Today’s readings: Acts 5, 27-32.40-41; Apocalypse 5, 11-14; John 21, 1-19.

The meaning of Easter is that we can never remain stuck in the past. After dying, Jesus was put in a tomb, and as the custom, devout women, went to anoint the body with perfumes, we are told. Today we proclaim Jesus to be really present, but again we seem to restrict that presence to be locked in our tabernacles.

Jesus promised to be with us not in our tabernacles, but as source of new energy and life, exactly what the Church is mostly in need of at this point in time. We read in today’s gospel from St John about Peter and the other disciples going back to work as fishermen and exhausted having caught nothing after a night out. Jesus challenges them to try throwing the net on the other side. The gospel today puts this same challenge before the Church.

We need an overhaul in the way we recruit new members and a rethinking in our expertise about mission, which at present seems to be at an impasse. We speak so much about the decline of religion as if the secularised world has altogether abandoned the lands of the Spirit. But for those who have eyes to see, there are also clear signs around us that there is still space and thirst for whatever can fill a void that marks the lives of so many even today.

It is a matter of seizing the moment, of reading these signs, and discerning where these opportunities are really manifesting themselves. Perhaps this is what is mainly highlighted in today’s gospel. For John, the significance of the miraculous catch is not so much the miracle in itself, as the promise of Jesus to Peter to make him a fisherman of men. The apostles’ mission was to bring more and more people to God.

Today, like the apostles, we may easily feel disheartened because we continue to do whatever we have been doing for ages, and to no avail. “They went out and got into the boat but caught nothing that night.”

The Church is these days struggling hard to find new ways of mission and of making new disciples. But it is becoming ever more crystal clear that in this we need an overhaul and we cannot just repeat more of the same. Jesus asked the apostles to throw the net on the other side and “there were so many fish that they could not haul it in”.

In this happening, Peter is singled out by Jesus in a sort of investiture. Jesus pours out on him a sort of collective responsibility mainly built on love. “Do you love me?” asks Jesus insistently. Love is the only source of life that can really animate our communities and be the focus of our being Church. Love, not law or rules or commandments. Love, not conditions for right belief and belonging. Love should animate our sense of mission. Only love can open us to new perspectives about being Church and being there for all who are searching.

It is only love that can fill our net again without it being broken. John’s emphasis that the net was full of big fish “and in spite of there being so many the net was not broken” may ring a bell for us today. The Church we belong to in our times looks like a broken net, damaged and with so many people leaving for a myriad of reasons because for them the Church, and hence the Gospel, is no longer credible.

The responsibility given to Peter was not one of honour but one that signified “the kind of death with which Peter would give glory to God”. We are here speaking of a ‘primacy’ of Peter, which for various reasons throughout the history of the Church has been a bone of contention and a reason for division.

It is not incidental that Pope Francis, in spite of the strife internal to the Church now, is spending his life going to places where many of us would not dream of seeing the Pope going: Jordan, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Armenia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bulgaria, to mention some. Pope Francis in times like these seems to be throwing the net elsewhere, not in the usual places where the Christian religion has been rooted for long centuries and where there seems to be exhaustion and heaviness. Only love can regenerate a new sense of mission and new enthusiasm for the Gospel of Christ.