paul put it they would know “the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings,becoming like him in his death” (Phil 3:10-11, NIV). They told the Story to others who in turn passed it onto others through the millennia and because they did the world continues to fill with the stories of Jesus. And yet, as Frodo reminds us, despite all that has been written there's yet a few pages more for each of us to write our own installment of the Story that will go on until he returns. “Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen” (Ephesians 3:21, KJV).

In the centuries that followed, the books that spoke about Jesus have flowed by the thousands, and yet still the world is not full of them. In many, perhaps most, of those books Jesus remains the misunderstood Messiah. Misunderstood, not because he had been obtuse or obscure, but because the wisdom he spoke and embodied was not, could not be grasped only through the intellect. The wisdom Jesus was could only be comprehended through relationship with the Word who had become flesh. John: The Gospel of Wisdom by Michael Card

I'm hoping Christ is writing his story in my life