We the Broiled Fish
Christ's post-resurrection meal is more than a symbol, but not less than
Third Sunday in Easter
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost.
He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.
Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering, and he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.
Luke 24:36-44
Fish: More than A Symbol
I try to write and preach in a way that people who are doubters, seekers, and “friends of the Church” might appreciate the Word along with believers. I’m hardly unique in that, and discussing scripture in this way has only grown in popularity. As I wrote about Richard Dawkins and cultural Christianity last week, doubt is welcome in the House of God and certainly on its front porch, even as we try to invite people through the door of belief into the hallway of faith, which sometimes means believing through each other as a community. I probably don’t always succeed in making it accessible, but I try to remember that for many people who aren’t sure what they believe about the Bible, their intellectual honesty might mean they only believe in metaphors of Christianity at best. For this reason, I like writing, preaching, and thinking through a literary theological lens, as I touched on a few months ago.
But the risk there, which I’m also hardly unique in noting, is that we turn all of scripture into just a metaphor, “just” a symbol. Again, I want all sorts of people to have pathways into the Bible and talk about the metaphorical, symbolic meanings of our biblical stories. “Did this actually happen exactly like this, or is it just a symbol?” These are legitimate questions to ask, it’s one I asked as a small child. If you can’t buy that it actually happened, I hope you still get something out of what I share.
When I wasn’t a Christian, one story that often came up with this was the feeding of the five thousand from just two fish and five loaves. Was it just a story talking about the miraculous generosity of this crowd, that everybody demurred from eating out of the baskets, and even chipped in some tilapia for others so they ended up with more? Did the story really happen, or was it symbolic?
The Bible, on its own terms, says yes to both. It’s one of the few miracles in all four gospels, documenting that a crowd was really fed well beyond what natural law says is possible. And, there’s more. There is rarely, if ever, one single meaning to any biblical story, and the meanings grow and thrive as the living Word encounters us in our own particular context. Perhaps one in the feeding of the five thousand goes back to earlier in the gospels, when Jesus tells the disciples they will fish for people (Luke 5:10). Symbolically, an additional level of the miracle might be pointing to how thousands heard Jesus preaching the good news that day and were transformed by it. Starting with just a handful of “fish” in the presence of Jesus, the bread of life, many more people became “fish” that day.1 At least, that’s one way it speaks to me today.
So when it comes to Jesus’ resurrection stories as we have in Luke today, Luke is trying to compile oral traditions of eyewitness reports (Luke 1:1-4). He’s trying to include symbolism, yes, but also faithfully tell what really happened. Like any other biblical story, did Luke capture every exact gesture, movement, and dialogue? No, clearly, many things are summarized and left out, as he wasn’t live-streaming from EvangelistLuke333 on Twitch. As the popular metaphor goes, Luke is trying to paint a faithful picture even if he doesn’t have a photographic camera. And he’s emphasizing the details that set the early Church apart from how others were talking about Jesus. In this story, it was emphasizing both Christ’s body and spirit.
Real Symbolism vs. Over-Spiritualizing
The Reformed theological tradition tends to think about the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as what we might call “real symbolism.” We don’t practice transubstantiation, that the bread is in some way the literal human flesh of Jesus. But while some say we’re just “memorialists” (eating in pure memory), that’s not quite right either. We believe in what’s called “real spiritual presence” of Jesus in the bread and wine. We eat with earthy, real elements, dining with real food as Jesus did, and believe in doing so, we are really joined to him in a spiritual union with him. It is symbolic, but it’s more than symbolic — it’s real food. It’s not just a symbol. But it’s also not less than a true, spiritually powerful symbol.
And that is what the witnesses who told Luke everything they knew were trying to convey in this story with Jesus eating fish with them. It was a real and symbolic act.
This story of the risen Christ was important to tell in part because of the social context of early Christianity. Some early Christians tended to over-spiritualize the gospel because they denied the real importance of the physical world. While we could be more granular, for now, I’ll lump them in the category scholars call Gnostics. An early Gnostic text, the “Gospel of Judas,” has no resurrection and teaches a greater worldview that the physical world is not as important as discovering the God within. Over time, such groups brought “sorcery” (pharmakeia) into their worship practices,2 generating Messianic complexes with massive followings and describing elaborate schemes of spiritual realms. The founding father of Gnosticism, Simon Magus, famously receives a rebuke from Peter in the book of Acts for trying to buy the ability to transfer the Holy Spirit on people: “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money” (Acts 8:20).3 While individual groups would differentiate along with their leaders, collectively they were the most prominent group talking about Christianity as a purely spiritual thing.
The early Church insisted that no, this resurrection thing actually happened. “This man died and was resurrected and will come again. We were there.”
Witnesses to Resurrection
So in this Luke story, we have Christ eating fish to prove he was alive in a resurrected body. Not a ghost, not a spirit, not a zombie, but a man who died, who still had the wounds he left with, and could eat a piece of fish. The disciples cooked it, gave it to him, and he ate it “in their presence.”
And thus they became witnesses (Luke 24:48). They changed their lives to try and share the good news that physical death was really defeated.
My non-Christian reader friends are going to wonder, and maybe believe, they made this up. I also held this for a long time. I’m not going full apologetics mode here but when you come down to it, either a large group of people in the early Church decided together that they were willing to die for a story they knew deep down wasn’t true, or they spent the rest of their lives to the point of death trying to do whatever they could to share what some of them really witnessed. It’s not the main or only reason I believe, but if you’ve ever witnessed something that you thought was deathly important, even though you know you might be completely misunderstood or not believed, you know the feeling of burning that the world just needs to know. And that is a feeling I do know.
If you don’t buy it, you’re still welcome, as they were welcome in this very story, doubting while still in their joy.
Fish: Not Less Than A Symbol
But while they might have been primarily emphasizing the nature of Christ’s resurrection as distinct from other beliefs, there is still a deeper symbolism when Jesus eats the piece of broiled fish.
Again, as he said earlier, the disciples had been learning how to fish for people (as caught fish themselves). And now, here he is being brought a fish by his closest “fish.” This fish was prepared over coals, just as the disciples had throughout their walk with Jesus, a “preparing faith” while he was alive, which in witnessing resurrection became a more real, more authentic, and vibrant faith. Symbolically, we might think of cooking as the long walk of discipleship and spiritual formation with Christ. It’s not something we can do to ourselves as part of spiritual self-improvement; after all, a fish can’t cook itself but needs the fire, the flame, of the Holy Spirit, whom we pray for in faith. Then, this prepared fish was brought back into his body just as Christ brings us back into his body. This is all done through the real symbolism of the fish. Not less than a spiritual symbol, but also more than.
By grace through faith, we are called fish from a huge ocean of humanity, set free in Christ. In freedom, we are broiled in our walk of faith, we hope, even if we need a little more seasoning, to be brought back into Christ’s body, now and forever, both in a spiritual way, but also in a very real way.
It’s possible this is a bridge too far in meaning-making (and if someone has a reason to think this is incorrect, let me know), and it may not have even been the gospel author’s intent, but part of Scripture being alive is discovering new layers of meaning beyond how the original human authors might have seen it.
Eusebius, Church History
It should be noted that some scholars of Gnosticism contest the biblical acccounts of Gnostics and those of Eusebius as being biased. It should also be noted that based on my interactions with psychedelic capitalism, these accounts seem entirely plausible to me.