Feed my Sheep - John 21:1-17

After the Savior appeared to all the disciples, including Thomas, “many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.” It’s kind of like in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, how the rich man asks the angel to allow Lazarus to go back and warn the man’s five brothers to repent and the angel said “they have the scriptures and the prophets, if that is not enough to convince them, then nothing will be.” John is kind of saying, “if what I’ve given you isn’t enough to convince you, then nothing else I have will be.”

When the women were at the empty tomb, the angels told them to go tell the other disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee. I wonder why Jesus told them that he would meet them in Galilee when he met them earlier than that in the city of Jerusalem. Maybe it’s one of those things where Jesus makes a promise that he eventually fulfills, but also gives more blessings in the mean time. After seeing the Savior again, the disciples appear to go home to the “sea of Tiberias” also known as the sea of Galilee where “Jesus shewed himself again to the disciples.” So Jesus kept his word that he would meet them at the sea of Galilee, it just wasn’t the first time he saw them.
Let’s look at life now from Peter’s perspective, he just spent the last three years basically living with the man he believes is the Messiah, has his perspective shifted from expecting to go to war with Rome to learning to love everyone. He’s seen miracles he probably never even imagined, and had personal contact with a man who had been risen from the dead and into immortality. The life he lived 3 ½ years previously had been through a complete whirl wind and now that he’s standing on the other side of it without clear direction, he might be a little bit lost. He probably misses his family and the stability that comes with a home and job and food, and maybe he saw the Savior’s promise to meet them in Galilee as an invitation to return home and resume their lives. When we consider all this that he’s been through, it makes sense when he says, “I go a fishing.” It’s like he’s saying, “well, I guess that adventure is over, now I’m going back to my old life.”
It was always difficult for me to understand why Peter didn’t just start preaching right away, I thought that he was giving up when he went back home, and was kind of irritated that Jesus had to tell him so many times to start ministering, but really, I was the one that was wrong. First, I shouldn’t be so judgy, and second, what Peter actually knew and understood at the time vs. what I thought that he should know and understand was totally different.
It appears that on their first trip out into the sea, the spent all night and “caught nothing.” The morning dawned and a man stood on the shore asking if they had any meat, and told them “cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find.” This is a throw back to when Jesus first called Peter and the others three years ago, they caught nothing that Jesus told them to throw their nets out on more time and they did and caught more fish then they could process. Sure enough, when the disciples cast their nets on that side “and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.”
I also think it’s interesting that Jesus told them where to find the fish in the morning after they hadn’t caught anything the whole night before. If they had been catching fish the whole night and then got even more with Jesus’ advice, then it might be harder for them to go back into the ministry or they might always have in the back of their minds, “I gave up a lucrative business for this.” By not catching anything the night before they were all reminded of how difficult their fishing jobs were, and all that frustration and exhaustion were fresh in their minds when Jesus called them to the work again. Another point that this event demonstrated was that the world could not be counted on to provide, but through the goodness of God they could feed their families. And much like what happened three years earlier, with this abundance of fish, the disciples would have been able to provide for their families while they were gone on their missions coming up.
The two events being so similar to each other, John recognized the pattern and tells Peter, “It is the Lord.” Interestingly, Peter was naked at the time, which seems pretty precarious to me with all the ropes and hooks and stuff, but he’s the expert, not me. Interestingly, the IM asks and answers, “Was Simon Peter really ‘naked’ while fishing?’ The Greek term translated as ‘naked’ in the King James Version does not always mean ‘nude’ but can mean ‘lightly clad’ or ‘without an outer garment.’ When Peter recognized the Lord, he quickly put on his outer cloak and ‘cast himself into the sea.’ This detail reveals how eager Peter was to be with the Savior.”
When John recalls to Peter’s mind that this has happened before and it was in fact the Savior standing on the sea shore, Peter quickly gets dressed “and did cast himself into the sea,” I assume to swim to Jesus. The rest of the disciples come in hauling the load of fish, and interestingly Jesus had made “a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread.” Jesus knew that they had worked long and hard all night and that they would be hungry and tired, so he provided for their physical needs before he taught them spiritually. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs the physical comes first, and I’ve found that to be true. A person needs food, water, and shelter before they can focus on anything else. There is a difference between being hungry because you’re fasting and being hungry because you don’t have food and you don’t know when you’ll have food again. When someone is devoid of these most basic of all necessities, nothing else matters, they can’t think about obeying the law or the commandments or if God loves them, they can only focus on survival. When we serve others, we must make sure that their fundamental needs are fulfilled before they can even begin to understand the concept of God, and Jesus demonstrated that here.
As they were eating, “Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.” Jesus asks Peter this three times and all three times Peter answers that he does, and the last time, Peter’s feelings seem to be hurt. Elder Holland says, “by now surely Peter is feeling truly uncomfortable. Perhaps there is in his heart the memory of only a few days earlier when he had been asked another question three times and he had answered equally emphatically- but in the negative.” It’s hard to remember that it was probably only about two weeks previous that Jesus had been crucified and Peter had denied knowing him three times. Asking him a question three times seems a little bit reminiscent of the denial and Peter is probably thinking, “please don’t bring that up again.”
The Savior’s answer “feed my sheep” and “feed my lambs” has always puzzled me, why not just say the same thing every time? But the IM quotes President Russell M. Nelson as breaking down the translation to point out that there are different meanings here. President Nelson teaches, “These three verses, which seem so similar in the English language, really contain three distinct messages in Greek: ‘Little lambs need to be nourished in order to grow; Sheep needed to be tended; Sheep need to be nourished.’” The concept of “feed my sheep” can be so abstract and really what it comes down to is taking care of each other, physically and spiritually.
It seems too cliché to even really draw much meaning from it, but the IM quotes Elder Marvin J. Ashton as teaching an interesting perspective, “Those who need help come in all age brackets. Some of His sheep are young, lonely, and lost. Some are weary, afflicted, and worn with age. Some are in our own family, in our own neighborhood… Some are starving for food. Some are starving for love and concern. If we give His sheep reasons to resist us, the feeding process becomes difficult, if not impossible. No one can teach or help with sarcasm or ridicule. Dictatorship of ‘I’m right and you are wrong’ will negate all efforts to feeding a wandering sheep. A wall of resistance will be built and no one will benefit. By our actions we show our love. Expressions of affection are empty if actions don’t match. All his sheep need the touch of a shepherd who cares.”  
This addresses the concept of the wrong way to “feed sheep” or the wrong way to take care of someone. This was so glossed over when I was a kid that I was led to believe that any adult in the church could do no wrong and that if I didn’t like the way that I was being treated, then the problem was with me. This quote here tells me that, yes, there is a wrong way to treat people and that if people are treated wrong, they are under no obligation to accept your mistreatment and say “thank you sir, may I have another.” People don’t like feeling judged, people don’t like being lectured or preached at. If we really love people, we love them where they are, we understand that their beliefs come from a place that is important to them, and we recognize that we need them just as much as they need us. I think it’s so easy to get swept up in the “I’m serving you” mentality that we don’t allow others we deem as “lost sheep” to serve us, but mutual service and respect, that’s the foundation of friendship and friendship is the foundation of ministering.
It seems like the message that Jesus was trying to tell Peter was “if you love me, take care of other people,” but Peter was doing that, caring for his family. It was a very difficult concept for me to understand, because I always think about Peter’s life from the stand point of knowing what he did after this conversation, but that doesn’t leave a lot of room for understanding why this conversation had to happen at this moment. The IM quoted Elder Jeffrey R. Holland as giving some different interpretation to Peter’s response of “thou knowest that I love thee” that Jesus was “perhaps saying something like: ‘Then Peter, why are you here? Why are we back on this same shore, by these same nets, having this same conversation? Wasn’t it obvious then and isn’t it obvious now that if I want fish, I can get fish? What I need, Peter, are disciples- and I need them forever. I need someone to feed my sheep and save my lambs. I need someone to preach my gospel and defend my faith. I need someone who loves me, truly, truly loves me, and loves what our Father in Heaven has commissioned me to do…
My beloved brothers and sisters, I am not certain just what our experience will be on Judgment Day, but I will be very surprised if at some point in that conversation, God does not ask us exactly what Christ asked Peter: ‘Did you love me?’ I think He will want to know if in our very mortal, very inadequate, and sometimes childish grasp of things, did we at least understand one commandment, the first and greatest commandment of them all… We have wrongs to make right, truths to share, and good to do. In short, we have a life of devoted discipleship to give in demonstrating our love of the Lord. We can’t quit and we can’t go back. After an encounter with the living Son of the living God, nothing is ever again to be as it was before.”