John 21: Christ, Peter, and Interstellar Love

John 21: After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. 2 Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. 3 Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

4 Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. 5 Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” 6 He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. 7 That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. 8 But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.

9 When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. 10 Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” 11 So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. 12 Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. 13 Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. 14 This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. 

 

William de Brailes, Christ Appears at Lake Tiberias, c. 1250.

This is John’s 21st and final chapter, and it's framed like an afterthought. Previously, chapter 20 tells of the resurrection: it starts with Mary Magdalene finding the stone of the tomb rolled back, and Christ revealing himself to her. Christ then reveals himself to the twelve apostles, and doubting Thomas puts his hands into his wounds. Jesus says, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”. The chapter ends like this:

“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” 

Amen.

But then this next chapter continues: “after these things Jesus showed himself again”. All that we’ve heard in today’s gospel reading might just as well fall under the banner of Jesus’s “many other signs” that that the gospel-writer cannot find room to tell. But here it is, told anyway.

There’s a lot going on in this passage, but I want to focus on this remarkable exchange between Christ and Peter. Three times Peter denied Christ before the crucifixion, and threefold in return Jesus asks: “do you love me?”. Peter is hurt: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you”. The hurt (as always in confession) stems from remorse, but Christ’s response is deeply ambivalent. Along with a little of the comfort that he desires, Peter gets much more than he bargained for. He gets an uncomfortable glimpse into the future: “when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go”.

So what is love? I mean, what is it really? In this passage it seems to span some mutual knowledge (in “you know that I love you”), care (in “feed my sheep”), and the terrifying abyss of the future, in which we grow old, lose our agency, and die.

Now, Hollywood might not be the most intuitive place to look for nuanced depictions of love. In fact, it’s usually the first place that one might look for really, truly, Twilight-saga bad depictions of love. But I’ve recently become really obsessed with the modern sci-fi classic Interstellar, most specifically with how it deals with love.

The setting is some time in the middle of the twenty-first century. Planet earth is dying, plagued by dust storms, climate extremes, and crop diseases. However, some mysterious, unknown force has positioned a wormhole near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with twelve potentially habitable new planets. Twelve astronauts have traveled through the wormhole to individually survey the planets. Of them, three are signalling the possibility that their planet could be the new earth. Their names are Miller, Edmunds, and Mann.

The astronauts land on Miller’s planet to find it engulfed by water. Miller is surely dead. The crew must then decide where to go with their remaining fuel supply. This is humanity’s last shot: Edmunds’s planet or Mann’s planet?

The three remaining astronauts at this point are Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), Brand (played by Anne Hathaway), and some other guy. They decide to vote. As they debate it out, Cooper reveals that Brand has an ulterior motive: she is in love with Edmunds. Of course she wants to go to the planet where the man she loves is waiting. Cooper rebukes that surely, as scientists, they should view love in evolutionary terms: “social utility, child rearing, and social bonding”.

Brand’s rebuttal, for me, is one of the most interesting moments in the Hollywood history of love: “we love people who’ve died ... where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means more - something we can’t understand yet. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen for a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t yet understand it”.

Sit with that notion for a while. Apart from gravity, love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Why do we love and desire the dead? Could love conceivably be a force?

Unlike your archetypal cinematic “love conquers all” speech, Brand is overruled, and the crew head to Mann’s planet. No spoilers, but suffice to say that the consequences are dire. It is only through a truly trippy encounter with the mysteries inside a black hole that humanity is saved.

The name of God is never used in Interstellar, and it is a film deeply committed to scientific accuracy; its writers were advised by a team of astrophysicists. But this is also a film committed, at its core, to mystery; to admitting what we don't know. The relationship between a mysterious power beyond all knowing, and humanity as we intrepidly and lovingly encounter the unknown, is what saves the world in the end. Taken in another context, that last sentence could well have been describing prayer.

In Theology: A Very Short Introduction, David Ford writes this:

“what is infinite cannot be fully grasped by our finite minds. God is always beyond human conceptual capacity, and if you think you have finally caught God in a definition, then you can be sure that what you have caught is not this God. God is ‘always greater’, and this has a direct consequence for any attempt to prove God’s existence: there can be no larger framework within which God’s reality can be assessed. The one who seeks God does not have any neutral criterion or any overview of the evidence. God is the ultimate framework and has the sole overview”.

This “ultimate framework” is made comprehensible by Christians as the Trinity, which is always giving. The father gives his son, the son breathes the holy spirit, and the spirit binds everything in unity. Love is as much God’s medium as God is love itself. Love is the matter and the energy that keep the Trinity in infinite motion. The final words of the John’s gospel are these:

“There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written”. 

There is always infinitely more to tell, always more we can do or say, another chapter to add to the book. God is always more, bursting the boundaries of the story, of perception, of space-time.

But the paradox of God that he has been human, and has invited us to breakfast. It is in the footsteps of the humble, human God that we approach the divine and infinite Trinity, and it is in the image of Christ who says “follow me” that the gospels invite us to live. And so let me leave you with the words of Charles Wesley in our hymn: “made like him, like him we rise,/ ours the cross, the grave, the skies.”