Luke 24:42-43 Fish

Luke 24:42-43 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, ⁴³ and he took it and ate it in their presence.

It is often in the most mundane and ordinary activities that the LORD wants to make Himself know to us. How do I know this is true? Take a look at the Scriptures. It is filled with once in humanity events and the most extraordinary happenings. But divide up all the events over the couple thousand year history that is recorded in Scripture and you end up with something exciting happening every few decades, that is all.

And if we needed the extraordinary events in order to experience God, then almost all people, even the people of the Scriptures, wouldn’t have been able to experience God. Extraordinary is just that: it isn’t ordinary. And most of us live in ordinary!

My life is ordinary, even though I have traveled and seen some of the world. I have been to war and survived. Even being in war is not that unprecedented these days. Much of the world is experiencing conflict, both from within and from without.

Even the First Family had conflict, one son murdering another son. Conflict is part and parcel of this world. We even fight with ourselves sometimes, don’t we!

But is this the way it is supposed to be? Aren’t we to be experiencing the presence of the LORD in every activity of our day? Aren’t we supposed to be communing with the Creator, and shouldn’t that be miraculous, mind-blowing enough for anyone!

Our text takes place after Jesus crucifixion, burial and resurrection. He has appeared to his disciples, and they are having a hard time taking the facts into their minds and hearts. This is just not what they had expected, even though this is exactly what Jesus had told them would happen. If only they had listened to Him.

As Jesus is talking to them, they are still not grasping the reality of the situation. They think Jesus must be a disembodied spirit, a ghost. It is one thing for Jesus to raise Lazarus from the grave, but for Jesus Himself to be raised, that went against everything they had come to believe about the Messiah.

But Jesus had turned all their assumptions upside down. The weak were the strong ones. The rich were the impoverished ones. The wise were fools.

So Jesus once again accommodates the disciples. Ghosts don’t eat. Please give me some fish. Chomp, chomp. Oh, I guess Jesus must not be a ghost. Ghosts don’t eat.

How many times had Jesus eaten with them? Three times a day for three and a half years, plus snacks. That is about 4000 times at least. A pretty ordinary, routine event.

And yet it is the most ordinary and routine event that Jesus uses to change the whole course of the disciples’ understanding in that moment. He didn’t hover above the floor and do head-over-heal summersaults in front of their eyes. He ate fish offered to Him.

The biggest impacts we can have on peoples lives is what we do with the ordinary, mundane happenings like sharing a meal. When we are willing to have others join us in our mundane, or we join in with theirs, something marvelous happens. The LORD shows up. That is because the LORD inhabits the mundane.

I’m not saying that it stays mundane when we recognize His presence, but that the event in and of itself is mundane. Nothing to look at here.

But when we invite Him into these moments of mundane He transforms them into life-giving and breathing moments. His presence fills our present. Humdrum becomes holy. Secular becomes sacred.

So share a piece of fish with someone today and watch what the LORD will do.