John 21:1-14
Let’s continue to pray for Jim and Marty.
“Notice what you notice.” I’m caught up a bit in the geography of Jesus’ Resurrection days. He was buried and rose from the grave in Jerusalem, where the disciples and hundreds of thousands of others had gathered to celebrate the Passover. He appeared to them in Jerusalem that first day when they were gathered as a group behind locked doors (John 20:19), then another eight days later when Thomas was with them (John 20:26), again behind locked doors. So my first question has to do with how many days the disciples spent in Jerusalem. The Passover celebration must have ended a few days after the Resurrection, but the disciples are still in Jerusalem on that 8th day.
Then in today’s reading we find Peter, James, John, and others fishing on the Sea of Galilee, presumably having cast off from Capernaum, Peter’s home town. So how long had they stayed in Jerusalem? And why did they head to Galilee? Recall that Jesus had told the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee and that He would meet them there (Matthew 28:10). But when and for how long did they stay in Jerusalem? Was there a prompt that moved them back to Galilee, other than Peter’s proclamation, “I am going fishing”? (v. 3) When and why does he make that decision?
Later, to continue to confound the geography of it all, Jesus’ ascended from Bethany / the Mount of Olives forty days after His Resurrection (Luke 24:50, Acts 1:12), just outside Jerusalem. So here I imagine that the disciples had returned to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, alternately referred to as the Feast of First Fruits. But the time frame between the 8th day after the Resurrection and the 50th day are not clear. Where was Jesus and where were the disciples during this time?
All this is not a major point, but one of the main things that I have learned this year is the geography and the chronology of it all. So here I have one last confusion on them both. Just thought I’d report that…! Slava Bohu!
Good thoughts, Fred. I was thinking that they had already gotten to Galilee, maybe following the women’s message to go there (what, listen to the women?). Probably they were sitting around wondering why they were there. Then, Peter gets antsy and gets up to go fishing.
What I wonder is that John never says, “I ‘. He identifies himself as the one whom Jesus loved. Didn’t Jesus love them all? Were the others offended by this claim? They were sure mad when he and his brother asked to sit by Jesus in heaven. Maybe the other disciples had all been martyred by the time this gospel was written.