But it's the fish itself that I find even more meaningful because his relationship with the disciples was built on fish.  Some of them were fishermen to begin with. And he, making acquaintance with them, and going out on their boats with them, and coming into their confidence, and bringing them into his own way of looking at the world, creating a community with the disciples, bringing other disciples not from a fishing background; but continuing to pursue the act of fishing as a way bonding with them in preparation for sending them out into the world to "fish" for people. Jesus built a relationship with them.  And eating a piece of fish for them, as he had done no doubt so many hundreds of times before, was a way of blessing that relationship.  And letting the disciples know that that relationship, the concrete facts of their lives, those things were still alive, as he was alive. Jesus had risen from the dead not to go back into some other, distant world; but in order to remain a concrete part of their actual lives.  Jesus was in their midst; and Jesus was still in the flesh.

     Still in the flesh; the disciples would be pondering in what sense he was still in the flesh in the weeks ahead as they prepared to have the Holy Spirit come into their midst and come upon each of them and empower them to be bold where they had once been timid, to be outspoken where they had once been silent, to share where they had once held back.  In what sense was Jesus still with them in the flesh?  In the sense that they would now have their own lives, their earthly lives, the life that had been blessed by the earthly presence of Jesus, they would have their own earthly lives touched by resurrection life and brought up into the resurrection.  They were going to take part in a cosmic drama in which the Eternal Son of God, having taken on human flesh and being born of the Virgin Mary and come into the world in a place that is often referred to as Palestine, in a particular moment in history when the Roman Empire was in charge and the Jewish people were under their heel.   Jesus having grown up in that atmosphere, in a mixed district of Jews and gentiles in a Jewish village.  Jesus having walked up and down the road between Judea and Palestine with his small band of followers.  Jesus having taught. Jesus having healed.  Jesus having revealed things about himself throughout his years of ministry, coming up to the point where he took that divine life made human all the way to death and the grave, and then beyond.  Jesus now risen, Jesus now glorious, was still in the flesh; the disciples were there with him. 

    Still in the flesh.  That's an idea for us to get our minds around as well.  No doubt it took the disciples many years to figure out all the ins and outs of how this resurrected Jesus was still going to be a part of their lives; and how, though not visible any more after a point, he was still really alive and really with them.  It took them a long time to figure it out; it takes us a lifetime to figure it out as well, and to figure out what that means for the flesh of our lives.  What it means is that God wants to touch with resurrection life our actual nitty-gritty lives here and now.  Not some ideal, wished-for life, that we plan to have some day off in the distant, unspecified future; not some kind of never-never-land life that we hope will happen to us some day if all the good things that could possibly happen suddenly happen to us.  People use different images: winning the lottery; their ship coming in; inheriting a fortune from an unknown, distant relative; that kind of thing.  And when people think about their wishes coming true, that's not what Jesus in the flesh is all about.  Jesus did not come to make wishes come true; Jesus came to take our actual lives and make them glorious.  It took me a long time to get my mind around that, even in my adult years.

    When Lois and I married at the young age of twenty and eighteen, she had no idea that she was hitching her own life to the life of a wisher.   It sounds more romantic to say a dreamer, but really it was a wisher.  I was a person who spent all of my life wishing for the ideal life to come along for me.  My imagination had been filled with all kinds of things that I thought my life would consist of when I grew up.  And those things did change as I moved from elementary school to junior high to high school, and as I went off to college and I felt I was entering into that part of my life when wishes would now start coming true.  And even though that didn't happen, I continued to project my wishes on into the future and on into my adult life.  And as we settled into the years of bringing up our kids and having very important, meaningful life experiences together, I continued to wish for that unspecified future when everything that's frustrating about the present would be all fixed and would become glorious.  That centered around two things, one of them was work and the other one was location.  I was uncomfortable in the pastoral ministry early on: I felt unworthy, I felt that I didn't fit; I felt unhappy in what I was doing.  I entered the Ph.D. program so that I could move into college teaching, and move into an area that I felt would suit me better; and in that way I was seeking to fulfill a wish; seeking to find the life without conflict, the life without self-doubt, the life that I imagined a college teacher's life would be like.  I know you're thinking how ludicrous that is, but that was the form that my wishes took.  And the circumstances of life kept that from materializing.   Eventually my Ph.D. happened, but by that time I was back in churches, and serving churches in such a way that I couldn't get out, even if I'd wanted to.  And by that time I was complex enough to realize that I didn't really want to - that there's something about the ministry, where I belonged in spite of my best wishes.  And it was the concrete, nitty-gritty circumstances of my life that stuck me here in ministry, hopefully for better, but for whatever may come.  That's the way my life worked out.  And that is how, my life as it really was can be contrasted with my life as I wished it to be.