1 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 his outer garment, for he had taken it off, 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.
15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17 He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18 Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But 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.” 19 (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”
– John 21:1-19 (NRSVUE)
Hunger is on the rise in the United States and across the globe. Nevertheless, in the United States alone, an estimated 27% of food goes uneaten. This is because the wealthy feast on a glut of resources too vast for their needs while those on the margins consistently go without. In one sense, this parallels some of the outrageous banquets described in New Testament texts. But in another, alarming, sense, it is quite different. Given social and archaeological evidence of a relatively stable subsistence economy in Judea and Galilee at the time of Jesus, it’s actually plausible that those on the margins in today’s economy face more severe food insecurity than they might have in the first century world. In other words, Jesus’ command to Peter to “feed my sheep” is more relevant now than ever.
Already in 2025, the USDA reported another year of statistical increase in food insecurity in the United States even as more USDA cuts hit American food banks. Now, as we enter the second quarter of the year, one of the impacts of new American tariffs has been to further inflate food prices and consequently diminish resources available both to the American public and to the food banks that support the country’s most vulnerable people.
Internationally, with the dismantling of USAID and the loss of food aid around the globe, the conditions are no better. In February of this year news agencies reported on the waste of food supplies as over $489 million worth of food was stalled in shipment containers amidst policy confusion. Now that the confusion is past and USAID is formally dismantled, the future is no less bleak. The Associated Press recently reported that, with US policy ending food aid for millions across the globe, the World Food program has called the withdrawal a “death sentence” for millions, and each new week brings with it the cancellation of even more humanitarian aid programs.
Into this situation of food inequities and insecurities, this week’s gospel text reminds us that food is not only one of the most basic of human needs, but it is also closely linked with the person and identity of Jesus as the Son of God. It is the sign by which Jesus calls Peter to signal his association with and love for him (John 21:15, 17) and, earlier in the same story, the means by which Peter first recognizes Jesus among them (John 21:7).
Indeed, from the beginning to the end of Jesus’ ministry, feeding is central not only to his mission, but to his very identity as God’s Christ. All four gospel accounts contain at least one story of Jesus feeding hungry multitudes because he has compassion for them. The first miracle recorded in John’s gospel account is Jesus turning water into wine. After Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, the first thing he commands her parents to do is to get her something to eat. At his last supper with his disciples, Jesus declares that the very bread they are eating is his body and the wine that they drink is his blood.
Moreover, most of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances revolve around food. Already, we’ve seen the central role of food and feeding in John’s gospel text. Additionally, Luke tells the story of Jesus’ appearance in the upper room with the added detail that the disciples attempt to feed Jesus himself (to prove that he isn’t a ghost, Luke 24:36-43). But, more frequently, it is Jesus who is feeding the disciples, demonstrating not only his bodily existence or even his capacity for miracle working, but most importantly, his continued compassion and love–the mission he embodies with his entire life.
In Luke’s gospel, the two disciples at Emmaus recognize Jesus only after he puts bread on their plates (Luke 24:30). In John’s gospel account, the disciples recognize Jesus only after he fills their nets with fish (John 21:6-7).
While the Emmaus resurrection encounter is interpreted by many contemporary Christian communities through a eucharistic lens, John’s narrative is about fish, not bread. The point seems to be less an allusion to later Christian liturgical practice and, rather, a practical signifier of embodied action. Where people are fed, there Jesus is. The gospels are unclear about the degree to which Jesus’ resurrected body resembles his physical body. In John’s account, both Mary and Peter do not recognize Jesus at first (similarly with the unnamed disciples in Luke at Emmaus). However, in two of these three accounts, the disciples come to recognize Jesus through the sharing of food. In the outlier, Mary recognizes Jesus when he speaks her name (John 20:16), another intimate encounter. The consistent witness, therefore, especially in John, seems to be an expansion of what Jesus tells his disciples in the upper room discourse: “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). After his resurrection, Jesus’ disciples uniformly recognize him through his acts and words of love.
In the case of John 21, the disciples, despite being trained fishers, have caught nothing (v. 3). This was not fishing for fun, because fishing was not a leisure activity in the first-century economy. Simon Peter and several of the other disciples, prior to following Jesus, had been trained fishers. This has been the way they earned their living and quite literally kept their families fed. Now that Jesus has been executed as a Roman insurrectionist and they’ve only barely escaped a similar fate themselves, the return to their fishing boats should be read not merely as a distraction, but as a lifeline–a needed pivot in order to keep themselves fed and alive in the Galilean subsistence economy.
One can only imagine, then, the despair of these men, scrambling for purpose, identity, and physical sustenance after their teacher’s execution, returning to the original occupation he had called them from only to end up with empty nets. By daybreak, conventional fishing wisdom would suggest that further labor is a lost cause. And, yet, this is when a strange man shows up. At first he appears to be taunting them, calling them “children” and asking if they have any food, but whether out of desperation, frustration, or something else, they cast their nets one more time anyway. And only then, when they feel the weight of their first catch and, indeed, realize the abundance of it, does Simon recognize that the stranger on the beach is, in fact, Jesus.
Luke shares a similar narrative, though much earlier in Jesus’s ministry–when Jesus calls Simon, Andrew, James, and John to be disciples (Luke 5:1-11). In both instances of the miraculous catch of fish, the disciples recognize Jesus as Christ in the miracle of feeding. The real presence of Jesus in both stories is not an abstract philosophical rendering. It is the tangible, physical experience of heavy nets and full bellies. Indeed, while Luke describes Simon and the others abandoning their nets, John makes the importance of feeding even clearer by narrating the cooking and eating of the fish that the disciples have caught (John 21:9-13).
In John’s telling of this feeding miracle, the relational love of Christ for Peter and the other disciples comes across even before Jesus pulls Peter aside to teach him about love. Whereas John’s elongated upper room discourse never actually mentions the consumption of food during Jesus’ last supper with his disciple, the gospel concludes with this raw, human narrative of Jesus sharing breakfast with his disciples on a beach.
This connection with Jesus’ love commandment continues to play out in the contemporary world as well. Even as the Trump administration adds more organizations to their cuts in humanitarian funding and the United States government continues to find more ways to disempower the marginalized and the poor, literally taking food out of the mouths of millions, the Christian church worldwide remembers the life, death, and resurrection of this God who feeds. This year in particular, the convergence of liturgical calendars led to both Eastern and Western liturgical churches across the globe celebrating Holy Week and the Feast of the Resurrection at the same time.
The result is that all over the world, as aid organizations shuttered their doors, Christians knelt before basins of water and washed one another’s feet, remembering Jesus’ command to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34-35). Pope Francis, at the time recently discharged from the hospital, visited a local prison on Holy Thursday just five days before his death, sharing time with those detained there and expressing regret that he was not well enough to share the foot washing ritual with them this year. It is this thoughtful ministry of presence, not the enactment of absence and indifference, that is the embodiment of Jesus’ love command.
As the season of Easter continues, it is this central command to love one another to which John’s gospel returns in today’s lectionary.
First, Jesus and his disciples eat together on the beach in John’s account (John 21:12-15a)–a temporal detail that should not be dismissed, as Jesus does not ask anything of his disciples until after their basic needs are met. Then, after they eat together, Jesus tells Peter that he will recognize Peter’s love for him when Peter, in turn, feeds his lambs (John 21:15b).
In this way, Jesus transfers the miracle of recognition from his disciples recognizing him across an overflowing fish net, to the world’s hungry recognizing Jesus in his disciples in a food bank line or across a soup counter.
“Do you love me?” Jesus asks.
“Yes, Lord; you know that I love you,” Peter replies.
“Feed my lambs.”
“Do you love me?” a second time.
“Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”
“Tend my sheep.”
“Do you love me?” Jesus persists.
Now Peter feels hurt. He wishes that Jesus, his teacher, his friend, would recognize his love. But Jesus insists. Love isn’t an emotion that can simply be professed. It isn’t an empty promise or a campaign pitch. It isn’t a thought or a prayer. Love is action. Love is embodied. Love is tending. Love is feeding.
“Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you,” Peter replies.
Jesus’ answer remains consistent: “Feed my sheep.”
In this season of Resurrection, as the Church proclaims Christ risen and testifies to our love of God, the Risen Christ calls Christians to make our proclamations with our bodies and with our pocketbooks as much, if not more, than with our voices and social media accounts. Jesus’ ministry begins and ends not with teaching, but with feeding. Fed as so many have been with the Easter joy, the Church is called to the concrete ministry of feeding and tending. And, after (and only after) our bellies are full and our bodies are safely tended, Jesus transfer that responsibility for feeding and tending to those who claim to love him–to those who dare to call ourselves his disciples.
For Jesus is made known not in eloquent sermons or lengthy prayers alone. Nor is the fullness of Christ limited to the breaking and sharing of eucharistic bread. John’s gospel reminds us that it is possible to recognize Jesus fully in the weight of a net of fish or a well-fed belly, that we can come to see Jesus embodied in the embodied love that we have for one another.
For the risen Christ charges those who proclaim we love him to feed his sheep. Christ is made known in aid deliveries to starving children and funding for school lunch programs. In this world of hunger and food insecurity, of chasms between wealth and want, the real presence of Christ is observed when the hungry are fed. And, lest there be any lingering metaphorical doubt, John’s Jesus pitches a fire, roasts fish, and kneads bread as he calls to his disciples, “Come and have breakfast” (John 21:12).
