A Place of Resurrection

It might be expected that a resurrection story would be filled with heavenly visions, holy incense hanging in the air, brilliant lights, and attending angels which makes the one in the 21st chapter of John a bit of a surprise.  It is at first glance a fishing story.  People in fishing stories are smelly, wet, and often filled with salty language which would make a sailor blush.  This story as John tells it is filled with smoke drifting down the beach, the smell of cooking fish in the air, and men exhausted from fishing all night and catching nothing.      

When the fishing story moves from the sea to the beach and becomes a breakfast story, there are worn out men wolfing down an early morning breakfast of fish and bread while warming their wet cold bodies around a charcoal fire.  It is an earthy story with more sights to see and more smells to smell than could possibly be imagined.     

Here in the midst of all that speaks of the earth is present the One who expressed Himself in Bethlehem as the Incarnate One, but who is now expressing Himself as the Resurrected One.  Look for the Incarnate One who also is known as the Resurrected One in the holy places filled with incense and holy rituals, but look also in those places where men and women strain and struggle and seek to live the most earth filled circumstances of life for in such places the One who came to die and rise chooses now to abide.