Bishop Robert Barren
The account of the appearance of the Risen Jesus by the shore of the Sea of Galilee is one of the most beautiful and theologically textured narratives in the Gospel of John.
Every detail is worthy of contemplation.
I would draw attention, for our purposes, to a few fascinating features. We hear that Peter and six other Apostles were in a boat on the sea. Now whenever a Gospel writer speaks of Peter and the disciples in a boat, we are meant to think of the Church, and the peculiar number of seven – evocative of completion or fulfilment – is meant to make us consider the eschatological Church, the community of Jesus approaching the end of its journey through space and time. On the shore (though they don’t dearly recognise him at first) is the Lord Jesus. At his command, they lower their nets and bring in an extraordinary catch. Well, this is the work of the Church until the end of the age: to gather in souls and to bring them to Christ at the end of time.
When they empty their nets before Jesus’, they discover 153 large fish. Numbers are never accidental in the Gospel of John, and many theories as to the meaning of this figure have been proposed. My favourite is the one put forward by St Augustine. According to the science of that time, Augustine argued, there were 153 species of fish in the sea and therefore, this extraordinary number is meant to signal the universality of the Church’s salvific mission.