I’m old enough to remember the days of public shaming in school. School discipline ran on the weaponizing of shame. Even a dutiful student like me was not immune from the dreaded embarrassment of having one’s name appear on the chalkboard. Any offense, however innocuous, was recorded for the length of a school day on the classroom chalkboard.
After the first offense, your name was written for the entire class to see. For all repeat offenses, a check mark appeared next to your name. I will never understand why a check mark was used, but perhaps it was shaming through sarcasm. Around three check marks tipped one over into the land of no return. You were headed straight for after-school detention or some similar, shameful fate. Everyone knew it because your name was on the chalkboard.
Although the names were erased at the end of the day, for a sensitive child like me, the shame was never erased. It still lingered in the dust wiped off that chalkboard. Is it any different in our modern culture? Is it any different in the Church? If not literally, then figuratively, we live in a culture of shame. One offense can mark a person as condemned forever. One crime can prevent a person from ever holding a decent job again. One misstep in religious circles holds greater weight than decades of faithful service. In some places, it’s not even three strikes and you’re out. It’s one strike, and your future is finished, canceled if you will.
What is it about the number three? Maybe it seems fairer than two. Three feels complete for some reason, and yet, in a culture of shame, three offenses extinguish any future a person might hope to have.
But in the kingdom of God, the number three signifies something else. It represents the expansiveness of love found in God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three is the pivot point into relationship and wholeness. It can’t be a coincidence, then, that the third time Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection from the dead, involves a shared meal of fish and bread beside a charcoal fire. It’s no coincidence that Jesus appears to his disciples in this final story of John’s Gospel in the early morning, the time of a new creation. It evokes the third day on which Christ rose from the dead. The disciples caught nothing all night. How could they be fruitful in the darkness? But in the light of the morning, when all is fresh and new, Jesus helps them find a catch of fish that exceeds any of their expectations. And it’s this miracle of abundance that reveals Jesus to the disciples so that they know definitively that it’s the Lord. Here, the third time’s the charm.
But shame is still lurking beneath the surface of this story in the waning hours of the night. It’s as if St. John couldn’t end his Gospel without correcting the nagging shame that’s been throbbing at the back of our brains since only a few weeks ago. Remember the charcoal fire? Remember that Peter denied Jesus three times? Three strikes, and you’re out. Surely that shame must still be with Peter as he stands in the boat out on the sea and suddenly realizes that it’s his Lord on the beach.
It’s such a poignant moment. Peter has stripped off his clothes for work, but when he knows that it’s his Lord standing on the beach, he does the most curious thing. He puts his clothes back on before jumping into the water. And it’s in this moment, at the tail end of the Biblical narrative of salvation history, that we’re brought back to the beginning. We’re brought back to shame’s unholy birth.
Since that horrible moment in the garden when Adam and Eve were expelled by God because of their disobedience, shame has colored humankind’s relationship with God. God’s people have been unable to see themselves in relation to God except through the lens of shame. For centuries, their sin and faults have been perceived as the reason for the tragedies of their lives. For so many years, they’ve only pictured a God who purports to love them but nevertheless constantly showers his wrath upon them. This God must be appeased, his love must be earned, but nothing is ever enough. For so long, God’s people have only sensed a great chasm between themselves and their Creator, and it's no surprise that they, too, have sensed such a gulf between themselves and the rest of humanity, especially their enemies and those unlike them.
This horrible strand of shame pulsates throughout the narrative of salvation history. God becomes nothing more than another fickle god of polytheistic memory, nothing more than a super-human who is vindictive and who plays with retribution like terrible earthly rulers. Through the lens of shame, God seems to catapult from angry violence into passionate declarations of love. And this skewed, tragic image of God must be tied back to that first moment of shame, when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. In the realization of their wrongdoing, they became aware of their nakedness, trying unsuccessfully to hide themselves with paltry fig leaves. The God who had walked so close to them in the garden now seemed removed from their sight, at a distance.
All this makes the final scene of John’s Gospel so touching. We can’t leave this grand Biblical story of salvation without correcting something that has bothered us for so long. What do we do with the shame? And on the beach in the post-resurrection light of early morning, we find the answer.
Peter puts on clothes. He undoes that hideous and futile cover-up with fig leaves that only magnified the shame of Adam and Eve. Peter doesn’t keep his distance from Jesus. With all his shame, he jumps into the water in his inimitable impetuous fashion and hurries toward his Lord. There’s something on the other side of shame. The chasm between humanity and God is diminishing. Peter can no longer stay away from Jesus; he needs to be close to his Lord and Savior.
Everything changes by that charcoal fire. Peter’s three previous denials are rehabilitated and redeemed as Peter affirms his love for Christ three times. In the light of a new day by a charcoal fire and during a shared meal, Peter is assured that three strikes don’t remove him from the story. This time, three is the number of redemption. The third time’s the charm.
The charcoal fire becomes the pivot point into loving service. Feeding and tending Jesus’s sheep is love not in word only but in action. Closeness to Jesus means proximity to all of humanity, to friends and foes alike. And only in the light of the charcoal fire and after the enactment of Jesus’s forgiveness, can he finally say, “follow me.”
What is it that we bring to this charcoal fire by morning light on this first day of the week? What shame are we carrying so deep inside that we can’t bear to look within? What are we trying to hide from God? Are we ashamed of our past? Are we ashamed of our present? Have we been told by an unforgiving world or an unforgiving Church that we have no present, much less a future? Has our world shamed us because of our social status or poverty or unwillingness to go along with the status quo? Are we ashamed of a Church that has backslid into the worship of power and money and that has allied herself with unholy earthly powers? Are we ashamed to be seen too close to Jesus, and is this why we keep our distance?
Or, despite the shame we feel, can we be like Peter? Can we move closer to Jesus out of repentance for past wrongs? Can we shed the shame that the world unjustly foists upon us? Can we let God re-clothe us in the shining baptismal garment of righteousness? Can we jump into the water and swim to Christ, who waits by the charcoal fire, not to condemn us but to share his abundant forgiveness with us?
In the garden after Adam and Eve’s disobedience, the final word was shame. Three strikes, and you were out. We know, now, that on that side of the resurrection, we could never fully understand God’s love. But on this side of the resurrection, Christ shows us a God who, even after Jesus’s death, appears again and again to draw sinners back to himself, to love and to forgive. The third time’s the charm. In a culture of shame that is ruthlessly unforgiving, there’s no better news than this. No shame is too powerful to separate us from God’s love. Now, in resurrection light and on the other side of the charcoal fire, we know and must tell all the world, that the final word, the only true word, is love.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Easter
May 4, 2025