Charcoal Fire

We just saw N. T. (Tom) Wright at Elmbrook Church a few weeks ago. He had a marvelous take on the two Charcoal Fires in the Gospel of John. He draws on his own reflections in his book John for Everyone in the "for everyone" series published by Westminster/John Knox.
He starts with John 21:9, "When they came to land, they saw a charcoal fire laid there with fish and bread on it." A charcoal fire. Not an insignificant detail, but in my more than 30 years of ministry, a detail I'd missed. The other charcoal fire is in John 18 where it is written that Peter, his last supper protestations to the contrary notwithstanding in chapter 13, denies Jesus three times by chapter 18. The cock crows after the third time and it all takes place by a charcoal fire.
Put the DVD of Christ's life on fast forward to chapter 21. Another charcoal fire. Another set of three imprecations.

Think back to the smell of that fire [in chapter 18], wafting through the chilly April air. Think of Peter going out in shame, angry with himself, knowing that Jesus knew. Knowing that the beloved disciple knew. Knowing that God knew. And hearing the next day what had happened to Jesus. Not even the resurrection itself could wave a magic wand and get rid of that memory. Nothing except revisiting it and bathing it in God's own healing. (John for Everyone, p. 159)

There's something about smells that carry us back to another time and place, often in pleasant and sometimes in shocking ways. The home where Grandma spent the last days of her life come back to us Pastors when we enter the house of a shut-in whom we visit and smell the residual effects of Ben-Gay and other poultices. Imagine, Tom Wright suggests, the environmental odor of that second charcoal fire on the lakeshore.

The smell of that charcoal fire lingers. Peter's night of agony—and Jesus' own night of agony—returns. But because of the latter, the former can be dealt with. [p. 163]

Peter must have been in two places at once. The charcoal fire of the night of denial and the charcoal fire of the evening of resurrection. In the present fire, Jesus asks him three times, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Typical of Peter's impetuousness, he replies "Of course I love you." "Lord you know everything, you know I love you." Wright, the Greek scholar points out that two Greek words are used in this exchange between Jesus and Peter. Where Jesus uses the Greek word "agape" Peter replies with "phileos." Jesus asks Peter for a divine love, but Peter responds with a friendly love. Both are translated as just "love" in English because we don't have much choice. The way Wright put in his lecture at Elmbrook the conversation might have gone like this:

Simon, son of John, do you love me?

To which Simon Peter responds each time,

Lord, of course, you know I am your friend.

But the third time, Jesus comes down to Peter's level and says,

Simon, are you [really] my friend? Then feed my sheep, tend my flock.

In this marvelous exchange, Simon Peter, once entrusted with the keys to the kingdom, but must have been sure that he has lost them in the bramble of his own terror, has now been given them back.


I've thought of those charcoal fires and our own fire of 2005. Have we been given something to do with this marvelous new building?